When building these bigger diy projects, a missing component might often cause an unwanted delay. Components might be unavalable for months, while somebody might have spares lying around. What do you think about a marketplace on the midiphy forum?

Jan Good idea! Note that the forum does not support internal mails - so every seller would need to publicly provide a means of contact, maybe an email address just for the parts trade?

Best regards,
Peter

  • Jan replied to this.

      Hawkeye We could set up a discord channel or something similar for contacting, since contact information might otherwise get abused. Maybe there are better ideas for a parallel communication platform aside from the forum?

      • Jan replied to this.

          Jan maybe Element from matrix.org as an alternative, I’ll ask around. If you approve of this idea @Hawkeye, could you add “parts” to the forum?

            Jan Would there be a problem with just ‘plain text’ email (the usual “me(at)mail.com” sort of spoiler to slow down web bots) - when something is gone just edit the posting to remove contact details.
            Is there a way of editing a post title to show “gone”?
            It looks like you can just delete the post.

            • Jan replied to this.

                Mechie Not only for bots, I think there advanced enough to tackle the (@) diversion, but I also dont wont my emailadress to be shown in full, since it contains my full name. This would open the door to fraudsters too, Im afraid.

                    @Jan and @Mechie - thanks for your ideas!

                    For hosting, i think we should use these forums, as people would likely search here first.

                    Coming from MIDIbox, i am aware there’s a lot more to community sales - i.e. if a seller suddenly goes incommunicado after receiving the funds, which happened on MIDIbox, it is a bad situation for everyone. We once had a community sale for SEQ v4 cases, which went belly-up this way and in the end there was a lot of effort involved - it would have been better to use a proper sales platform from the start.

                    My suggestion would therefore be as follows:

                    • list excess parts in this forum, in a separate thread per project (i.e. “LoopA excess parts for sale”), including a photo and suggested parts price
                    • if someone is interested in a part, specify the interest in the thread, the seller can then list the part on ebay, specify the sales link and both parties perform the sales over this platform - this protects both buyer and seller, even if there is a ~ 10% fee. This also solves the communications problem, as ebay has a built-in messaging system.

                    Of course the parts would need to be listed on ebay only, if there is serious interest by a user, so no upfront work necessary.

                    Does that sound ok?

                    Best regards,
                    Peter

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