If you have had problems with people in an online transaction, check out the new community; forsale_warning. Share your bad experiences and help prevent others from similar trouble.

By posting to this community, you agree to the posting rules as listed, and accept that you may be banned without warning if you choose to disregard them

Moderator: xinit
Moderator's blog: bankrupt artist

I got sick of paying to list things at ebay, or posting them only to my friends list. USENET's a decent place to post forsale / wanted ads too, but since I (ab)use livejournal already, why not add a place to post things here?

Okay, there's been a rash of people flagrantly ignoring the posting rules here... The first step is to moderate membership. If you want to join the community, your request will be approved by a human being. If the bad posts don't taper off, we'll move to a moderated posts format where a human will okay every single post to the community. I don't want to moderate all the posts, so at least TRY to restrain yourselves.

Rules:

0) If you have any entries in the top 100 posts in this community, you will not be allowed to post again until your post has moved out of the top 100, or at least 7 days have passed since your last post. 100 posts is the first five pages of archives, and should provide more than enough room and time for your post.

1) You may post ONE visible image in your posts. All images beyond the first must be BEHIND AN LJCUT and will be less than 500x500 pixels in size. Place <lj-cut> between picture one and two. Keep the images of a sane size. It is NOT okay to reduce a 3 megapixel image solely with height and width tags. The idea is that any images above the cut line will be LESS THAN 80K in size.

2) You may NOT use tables, JavaScript, CSS, marquee or blink tags, or anything that requires a plugin, above the lj-cut if it has the potential to mess up my friends page layout. This includes anything in your posts that position items outright. For the most part you're safe if you're using a bit of scrolling text that goes side to side. Basically anything that messes up my friends page falls in this area, so make sure you close any HTML tags you open, and remember, PREVIEW is your friend when posting.

2b) Yes, this includes that Etsy Flash applet; that will be deleted too. Stop it, or put it behind an lj-cut.

3) You will leave comments enabled. This is important especially if you're posting warnings about people, or about transactions gone wrong. If you state that whoever ripped you off, and you "hear" that they do that a lot and you "think" they've been banned from other communities, all you're doing is gossiping in a way that can't be disputed. You will allow a person to give their side of the story in public. You can also visit forsale_warning for a more targeted audience for your warnings.

4) This community is not intended for the pimping of your personal LJ sales communities or web sites; it's meant to be a central location to post things to sell. Feel free to link to your site, etc, but post some CONTENT, not just an ad.

4b) No affiliate or multi level programs... no amazon affiliate links, no freeipods, no notebooks4free, no freeg4s, etc etc. No "street teams" for web sites, and no shareasale, or other advertising banner style program. Nothing where you have to complete some lame offer and then get 312 of your closest friends to also complete said offer in order to get your "free" product. Maybe it's not a scam - I don't care - it's not appropriate in this community.

5) If you're pointing to something you have for sale on ebay, you may post once to announce the item.

6) You will not post back-to-back. If you have multiple items to list, you can do so in a single post, using lj-cut. Multiple posts may result in all posts made at the same time being deleted. Top-posting (that is, deleting an earlier post and re-posting in hopes of avoiding my notice) isn't welcome.

7) This is not a democracy. If the moderator asks you to change something, that falls in the catch-all rule #7... "The moderator is always right."

What can you post for sale? Nearly anything that's legal. Regardless of how you may feel about it, copyright infringement is illegal, and that's one of the limits I'm imposing. Post about how you're selling CD-R copies of albums, or offering them for trade, and your post will be deleted.

If you get a response to your entry that's short, to the point, and tells you you messed up, but you can't respond because the post can't be found, then you've neglected to follow one of the above rules. If you made a mistake, EMAIL ME and you may be able to regain access to posting here.

Any posting offense is currently subject to a community ban. The reason for this is that there are simply too many people in the community, and a number of transient users leave and come back to bypass a simple posting restriction. Therefore, it's a "one strike and you're out" policy from here on. It's as simple as emailing and asking to be reinstated, most times. Sending an email to demand an answer to why you were removed won't help very much.

Should you be banned, you can always request that your posts be deleted, or request that your account be given access again, and it'll likely happen as long as you're not a jerk.

If you email me, tell me your LJ name or I'll be of little help to you. If you email me with name calling, or threats, or (god forbid) praise, I reserve the right to talk about it, quote it, and act on it. Sometimes I talk about the fun of maintaining this community over on my blog as well.

Note: that says contact me via EMAIL; not by LJ message, not by posting a comment on my blog or on my livejournal. I won't respond to any method other than EMAIL

January 27, 2008 Marks an important moment in the history of this community. In a bold move, by making an offensive post in huge letters to the community, we have awarded the first life-time banning from the community. Congratulations go out to stormfaerie who thanked her mother and god in giving her the short-sightedness and quick temper to not only flagrantly disregard posting rules, but to throw a tantrum when the rules were applied to her as well as to others. This is after the posting restrictions were loosened greatly in an effort to make this moderator's life easier...

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