Bartertown.com

So, in the spirit of rule 1a, I have to ask...

Instead of re-posting an entire ad each week, wouldn't it be easier (and less invasive) if we could simply bump our own ads once every 7 days? I've been here 30 years (feedback goes back to '96 when I was living in Seattle), and I think at some point in the past that's what we were doing, but don't quote me on that.

I mean, I can copy'n'paste like a madman once a week, and even go into the old ad and essentially delete everything to try and keep the forum tidy, but it just seems simpler to post "weekly bump" in our own threads.

Did this get out-of-hand/dumped at some point, or am I just misremembering?

It was a rampant issue, which resulted in what we have now.

The way the trade forums are currently configured, even "bumping them" doesn't bring them to the top of the first page, they stay fixed where they were in the original post order. Looking at "New posts" in the Quick links tabs will show the post and take you to it. But if you bumped a post that's fallen off of the first page you won't see it in that forum unless you go to the second page, third page, etc. In my experience people rarely travel beyond the first page in a forum. If they are using the search function (which most don't) they will find it if the terms match.

Traffic has fallen off so much since 2020-ish that not even the 40K forum (by far the busiest) will drop the first post to the second page before you're eligible to post again at the 7 day mark. Back then, my post would be on page 3 by seven days, so reposting it was the best way to get attention.

Maybe it's time to change? I personally dislike post bumping. Wading through a bunch of one word bump posts is very irritating to me, so I enjoy the way things are here. That's one of the major reasons why I support BT as much as I can.

Awesome answer, thanks for clarifying it. I was mostly just curious, because I remember the long ago times. It's easy enough to cut'n'paste to a new ad and blank the old one so as not to clutter things up too much.