Suggestion: new Market Place forums

[ugo]

Suggestion 1: new forums for services by/for members
I've been thinking that it could be cool if we had an employment area where members could advertise their services, or post jobs that are in need of help for. Regulars at KVR often have a better idea about each other than the average person off the street or craigslist, and that could make for good working relationships - but since neither the jobs nor services are typically posted here, business opportunities are likely being missed. The way I envision this working is as follows...

The services/employment area would include the following sub-forums:

Services by Members
- Application development (coders for hire)
- Sound Design (presets, samples, games, film)
- Composers (soundtracks, demo songs)
- Visual Services (graphic design, web design, GUI, photography, video, animation)
- Marketing Services (ad campaigns, SEO)
- Writing services (manuals and tutorials, translations)
- Other Services (everything else)
- Feedback (reports on positive/negative dealings)

Jobs
- Jobs (members looking to hire for a project)

In the "services" section, posts would be stickies that would automatically rotate over time. This would allow for long running service ads without the need for posting bump replies to your own post, while giving everyone a chance to eventually end up on the first page from time to time. The ads should eventually expire so that only those actively looking for work are still shown. Maybe there should be an option for selecting your ad run length - 1 month, 3 months, 6 months?

The "jobs" section could probably run the same as normal forum threads, and wouldn't require the auto rotating sticky posts because jobs come and go, typically with a relatively quick deadline.

For both forums, it might be good to have a way for users to mark posts suspected of spam/scams which automatically get removed after a certain number of unique reports. That might help reduce the amount of work for the mods. To further reduce the spam/scam potential, I think this forum should only be visible to those who have been KVR members for at least several months.

Suggestion 2: Buy/Sell/Special Offers
Rather than the current all-in-one forum, it could be helpful if this was broken out into the following separate forums:
- Hardware for sale
- Software for sale
- Special offers

This would let buyers more easily watch what they are interested in, and sellers keep their threads more visible to the right audiences.

Suggestion 3: combined Market Place
If all these ideas are implemented...then for the sake of organization it would probably make sense to have the Buy/Sell/Special Offers and the new employment sections all under one big header, rather than keep the entire Market Place within the Main Forums header.

[jobromedia]

I agree.

[audington]

What a brilliant BRILLIANT suggestion! Please make this happen!

[horsma]

+1 for Suggestion 2: Buy/Sell/Special Offers.

[ZenPunkHippy]

Excellent idea, ugo!

Peace,
Andy.