Change in B&S: A Trend or Permanent Shift? - Page 3

Uhh.. how about card counting?

Yep, that seems like the smart strategy. Although following this made me lose out on one of aportnoy's awesome suits

Agreed with both of these.




Thank you for noticing my posts in particular.


Thank you very much for pointing this out, teddieriley. It seems a common practice across the board to me. Thank you to Doc as well for stepping up and saying that he does this too.

I will also point out that I often include extra new deals/price drops as part of the updating (and so does the Doc, from memory).

In fact, if you look at my current sales thread, only ONE of my updates is just an indication that an item has sold. EVERY other post either provides new information, or a reply to a public question, or a new discount or a new shipping deal.

I think this has more to do with some of the crap and the massive amounts of spam that seem to have taken over the board in the last few months. When I get to the office and have a look there can be 1-5 threads on page one talking all about "behold and avail" or something else just as stupid blocking perfectly good threads about suits that I want to see

I think this is due in part to having a consolidated B&S forum for both streetwear and men's clothing. I would not advocate for this to change, as I believe there are people like me who straddle the line, but it certainly does clog up the works on occasion. More so now that there are a greater number of people from other message boards (i.e. Superfuture) cross-posting.

Just had another couple of thoughts to try to reduce some of the concerns being mentioned in this thread. Constructive suggestions, if you like:

1) It might be an idea to have 2 separate B&S sections, just like the Men's Clothing and Streetwear & Denim forums are separate. That would reduce the number of threads (and therefore the turnover) in each forum, benefiting both buyers and sellers of both types of clothes.

2) Regular repeat sellers could have a single edited thread (until such time the edit window on that thread expires) rather than having lots of threads on the go at any given time for lots of different items arriving at different times. This has both positives and negatives for sellers & buyers. Postives are less overall threads filling the forum, so less turnover hopefully, so slowing the drift down the pages. Regular sellers will be updating that thread fairly often with new items and if we're allowed to post a new post to the thread when we add new items or sell an existing item as we currently do, it shouldn't disappear too quickly. Negatives are that when it does go off the first page, a lot of stock could remain unsold in one go, and that's scary.

3) In conjunction with the above (and I hesitate to suggest this for fear of a backlash) but very regular sellers (and I freely admit that I don't quite fall into this category myself) could have a pinned single sales thread? Extra visibility, but no other threads from them allowed. Maybe even work in a donation scheme for the board in return for the pinned thread?

In the end it's all a balance - many regular sellers here are small scale, operating on low margins as a bit of a hobby for nothing more than beer money. The free advertising we get here helps us keep margins low and move items quickly. The downside is that we're all afraid of getting lumbered with lots of stock we can't shift. We can't absorb that hit the way a big store can. So we're always trying to ensure items sell fairly quickly. Buyers get a good deal because of the ultra-low prices on offer, but the slightly fervent desire sellers have to keep their threads visible is the quid pro quo.

I've thought about creating one ongoing sales thread, but I wonder how that would affect views on a long-term basis. I count on that initial rush of interest for most of my sales -- after that, things slow way down. And once I've looked at a thread, I'm less inclined to go back to it.

I think having a streetwear B&S and a non-streetwear B&S board is a good idea.


I think a lot of FS items will be missed with one giant thread. Better to have separate threads. JMO.

Yes, that's the "scary" part I mentioned. I know exactly what you mean!

But it does have the potential to increase views, as your "brand" becomes established. For instance, when I see chorse's Nagrani thread come back to the first page, I always take a look to see if new ones have been added.

One other thing - if we did move to a single thread situation, sellers would need to be able to edit thread titles to reflect new items arriving. At the moment, we can change the thread title in the thread itself, but not how it appears on the index page. Being able to change the title would keep it fresh-looking and up-to-date, helping negate the problem you mention.

This idea has been rejected by the mods on countless occasions.

That's definitely a good idea, if it's possible.

There's an option to allow this in the vBulletin system, but it would have to be activated by the board's tech admin, if mods thought it was a good idea to let us do this. I think they can even set it so users can only do this in specific forums.

Proof, if it were needed, that the prayers of Brits are listened to and actioned.

I actually don't see anything wrong with posting that something has sold. I think it is a fair "bump" that informs the public what is going on with that particular sales thread and what is available. Simply updating the original post does no good in helping your items sell (i.e. no increased visibilty).

I often surf SF on an older laptop that lives under my easy chair in the living room. And with this machine, I cannot open the larger consolidated threads -- any one VMan thread will crash it. More such threads would mean less shopping from that computer. I mention this because I guess I'm not the only one who skips the larger consolidated threads for this reason.