Has anyone seen or deployed a successful classified ads system or plugin for Discourse. Is this something that could work well or is there a better approach, a third party solution that would play nicely with DIscourse perhaps? Seamless authentication and user experience being key issues.
Can you describe with some specific examples? What is being sold, by whom, on what terms/costs?
Hi Jeff, this would be a general classifieds area, could be anything for sale from small items to property/cars etc at any price range. Listing should be free with options to add features to ads, charge for real estate ads, promote listing etc. I appreciate this is not the primary function of Discourse but would be interested in your thoughts! Thanks
I guess you could technically host a Classifieds forum on Discourse, but I’m not sure it would be the best way to go about it.
Have you tried looking around?
Hi Ron, thanks, yes I’m looking around too, was just intrigued as to whether there was a Discourse plugin or some other easy integration as I may move my Drupal forum over to Discourse and my members want classifieds.
As far as easy integration goes, Discourse is quite a capable SSO provider and consumer, so tying user accounts and such together shouldn’t be a chore. A plugin to actually embed a fully-functional classified ads into a Discourse forum is probably overkill. However, people run classified ad setups on “discussion” systems (Facebook is the one I’m familiar with, since my wife runs one), where each item is a topic, and people reply “I’ll take that!” and so on. If you just wanted some classified ads as a sideline to the main “discussion” part of your forum, I’d say that’s probably the least friction way of getting started, even if you then later build out a plugin to support more features if the community demands it.
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Thanks Matt, appreciate the suggestion. Sounds like a sensible approach.
There are plenty of forums that do a ton of selling. For example sneaker forums are hugely into buying and selling rare sneakers among themselves.
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My thought is that classifieds are best done in something other than forums. You can provide a better user experience with things like proximity search, image galleries, pricing based searches and so on.
Sure, but there’s “best”, and then there’s “good enough”…
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True, good enough, is good enough. All depends on your community/audience.
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I think it’s natural progression once you bring people together around a niche interest with an excellent forum solution like Discourse to want to give people a way to buy/sell/trade with each other.
We’re currently considering adding a folder for this on one of the forums I work on but all the headache of preventing fraud, dealing with dispute resolution, having to come up with a reputation management system is daunting.
Has anyone come up with a brilliant silver bullet for this?
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