From my boards.ie announcement yesterday (ooh, I like today’s date, 20-06-2006!):

Dear all -

As part of our migration towards our new adverts system at adverts.ie, we are beginning to disable our old FS forums. I had considered moving all of the old FS items into the new adverts system, but this would be overly complicated (and due to the differing database structures it would also involve the loss of some associated metadata). Therefore, running both systems in parallel was a better option, and now that the new system has been well tested, we can maintain an archive of previous FS items at the old forums.

Cannot Post Threads, Can Reply to Threads

You will be unable to post a new thread on the FS forums to sell an item. If you wish to sell a new item, please do so at adverts.ie. The categories are almost identical to those on the old FS forums.

You may continue to reply to any items in the old FS forums for a limited time.

Main Issues Addressed

I’m happy to say that we have addressed all the main highlighted issues on adverts.ie, and I think we’ve made a much better system as a result. Of course, small things WILL go wrong, but look at the progress so far and I’m sure you’ll share in my confidence that such things can and will be fixed…

We’ve also created a Sin Bin category (hidden) where our Adverts Moderators or AMods can move rubbish to. The top-level AMods (Blade, CuLT, Lemming) have banning powers for the site, and we will ban troublemakers, touts and traders. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them (hint: the Adverts Support forum), maybe you can ask the A-Team.

Sophisticated Creation and Viewing Options

We now have custom fields for things like price, county, etc. when you create an advert, which will help us in future to easily display items for sale in certain regions, price ranges, etc. Also, our “Tag Cloud” allows you to easily locate adverts that have been “tagged” with particular keywords.

You can now sort all items by the latest comment, and the total number of comments and last poster / date is also shown (this was the most requested feature).

We’ve also prevented advert posters from replying to their own adverts for 24 hours (to prevent premature bumping up of items).

The “blocky” look is gone - lists of adverts are now more like the forums, and you can see an image of the item for sale by moving the mouse over the image icon on the left hand side if it is shown.

Printable PDF pages and RSS feeds available

We’ve also introduced a new PDF printable sheet which I am very happy with - now you can take your FS or Wanted items to the convenience or whereever with you

There’s also a corresponding RSS feed for each category for your syndicating pleasure.

Both the PDF and RSS links can be found on the main adverts.ie page beside each category (the red and orange icons respectively).

Where is this new-fangled thang?

Go to http://www.adverts.ie/.

Also, you can navigate to the new categories from the DHTML menu under “Shop”.

I hope that together we can make adverts.ie a success. We’ve had over 45,000 items placed by 8,000 users on the old FS forums (over six years), and already in our beta phase we have 1,250 adverts from 675 users on the new site (over the past few months). These figures are very encouraging, and I’m looking forward to seeing these trends continue.

Remember, it is free to place an advert at adverts.ie, and will remain so. Extra options for adverts (bolding, italicising, highlighting) may appear later on in certain categories (e.g. motors) for a small fee, but the ads themselves will still be free.

Thanks for your continued cooperation, and enjoy the new service!

John.
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