mam98031 • Volunteer Community Member • Buyer/Seller since 1999
For what reason does a question to sellers, regarding issues related to sellers in chat, specifically mentioning the effect it has on small sellers, asking for advice on how sellers could take advantage of the crash sale, not belong on a sellers forum?
Well that answers a lot. Just because a question or thread is created on the Selling Board does NOT mean it was created by a seller, is only something for seller's to answer or is a seller specific subject. This thread is a great example of that. While it was created by a seller on the seller board, the topic was NOT specific to sellers or seller related subjects. It is a general question regarding the Weekly Chat, which is also NOT specific to sellers either.
Even if we decide there's other places it could belong, what positive aspect do we have from it being here?
This board may not be important to you, but it is important to others.
Why on earth would we move it to a forum that it's guaranteed to never get a response? Take a look at the rest of this forum. It's a barren wasteland.
Yes, clearly this is a inactive thread??!!?
It's guaranteed to never get a response by moving here. Are we trying to say that's not the intent of moving things here? Or having forums such as this on the list?
That guarantee isn't working. People are participating.
As mentioned before, the only reason to typically separate forums like this is so you could get better dedicated support for these issues.
Well no. Are you talking about "dedicated support" by Ebay or the members? It is much easier to look at the list of threads by the various titles we have currently on Ebay. Selling matters, buying matters, payment matters, etc. If everything was lumped into one area, it would be difficult to go through threads to figure out which ones you want to participate in, offer assistance to others or learn from. IMHO it would be one big heaping pile that good subjects / threads would get buried alive in.
@mam98031 wrote:For what reason does a question to sellers, regarding issues related to sellers in chat, specifically mentioning the effect it has on small sellers, asking for advice on how sellers could take advantage of the crash sale, not belong on a sellers forum?
Well that answers a lot. Just because a question or thread is created on the Selling Board does NOT mean it was created by a seller, is only something for seller's to answer or is a seller specific subject. This thread is a great example of that. While it was created by a seller on the seller board, the topic was NOT specific to sellers or seller related subjects. It is a general question regarding the Weekly Chat, which is also NOT specific to sellers either.
Even if we decide there's other places it could belong, what positive aspect do we have from it being here?This board may not be important to you, but it is important to others.
Why on earth would we move it to a forum that it's guaranteed to never get a response? Take a look at the rest of this forum. It's a barren wasteland.
Yes, clearly this is a inactive thread??!!?
It's guaranteed to never get a response by moving here. Are we trying to say that's not the intent of moving things here? Or having forums such as this on the list?
That guarantee isn't working. People are participating.
As mentioned before, the only reason to typically separate forums like this is so you could get better dedicated support for these issues.
Well no. Are you talking about "dedicated support" by Ebay or the members? It is much easier to look at the list of threads by the various titles we have currently on Ebay. Selling matters, buying matters, payment matters, etc. If everything was lumped into one area, it would be difficult to go through threads to figure out which ones you want to participate in, offer assistance to others or learn from. IMHO it would be one big heaping pile that good subjects / threads would get buried alive in.
"While it was created by a seller on the seller board, the topic was NOT specific to sellers or seller related subjects. It is a general question regarding the Weekly Chat, which is also NOT specific to sellers either."
I would be able to agree with that statement if we're looking at only the subject alone. Based upon the contents of the actual post/question inside the post, it's definitely seller related. Buyers won't know, and have no interest, on how to use the Crash Sale to their advantage.
"This board may not be important to you, but it is important to others."
That's an evasive answer that is deflecting what I said. My question was about what positive aspects it might have from being here. Which was relative to where it was originally.
Besides, we can tell how important it really is since nearly 3 weeks there wasn't a single post or response in this forum prior to this topic. We can also tell by the "most helpful authors" how many people find this forum important. The answer being... not very.
"Yes, clearly this is a inactive thread??!!?"
We posted in it before it was moved. This doesn't change the fact that community members who did not see it on the seller forum almost certainly will not see it here.
