Recent eBay Ads in the Marketplace - An Explanation

[Lee Roberts]

Yo, Ok so an update on this!

Right as noted by John S I have now extended the TOPSTATS module above the forums on the forum home page:

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Additionally I have also implemented an AJAX auto refresh; this is set to automatically refresh the top stats every 180 seconds so three minutes. If you look at the screen shot above you can see the timer highlighted in a red box to the left and on the right of the screen shot you can see a manual “Reload” button so you don’t have to wait for the timer if you don’t want to. These are at the bottom of the screen shot.

With it being AJAX based I was hoping that maybe some of you leave the page open most times while you are doing other things (waiting for a job to finish on the machine, so pottering about in the workshop), so at a glance you can easily see any updates that may have gone on since you last looked - without the need to even touch the mouse!

I can’t control how many “Latest Posts” are shown directly but what I do control is the stats on the left of the module, so I’ve set it to show 10 items for each, anything more and it outputs too many latest’s posts on the right for my liking and any less brings the list on the right down and I didn’t feel it was “enough” of a selection, so hopefully I’ve now got a happy medium that we can all live with.

I’ll come to the eBay ads in a mo everyone!

Can I suggest a way those that like the Ebay ads win has well.??
Remove the Blog section because I see very little activity happening there and replace with Ebay section.?

In light of that idea Dean I thought yea maybe, when I looked I thought well I don’t really just want a Marketplace Nav link/button because it gives too much direction to one particular section, so I thought ok ill put one in for each section we have got, I did that but didn’t like it as it made the Nav Bar to busy in my opinion so I removed them all again.

Previously admin had no direct tools to manage the Nav Bar in vB, however I updated the forum yesterday to the newest version (4.2), 4.2 is a major feature release and as such contains only feature changes and issue fixes related to those feature changes.

Here is a list of what is new:
· Activity Stream
· Navigation Manager
· Members who have Visited Today
· Cron-based Batch Email Sending
· UserCP Reputation Display
· Reputation Notification
· User Profile Reputation Display
· Who has Read a Thread
· Doublepost Prevention
· Enhanced Reputation Checks
· Updated Readme.
· Integration with Post Release

So now I can manage the Nav Bar properly, nice!

I’ve removed the “What’s New” button/link; this was only a replication of the “New Posts” link in the Nav Bar anyway:

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What I have done is go on to extend the “New Posts” link, if you look at the image above you can see this is now a dropdown menu as well but also has some AJAX magic to it, those green numbers you can see are showing the number of new posts and in how many threads. This automatically updates every 15 seconds, clicking the drop down menu then gives you a list of the different sections we have on the forum that you can then see new posts for.

This should cater for anyone interested in only one section of the forum. There are some other options there as well.

Additionally while I was there I have also implemented a “Private Messages” link with a menu:

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This also introduces some other PM Enhancements:

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To wrap up while I’m in this section, I also noticed on my travels that there was a permissions problem on the “Donate” system, this has now been fixed and you should be able to view the donations list and make donations like you could before:

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I’m not going to remove the Blog section this time round, it was an additional feature/cost at the time and while I had doubts over whether or not it would “work” so to speak I have got an idea I may use it for in the future.

eBay Threads...

What I’ve done is condensed the 4 feeds I had into 1 feed, my eBay search now is for “CNC>In The UK>Newly listed items.

Then I’ve told my feed to only bring in 1 “feed item” that contains any of the keywords I have stated:

"stepper motor"
"linear rail"
"motor driver"
"water spindle"
"rail mount"
"power supply"
"end mill"
"milling cutters"
"spindle mount"
"coupling"
"linear bearing"
"shaft support"
"milling machine"
"cnc lathe"
"carbide"
"breakout board"
"fluted end mill"
"timing belt"
"timing pulley"
"round rail"
"supported rail"
"profile rail"
"guide way"
"kress FME"
"engraving machine"
"router"
"driver board"
"stepper board"
"board controller"
"dial indicator"
"ballscrew floating"
"ballscrew support"
"motor mount"
"lead screw"
"diy plans"
"wood working"
"metal working"

The feed is still checked every 12 hours because that is the longest duration I can choose at this moment in time, however this brings everything much closer to my original requirements of only having 1 new eBay thread every 3 days. I’m not happy removing the eBay threads from the activity streams all together, I feel I have compromised enough and what we have now is so much better then what it was before.

One of the benefits of having the eBay forum is you can submit your items on eBay and know they will be noticed by allot of people, removing them from the stream defeats the objective. I appreciate that still may not be to every ones liking but personally (and this is my own personal ask now) I feel I have given with three hands and only taken back with one, I hope you can understand that.

Cool, i think that just about covers everything, hopfully we can all live with how it is setup now, i think its allot better. There are a few other things new to the forum here and there I won’t go on about them now but may post a new thread for some of them.

Cheers,
.Me