Room for more shop links here...

[booksforsale]

We also need to be posting stuff there.

On the ebid board,
( http://www.buildaskill.com/board/ind...ard,105.0.html )
there are only 8 recent threads.
The last one before that goes back to July last year.

[summerdreams]

I still haven't had any response to my link exchange deal.....

[gazlannathai]

Replying on behalf of BuildaSkill to all the comments above ...

PASSWORDS - Anyone that is not using at least upper and lower case letters and numbers in ALL their passwords (on any site) is asking for their account to be hacked.

Where sites also permit symbols in passwords (e.g. #$% etc) then the password strength increases by immense amounts. There is a thread in the website building forum on BuildaSkill where a university in the US calculated the time to crack a password and the difference between say "buildaskill" and "BuildaSki11" was something like from under 1 minute to around 10 years (using password generators hard forcing the password attempts). Change that to BuildaSki11%$ and it went into the hundreds of years.

REGISTERING + PASSWORDS - the enforced 3 out of 4 character-types required in a password, plus the manual Q&A to check you're human, was implemented a few months back in response to a massive global bot-registration attack of tens of millions of sites. The double implementation stopped all false registrations dead immediately.

Some of you may remember that eBid locked out all users (from outside the 18 countries on this site's home page) last October through December - correspondence on file from eBid support said they did so for a very similar reason (automated registration attacks) - it cost me the eight selling weeks running up to Christmas, during which I could not even view the eBid home page, let alone manage my shops and listings.

I am sure you'd all prefer tougher registration measures rather than being blocked from access at a server level, or having phishing code injected through the registration system?

POSTING IMAGES - BuildaSkill had a couple of attacks last year where first time posters were putting highly explicit and obscene images into their initial posts. The decision was taken that users must have a minimum number of posts before they can upload images or avatars. The number was set quite low as it was only the first posts that needed blocked to discourage the animal, child, and homosexual pornographers.

I am not at liberty to state off-site what the post-counts are, but users can watch their member profile for the required fields appearing that will allow them to upload an avatar or image in posts (the little picture frame button that appears under the italic font button when posting).

Regarding images and links in signatures. Again there is a quite low post-count required after which the links will appear on site, so from your profile page, just create your signature, then make a few posts and wait for the signature links to appear when you're posting. Once you've hit the post-count, the links will also appear in your earlier posts.

----

General - the BuildaSkill forum is in 9 major categories (currently) ranging from announcements and non-members zone, through online channels, business admin, home business ideas, and help for web building and monetising.
As a member's post count climbs, more zones and sub-zones become visible to them (less overwhelming that way and keeps the really good info for those contributing to keeping the boards active).

Additionally, all new members have the choice of joining a selected user group at sign up (or afterwards from their member profile page) for example, joining the eBid sellers group gives you immediate access to all of the eBid zone, whereas eBay sellers might not be able to read the eBid zone until they've got 10 or 20 posts in other zones. The exception is the shops advertising thread, which anyone, including non-members, can see and read at any level of post-counts (including zero). The same applies to the same advertising threads for other venues e.g. TazBar.

ADVERTISING YOU EBID SHOPS on BuildaSkill - you can help your shop, eBid, and BuildaSkill by using product name and keyword lists in your advert posts (as per the OP of the advertising thread) and remember you're allowed one post per shop - so 5 shops = 5 posts. Search engines like Google pick up those lists and use them as keywords for ranking and classifying each page of posts in the thread.
As the number of users and replies grow, we can shorten the number of posts displayed per page, thus effectively increasing the number of pages picked up by the search engine spiders, and increasing the hit returns in search engine results. We love to be able to shorten in right down to around 5 posts per page, but that's getting a bit silly for readability.

The BuildaSkill forums are a community discussion area for home and small based businesses worldwide, and cover a lot more business topics that just venues and sales skills. This last week, Ed has been doing a major news and service providers series for the credit and debit card industry, and the effects of the global economic crisis on using those services for your business. He's also covered mobile payments and mobile banking, website payment widgets, transaction volumes in major markets by card users, and a heap of other stuff that should prove useful in targeting where you market to, and which sectors and segments you hope to sell into. Most of that was in the blog with a lot of supplemental info in the forum newsboards (which no-one ever seems to reply to or comment in).

Overall, the boards are more private that the blog (they don't get syndicated) but the boards attract a lot more readers - almost 250,000 of them since the end of September 2007 - that's an average of around 15,600 per month in just the forums. And remember, 99.9% of them are lurkers, not posters. The blog averages around 6,500 directly read pages per month right now, with syndicated readership (and duplicated posting) around 22,000 per month.
Cumulatively, that's around 3.5 times the peak traffic that eBay gave me in Nov-Dec 2005 when I had 3 eBay shops and over 30,000 listings live daily on their sites worldwide.

