Right now they are pretty passive features. They sit at the bottom of the marketplace area, and they are excluded from showing up in the "unread post" or "what's new" searches, just like the moto-news section is excluded. People can post in the threads that are in those sections. I'm considering having the threads auto-moved into one of the other marketplace sections if someone does reply to a post, so it gets more visisbility. (just like how the moto-news section works). But - I'm somewhat wary of putting a generic eBay auction in with the rest of marketplace threads, as it might take some focus away from the long-time users here who are trying to sell their stuff to other fellow users here.

What do people think? Have you checked out the new forums? There have been many purchases on eBay over the last week or so from links from that forum, so it's getting usage by some folks, but it's hard to tell if it's mainly registered users or guests who found their way here via a search engine.

Ninja 300 items: http://www.ninjette.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=53
Ninja 250 items: http://www.ninjette.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=54

I just added some code to wipe threads from the ebay sections that are older than 1 week. This way the auctions that are listed there should always be relatively current.

Is this some kind of paid advertising?

I just added some code to wipe threads from the ebay sections that are older than 1 week. This way the auctions that are listed there should always be relatively current.

Don't, because a lot of listings are "buy it now" and go on for 30 days. Most shops list this way, so your code will exclude them all.

That's true, but if it's still a current auction, I think it should be pulled in with the RSS feed again within that month.

Is this some kind of paid advertising?

Not exactly, but it's a similar idea. It relates to this thread about affiliate links (http://www.ninjette.org/forums/showthread.php?t=127000). When people click on ebay links here, and then go to ebay and choose to purchase something, this site does get a small percentage of that sale for referring the link to ebay. eBay doesn't pay anything up front for these threads to be here, and users who click on them don't pay any more for the items than they would have.

Cool. No harm I guess since they have dedicated sub-forums.

Added an Amazon.com one (http://www.ninjette.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=55) this afternoon. Same deal as the ebay ones; shouldn't show up on the unread post searches. It populates with the top 100 items tagged as "motorcycle" on Amazon. In each entry, there are a bunch of tags for that particular item, so you can then browse amazon by a specific tag if it would be helpful.

The eBay subforums are proving to be much more popular than I would have expected. The revenue from the links to auctions is running about 3 - 5 times the daily revenue of the banner ads shown on this site. I'm late to the party and should have done this years ago. This new influx has allowed me to cut the members fees here in half, from $0 to $0. :thumbup: