I don't know about anyone else, but I get a little annoyed when a seller, upon successful sale, replaces a topic's descriptive title with a simple SOLD.

There are a number of "Forum rules" at the top of each classified section. I think we should add another optional guideline that gives a best practice for closing out an ad. For instance:

"5. Check the post date. It may be quite old. Sellers - add the word SOLD to the beginning of your topic title. Buyers - add the word FOUND."

+1

It wouldn’t be a huge lift for me to automate some of this. I’m on a business trip but almost home. Put a fire under me maybe next week and I’ll see if I can put something together

Fire!

For reference, I posted this last year:

"I've noticed that some sellers feel compelled to delete prices from their ads after selling horns. Others feel a need to delete their ads altogether.

I would like to encourage sellers to simply mark their ads "SOLD" once they find a buyer, while leaving the title and content of their ads with pricing intact.

The ability to see the prices that others have asked or received for horns provides future sellers with an invaluable point of reference when trying to determine a selling price. Also, there is often valuable information contained in the discussions which accompany many classified ads that gets lost forever when an ad is completely deleted.

While I understand that others may have their own reasons for deleting prices or entire ads, I would ask that you please consider the value of leaving your ads intact as a sort of archival reference."

<LINK_TEXT text="viewtopic.php?t=33074&hilit=Sold">https://trombonechat.com/viewtopic.php?t=33074&hilit=Sold</LINK_TEXT>

If the idea is that it's a community board you tack your ad onto, which is how the classifieds have always seemed to me, it makes sense to take your ad down when it's sold. This isn't the NYSE. Some people like to leave their ad on the board forever and not take it down even after it's sold. Never heard of someone writing "SOLD" on a tacked up ad and leaving it on the community board.

It kind of implicitly does that because you tack it to the board, and eventually, it just doesn't show up as other people make ads. If you happen to find it, it's because you were looking for it.

I was thinking of having a separate section that is still searchable but an "archive" area. I like having history, especially if people post images here. Some pretty cool things have shown up, and occasionally, the only images of something or the best images of something are actually from a classified ad here. I can write a script that will move an ad to another section if the poster of the thread posts a response like "SOLD" as the only text or something. I can make that section not appear in anyone's notifications too so it wouldn't generate a bunch of useless notifications.

Might make sense to archive anything automatically as sold/archived after x days of activity. That would still allow bump posts, so people can explicitly declare something still for sale but everything otherwise will default to being assumed sold.

The latter would be pretty easy to code I think.

Being able to search and filter for past sales, images and prices is an absolutely invaluable resource for current and future historians.