That's a lot of eyeballs hitting the site, and the eBid Boyz will be able to testify (from their clixGalore stats) as to how many new Seller+ members are here because of adverts on BuildaSkill, plus how many came for a look-see but didn't sign up for Seller+, yet maybe did so as buyers or basic sellers.

Buildaskill is sending an average of 20 unique first-time visitors per day to this site from the stats we see in the site back-end there - that's around 600 new visitors per month arriving here from us. If the forums (and blog comment replies) were more heavily used by eBid members, I'm sure that number would climb. (It would also help if eBid marketing and PR added Ed to their mailing list as was requested 15 months ago, but has still not been done).

Who is Ed? - a question many people post online. I've known Ed for 30-ish years and I'm sworn to secrecy. I will say that he has more separate online-venue memberships that any 10 members from any group of sites that I can think of, and like me is also a full time registered journalist - many of you will have read his print-media stories without knowing it was him.

I built the site at his request, and do most of the donkey work maintaining it (in addition to numerous sites of my own) - I am not Ed. Any policies or changed plans are fully his. You'll never see him post on eBid as Ed even though he is a long-time member here, but he does post here under his selling IDs - so be careful what you say and to whom - you might find yourself subjected to an expose in "News of the Loose Screws"

Hope it helps everyone?

Gaz

(if I missed any replies, I'll add them later - food just landed on the table)

[gazlannathai]

Summerdreams - re the link exchange - Ed's getting to all those over the weekend - for every one genuine one, there are over 50 spammer and phishing link attempts, so it takes a bit of careful probing to check each one properly.

Make sure you already have the link to BuildaSkill in place before he tests them, or the software will automatically disable and delete yours in the link exchange - another reason he always waits a few days before doing the validation.

Had to reply to that before eating ...

... I am just going outside now - I may be some time

LOL

[summerdreams]

Summerdreams - re the link exchange - Ed's getting to all those over the weekend - for every one genuine one, there are over 50 spammer and phishing link attempts, so it takes a bit of careful probing to check each one properly.

Make sure you already have the link to BuildaSkill in place before he tests them, or the software will automatically disable and delete yours in the link exchange - another reason he always waits a few days before doing the validation.

Had to reply to that before eating ...

... I am just going outside now - I may be some time

LOL

Ok, thank you Gazlannathai.

[madelaine]

come on folks! Still room on that thread.

[madelaine]

There is a thread of this sort for each site and ebid's is by some way the longest but it still has room for more... put a link to your shop.. one for each one (separate posts).

The site is worth visiting anyway - the blog keeps up with announcements from the darkside and doesn't just cut and paste but interprets and comments - all useful stuff.

[gazlannathai]

Currently out of the 99 available slots in the thread, only 52 have been taken by eBid members - that leaves slots for another 47 eBid stores - the multi-store sellers obviously get the better deal from it, so I recommend all you single store sellers dive in there sharpish.

The BuildaSkill forums are due some major changes over the coming weeks, not least of which are -

The shop advert threads for all sites will be moved to a special category near the top of the forums index, which will have 100% public non-member reading visibility, and it's own series of RSS subscription buttons.

Once that's done, Ed will be working to get all new posts syndicated out to other forums around the world that are venue-independent ecommerce forums. Your on-BuildaSkill eBid store ads will be seen to a far huger global audience that the heavy traffic BuildaSkill currently enjoys on its own.

We're busy building a "reward ads" system whereby banner ads submitted by you, for your eBid stores and/or websites, will be promoted all over the full BuildaSkill site FOR FREE - you qualify by building your total posts count in the BuildaSkill forums - there's a pre-Beta announcement and outline in the BuildaSkill announcements board.

The entire look and style of the forums are getting a major facelift soon (development has started) and a lot more web 2.0 and social networking stuff is being embedded ...

... "bottom secret" is we're testing some widgets that could (I stress could) see your eBid listings appearing in your forum signatures over there by way of RSS feeder or similar - we're testing bandwidth load and server resource load and stuff to see which way is going to work best, if at all. This is a long way off as yet, but it's exciting and about as hush hush as a knicker ripping wind breaker .... just a lot less smelly

I must warn existing registered users that you may see some disruption to the board structure during the coming week - all links will still work, as each topic and post has a unique ID, but they'll be getting moved around a bit in readiness for working with the new design and layout.

Gaz