Babypips Marketplace thread?

[SimonTemplar]

Good afternoon all.

There seem to have been a number of new posters recently, pushing website that offer tipping, education, trade ideas etc. Some of them are pretty blatant, others try to be a little more discreet about what they are doing, but I expect that most of us can spot them. I know that there will always be a few, but there seem to be more than normal, recently. Between those threads and a few new/newish users digging up very old threads to get their post count up (I assume that that is the reason, in most cases?) it is often the case that good, current threads can quite quickly be knocked off the main page, which can lead to them being lost when the discussion they contain might still hold interest. Taking a couple of days away from BP (a shocking thought, I know!) can even cause people to miss new threads altogether.

So - and with due apology if this has been covered before and I am simply retreading old ground - has thought ever been given to setting up a 'marketplace' (or similar) thread on BP? This would be somewhere where anyone wanting to push a website (or, for that matter, any other trading-related service) could post the details, while keeping them off the main discussion boards. This would give the Mods sound justification for moving any such posts that still appeared on the main boards over to the marketplace section. I am not a lawyer, and do not know the legal ramifications of this - if any - but perhaps there could be a big caveat at the top of the page along the lines of 'BP do not endorse any of the stuff posted here'.

Anyway, it's just an off-the-cuff thought, so there might be many good reasons against this idea that I have not thought of, but as we seem to get a regular stream of people pushing services this struck me as maybe providing a way to ringfence them.

If it's a terrible idea then apologies!

ST

[micmic]

I would personally love to know a couple of things about all posters who offer advice. Like how much money have they made or lost and whether they sell something related to forex or not. Of course the first is a little tricky; I read about countless people who -if I were to believe them- are living the big life thanks to their trading skills: They apparently tour the world making big money with just a laptop, and they only offer their lessons/signals/mentoring etc because they love teaching and/or like to help. There is indeed an amazing number of people who allegedly live from trading and apparently their dream was to teach others, sell videos and spend their days advertising -directly or indirectly- in various fora. I don't know, I would guess that most people who have made a lot of money from forex would like to do other things, like vacations on tropical beaches, enjoying girlfriends/boyfriends of model quality, engaging in some form of art, helping poor kids in Africa or people with disabilities, focus on a myriad of interesting hobbies or simply raise kids. Yet it looks like most successful traders' lifelong dream was to become forex teachers. Strange...

So I would wholeheartedly agree with Simon's idea. Of course I understand that many many people who sell something related to forex, also offer advice for free, and often put a lot of work in what they give away for free, and their advice is good. Still, I can't figure out why someone who is so succesful in forex would ask money for helping others. If they just want to screen out less than serious students, they could ask for donations to well-known charities instead of asking for amounts of money that SHOULD be insignificant for them.

[Pipstradamus]

Good afternoon all.

There seem to have been a number of new posters recently, pushing website that offer tipping, education, trade ideas etc. Some of them are pretty blatant, others try to be a little more discreet about what they are doing, but I expect that most of us can spot them. I know that there will always be a few, but there seem to be more than normal, recently. Between those threads and a few new/newish users digging up very old threads to get their post count up (I assume that that is the reason, in most cases?) it is often the case that good, current threads can quite quickly be knocked off the main page, which can lead to them being lost when the discussion they contain might still hold interest. Taking a couple of days away from BP (a shocking thought, I know!) can even cause people to miss new threads altogether.

So - and with due apology if this has been covered before and I am simply retreading old ground - has thought ever been given to setting up a 'marketplace' (or similar) thread on BP? This would be somewhere where anyone wanting to push a website (or, for that matter, any other trading-related service) could post the details, while keeping them off the main discussion boards. This would give the Mods sound justification for moving any such posts that still appeared on the main boards over to the marketplace section. I am not a lawyer, and do not know the legal ramifications of this - if any - but perhaps there could be a big caveat at the top of the page along the lines of 'BP do not endorse any of the stuff posted here'.

Anyway, it's just an off-the-cuff thought, so there might be many good reasons against this idea that I have not thought of, but as we seem to get a regular stream of people pushing services this struck me as maybe providing a way to ringfence them.

If it's a terrible idea then apologies!

ST

Hello ST,

It's definitely not a terrible idea. We've been toying with offering this for years and have started our own internal discussion about how something like this could work. It would help especially with keeping such posts out of the other discussions like you mentioned, but also give buyers and sellers a place to congregate.

We have a couple of ideas regarding the inner workings of such a section:

1. Create several different main categories under a "Market Place" forum such as "Buy/Wanted" or "Want to Buy", "Sell/Selling" or "Trade", and "Free". We could create subforums within each of these sections to help categorize similar products/services.
2. or Create one huge "buy, sell, free" forum and then create subforums in it for specific products/services (things like mentoring/coaching, managed accounts, signal service, brokers, programming, etc.), in which members could buy, sell, trade.
3. There's a potential for category overload here so we would start small and add categories as needed.
4. There's also been a suggestion of using the built-in forums rating system to move highly rated products/services ahead of others, a benefit offered to the seller (similar to Forex Factory's commercial forum).

These are some but not all of our ideas. We'd like to open up the floor to you all. Do you see a commercial area as a benefit or not? Anything in particular you'd like to see offered? We welcome all feedback.

Pipstradamus

[bobmaninc]

I personally like the idea. Less clutter in the other areas of the forum. I also like the idea of rating the threads. This would weed out some of the scams versus actual business minds that are bringing something to the table.

The only downside I see to this is scammers would just create a million screen names just to get there rating up. So maybe limit rating threads till you have a certain number of posts or something to that tune. I am not sure its what you guys do and you do a great job at it.

[jamessheppard]

Anything that would stop all the spam would be appreciated. I agree that good threads do get ruined from time to time. I also think that even if there was a marketplace a lot of threads would still end up in the wrong place. Just look how many people start threads asking where to start learning even though it says on the first page about the school section!!
I think that there must be some good trading related things for sale somewhere so it would still be benefitial for them. I think it would be good to have a marketplace but im just not so sure how affective it would be.