Business and Individual seller listings separated

[ChrisSilver]

There have been some complaints/issues regarding some business members missusing the bump feature as well as bumping within forum rules but mass bumping multiple topics and taking up a lot of space on the first page continuously. Some potential solutions to help solve this were discussed in the Platinum Lounge.

The easiest current solution was to separate the trade section. Currently this will just be the UK ungraded trade section that the implementation will affect, due to the volume of trade in this section.

The UK trade section has therefore been separated in listings for individuals as well as listings for businesses.


Trade listings from individuals:

https://www.thesilverforum.com/forum/13-united-kingdom-ungraded-individual-sellers/

Trade listings from businesses:

https://www.thesilverforum.com/forum/156-united-kingdom-ungraded-business-sellers/


Business Sellers can only list topics in the Business section, and Individual in the Individual trade section. Businesses are still able to reply to listings in the individual sellers section, this is useful for replying to 'wanted' listings. Therefore if you are amn individual posting a wanted listing, please continue to post it in the individual sellers trade section. 


Please note the forum rules on business accounts, if you are a seller listing a lot of listings you may be classed as a business in the eyes of the forum. Do not risk account closure please contact me or purchase a Business Account. Most of the time you can use common sense to work out if you should be upgrading your account, but if in doubt please private message me and I will see what I an do. Self employed are also counted as Businesses (and not individuals) and would require Business Gold or above. Even if you are not-registered self employed and/or not submitting self assessments to HMRC, this does not mean that you're not a business in the eyes of the forum. If you are in doubt if you should upgrade your account due to volume of sales on the forum then you likely would need to, please contact me or purchase from the store. It is members responsibility to pay any applicable taxes owed.

[ChrisSilver]

So was doing some testing, focusing just on the UK Trade Section as an example as it has the most trade, it is possible (eventually) to combine the view into one single page. 

Topics can then be filtered (top right sidebar on desktop, or top centre on mobile) using tickboxes to select the various 'categories'

UK
- Individual Sellers
   - General Ungraded
   - Gold Ungraded
   - Silver Ungraded
   - Graded Only
- Business Sellers
   - General Ungraded
   - Gold Ungraded
   - Silver Ungraded
   - Graded Only


These would be technically different forums, and when creating a topic in the UK Trade Section it would ask you to select which forum from the above to post in. Viewing however would all be on a a single forum view and would show all of the 'categories' from the list above that are selected, the user will be able to select which ones are visible / hidden.

This would also allow Gold or Silver to be split up for listings containing only one particular type of metal, whilst also reducing friction of use compared to if they were all separate forum sections that needed to be viewed one at a time. 


Only issue is that currently this view type is currently not compatible with trade topics being visible for the first 3 days for Premium Members only. I do remember that there was an issue regarding implementing it for that view type, this particular part is under a new developer who took over that project, so I can get them to look at this at some point in the hopefully near future.