Hi all,
We would like to thank all for the feedback and comments we've received.
We've been struggling with the increase traffic generated from the threads in Marketplace and Exchange Corner. It has gotten worse as there are members who abused our resources and started running a business and earning profit by operating through the forum. It has become very difficult for us to detect them as these members have learnt to phrase their wordings very carefully. Instead of spending our time and effort in developing the portal, we've spent much time in trying to weed out these threads.
In order to reduce the number of threads, we had thought of charging a $10 fee per listing for a 7-day period. We introduced this method as we wanted to have a simple method to operate the marketplace. With this method, we wouldn't need to investigate whether someone is profiting from the forum. We also thought mummies will be consolidating their items together to share the $10 fee thereby helping to reduce the number of threads.
Please do not think that we are trying to profit from this method. If we had wanted to, the fee would be much lower. However, our intention was really to create a small but easy to overcome barrier in the marketplace which will help to reduce the number of threads.
I hope everyone understands that we have operating costs in running the portal. To ensure that the forum is fast even with large number of postings, we need to have a dedicated server. As the forum has large number of postings per day, the bandwidth consumption is also large. Imagine 2 staffs of $2.5k salary per month and a bandwidth costs of $1k per month, our operating costs will easily be ($2.5x2x13 + $1x12)=$77k and I've not included CPF and other operating costs!
For long term members, you would remember that we've spent much effort in building up the forum. Remember we had to shift the forum twice? Remember the error "Too many connections" error? We had spent months of effort to rectify it.
It was disappointing to say the least to see the reactions of some members. A member whom we had helped had taken an opportunist approach and setup a competitive forum. We are sorry but it is only common sense and right that we won't allow the promotion of other forum in our site. We have took years and effort to build our own traffic so of course we wouldn't allow anyone to leech on our traffic.
After receiving feedbacks from various members, some had felt that genuine mothers had been penalised due to members who abused the forum. Please do not misunderstand, it was never our intention to penalise any parents. As such, we are willing to try another alternative method which we were considering.
The new requirements are as follows:
<font color="0000ff">1. No listing fees will be levied on genuine members. All new threads in marketplace (except for free items) can now only be created by members with 100 or more postings. Messages made in marketplace will not be considered and the 100 messages cannot be messages posted just to make the numbers. Any members found to have violated the terms will have the thread removed and account suspended immediately.
2. Businesses who wish to promote or sell their products can <font color="ff0000">
ONLY</font> do so by posting in
Marketplace & Exchange Corner (For Business) at a fee of $20 per 7-day period.</font>
It'll be a manual effort in ensuring the above conditions as the forum software does not allow us to have a pre-set condition for posting. We hope everyone will help by pointing out offending threads and users to us. Please also help by volunteering as moderators.
Please feel free to give us your thoughts and comments
here.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all members who have supported us throughout this period. Thank you!
Regards,
Chin Leng.
