Bartertown.com

So, I cross-posted an ad in Miscellaneous - Futuristic, and Miscellaneous - Fantasy for a variety of both futuristic (Dark Age) and fantasy (Wargods of Aegyptus) minis I was looking to sell or trade. I modified each thread title to emphasize the different categories there.

It's my understanding that this is fine, and, considering the absolute lack of posts in the Misc- Fantasy board, I'm curious as to why my ad was deleted from there?

Bear in mind, I haven't been here in a decade, but this is always, and will always be, my go-to for selling or trading minis. I reviewed the rules before I posted both ads, and was pretty sure I wasn't running afoul of anything.

Can an Admin clarify so I don't make the same mistake in the future?

Thank you.

I looked at our logs and the last post to be removed through action of the staff was back in February.

When did you post it? Our forums do auto-prune older posts.

If it was recently, then I am just as confused as you.

I would say no mistakes were made so go ahead and try posting it again. Let me know if you run into any issues.

Ryan

Some of the categories have a shorter "shelf-life" for posts than others. I have a trade ad I keep reposting in two different categories, and from what I canna tell, in one category the ad lasts about a week, and in the other it is more like 2-3 weeks.

3eland wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 20, 2025 2:12 pm

I looked at our logs and the last post to be removed through action of the staff was back in February.

When did you post it? Our forums do auto-prune older posts.

If it was recently, then I am just as confused as you.

I would say no mistakes were made so go ahead and try posting it again. Let me know if you run into any issues.

Ryan

I put them up March 17th according to the site, but I think that's because it was late at night on the 16th and I'm in a different time zone. Thanks for the reply Ryan. I appreciate it. I'll re-post it, just making sure I hadn't done anything wrong.

I know something might be up with the site. The ad I posted in Miscellaneous Futuristic shows 13,617 views on my screen.

If only that were true...all of it might have been shipped by now.

ETA: Ok, in 30 minutes, the count has gone to 13,705. That's 88 views in the same period of time that the other threads have gotten zero. Essentially one every twenty seconds.

Something is screwy. Or is it just me who's seeing this?

You aren't crazy. I see it on one of your posts, one of my posts, and at least one other. Thousands of views. But definitely not on all posts. Weird.

14995 views now! You're popular.

Could be your post has a specific keyword or something that bots are picking up. You may notice at times on the bottom of the page it shows who is browsing the forum, and there is usually a bot or two (and a handful of guests - which can also be bots funny enough). These bots are outside sources and are in no way associated with Btown.

Not entirely sure what makes some posts highly attractable to bots than others, but it happens. This seems to be a fairly common phpBB thing and although we can take steps in helping prevent against the majority of bots, there is no way to fully block them.

I'll send Plarz a PM to look into and update the bot list permissions.

Thanks!

Ryan

Awesome, thanks for the explanation, Ryan. Glad it's basically a non-issue.

Hi, all. Sorry for slow reply.

I'll take a look into this, but my gut says it's an annoyance rather than a problem to be concerned about. These are guest users and as such have view-only permissions. So, their capability to have a meaningful impact is pretty small.

That said, I'm a firm believer in "Trust, but Verify". I'll do a due diligence check on the server and ask for a check in from the web host's support team as well.

Thanks for raising this! I'll circle back when I know more or have any progress.

Ambience 327 wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 20, 2025 2:34 pm

Some of the categories have a shorter "shelf-life" for posts than others. I have a trade ad I keep reposting in two different categories, and from what I canna tell, in one category the ad lasts about a week, and in the other it is more like 2-3 weeks.

You pretty much nailed it. We have more aggressive pruning on high-traffic topics, but given the general slow down in site usage (compared to past years), we may be able to relax those.

If there's a board that's unnecessary aggressive or annoying, let me know? We can tune this fairly easily.