Originally Posted by
gazlannathai
The primary problem I see with the suggestion in the OP is one of spammers abusing the system and sending you links to sex drugs and what have you. Remember the question (and it's link) would sit at the bottom of your auction giving a back link to the spammer's websites until such time as eBid removed it.
I know you're saying only the seller can answer with a link, but if it's enabled for the seller to do so, there'll be a discoverable hack for buyers to do it too, and you can be sure the spammers will be searching and testing for that hack - one problem there is that such brute-forcing to find the method, can symtomise as a DDOA attack on the site and lead to it being taken down for security reasons.
I know from running many sites, that even when you include a clear indication that all links in comments, questions, etc are "nofollow" and hyperlink disabled, you still get hordes of spammers trying to post their carp on your site hoping to squeeze some SEO juice from a completely pointless and irrelevant answer/question. I can see enabling such a feature as being a complete donkey to administer for the site, and for sellers.
What would be good however is a way to link to your auction pages directly and send that link as a reply - perhaps the facility for the seller to add the listing number with a prefix (e.g. ebid-item-xxxxx ) and that then inserts the appropriate hyperlink. In that way, control is maintained, and only on-eBid pages and items can be sent as links. Perhaps a checkbox with a drop down set of criteria that maps to the listing you want to send as an answer?
Just thinking aloud with my web-admin head on midway between my first and second coffee.
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