The Sales Policy Poll

[quote]put cels you have for trade or offer in a section on your gallery its not that hard and people would see the update and know its not that hard to do i dont see why a blog on top of that is neccery gradius for good has a ection like that i saw it looked ar it saw there were no cels i could even consider making a offer on and went about my daymake a section and isnt sales page links what the link section is for and the for sale section of the fourm[/quote]

Under our revised policy, this is no longer acceptable. It simply caused a lot of confusion. So the question is, is this change a reasonable one?

Jason please correct me if I am wrong or have misunderstood anything I am about to comment on.

As I understood it, the recent attention with RS blogging underscored the concern that some people were using their blogs to announce sales and solicit offers. This practice is not permitted and directly resulted in the banning of galleries that used blogs containing any information involving offers or sales.

However people are still permitted to sell items on RS, but this is restricted to ONLY RS sponsor users. Sponsors can specifically do two things: a) list items in the RS cel shop for sale, and b) increase exposure by creating a section in their RS gallery, displaying their items also contained in the RS cel shop. It was my understanding sales conducted specifically in this fashion are permitted.

I found myself Locked out of my gallery this morning for just that reason but, I'm not at all upset about it. I just would have liked to have Known I was doing something wrong by posting about my sales page in my blog. I guess that's what I get for not using the site for 4 months or better. So I agree with Roy having put a header either in the my account area or on the blog page would have saved me a bit of a headache.

Honestly, though it seems a reasonable thing not have people posting sales in their blog as then you get the constant only so many hours/days left in my auctions post which can get ridiculous. I personally use my blog for any updates I'm doing cel wise which occassionally includes sales but, I've never written a blog entry exclusively devoted to sale links (IE today's "naughty blog" included info on what I was changing on the site and the things I was currently selling) Which I see as less of an issue but, I can understand that a blanket policy makes more sense. Otherwise if it was you can have links if there's other substance as well you'd get people going. "I like pretzles, here's some links to my sale pages."

On the othere hand I can understand pushing all offsite sales off site but, how should people advertise things they put in the RS shop for example? I know the forums are an option but, many of us (me included)completely forget they're here. though I agree with mahoro's suggestion of a shop banner as I've always wanted kind of "see sellers other items for sale option" when looking in the shop. But would you be allowed to advertise that?

If we're proposing a total ban on sales in Personal spaces how does that include the links page? I.E. I have my offsite gallery at the top of my links page and there is a sales page attached to it, I don't mention it in my link info but, could I?

Honestly as long as I've used the site sales have always been a touchy subject so I don't think anyone is ever quite sure of what the current rules are. I remember it was ok if you didn't post prices, it was ok if you asked a mod ahead of time, or when it was ok if you linked to an offsite, and ect. So whatever is decided I'd like to see a clear well advertised policy. No matter what I still appreciate the site and I'm still going to use it and donate when I can afford it whether or not I can sell my excess acetate. I'd just like to have a set of rules that doesn't change every few months and if they have to change I'd at least like to be informed of them somehow.

I apologize on behalf of all of us here that the exact changes may not have been communicated completely and accurately. As quoted above, there is still understandably some confusion about how we're going about doing this.

The two points important to this discussion to RS staff:

1) The no-sales policy is now absolute where in the past we allowed things like offers, etc. It was being too abused. Can we tell people things like, "don't just use your blogs to keep everyone updated about the things you're offering or the things you have on auction?" Well, it leads to a lot of gray areas. We get a *lot* of "why can so-and-so do this and I can't?" I want to stress that the level of strictness was agreed to between all the mods and myself.

2) We are willing to discuss ways to create a policy that is strict but fair. It's not like we ban people just to be mean or play favorites. It has less to do with bandwidth or physical resources and more to do with preventing the home page from becoming one big advertisement. The issues that you have raised so far are legitimate and things that we have discussed at length amongst ourselves as well. (i.e. "How are we supposed to say that you can't have links on your links page to another gallery? That's a little weird on our part if we were to say that.")

Thanks again for your comments so far. They *do* help and we *are* listening.

So... you can't list cels as being for sale/trade/offer in your actual gallery or blog, but you can post on the "for sale" forum and say "the following cels in my gallery are for sale/trade/offer?" Just curious.