I'm sure you're aware of my point here, and that the activity in this thread is not a result of the forum it's now on, but in spite of the forum it's on. I just ask to please be realistic, as you know what I'm saying.
"That guarantee isn't working. People are participating."
People who replied on the seller forum are participating. Furthermore, the question in the OP was obviously raised in hopes of getting attention of eBay in hopes of sellers getting some information on how to take advantage of the crash sale as small sellers.
The people who are able to do so, are not participating. Based on the activity here, they don't even check this forum. Or else the other topics without responses for so long would get responses.
Same as the Catalog and Motors forum, and the others I listed.
"Well no. Are you talking about "dedicated support" by Ebay or the members? "
I'll paint a better picture that hopefully describes what I'm saying.
Let's say I'm one of the eBay community managers, or representatives in charge of the community. I'm in charge of the forums, I can make forums separated for users needs, for community members to get assistance, etc.
Ideally, we don't want a ton of different forums that have no activity. At the same time, we don't want just a couple forums with a huge amount of activity but no categorization. So we must achieve that balance.
Having forums that are "too crowded" is just as bad as a forum that has "nearly 0 activity". Neither is ideal. As community manager, an ideal solution would be to combine some of the lesser used forums to some that have an adequate amount of activity and/or exposure.
But this isn't just about activity. It's about helping users, right? Considering this perspective, having "more forums with less activity" does have one single benefit. That benefit is you could have dedicated staff members to assist with the community. We seen eBay (at least claim they were) doing this in the past, particularly on the Catalog forum in recent memory. Having an inactive forum can make it quite easy to designate staff in charge of that community that has the authority to help them out.
Then comes the idea of "moving topics to the correct category". As a category manager, for what reason would you do this? Above, we talked about two major approaches that would help the community. 1) Separating in to categories with an adequate amount of interaction, and 2) Sending it to a community that could be better monitored by staff members and/or appropriate personnel that could assist.
Are we seeing either of these? Does that seem like the intent of the topics that have been moved? It's definitely not increasing interaction. It's definitely not sending the topics to a place they can get answers from appropriate personnel either.
Now if we look at what's going on here, that's not what we're seeing.
We see forums, such as the Catalog forum I mentioned, that go for months without responses.
We see eBay staff replying to other posts, but ignoring questions that specifically were to them.
We see them saying they're going to provide a response, but then never get back to them.
We see topics moving places that they won't ever get "appropriate responses".
We see eBay sending community members to these forums, and then a forum environment that works against them.
We see an decreasing amount of visibility on the forum. Same as we see on the eBay site itself.
We see less transparency as (part of what the OP mentions) questions get ignored despite eBay saying they will respond.
Are any of these things a community should strive for?
If you were personally the community manager, would you be running things this way?
If we really wanted these topics to get an appropriate response, are these the actions we would be taking?
I hope that makes sense.
And I wish there would be actual discussion and responses to the questions I bring up, because defending eBay without addressing these questions ignores legitimate issues with the direction things are going. It's easy to justify things if we want to, but only if we ignore reality. Ignoring reality means the intent is simply to "Be right" in a discussion, and not be helpful or constructive.
I think you are arguing against something simply to argue. The Weekly Chat which IS THE SUBJECT of this thread is NOT specific to sellers. It is for ALL members. Sellers may frequent it more often that buyers and some sellers are buyers too. But the Weekly Chat is for EVERYONE.
It is extremely unlikely that the OP of this thread intended for ONLY sellers to respond.
The simple truth of it is that this particular thread did not belong on the selling board and does belong here on the Community Platform Feedback board because it is all about a board on the Community Platform NOT a specific subset of Ebay members.
Then you are completely off topic of this thread. Maybe a new thread on target for what you seem to want to discuss would work better.
Mentioning a different topic on a thread isn't typically an issue. Many of us do that from time to time. If flows with the conversation. But now there has been much discussion about it and maybe more than what the topic is actually about. So maybe it is better served to start a thread on the topic. It is a good topic and deserves it's own attention.
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