Terry,

The way it was you had to scroll past a random set of 8 features at the top of EVERY page. Now you can look at the ads starting with the featured ads and then on to the standard listings.

the 4 pages only exists when you hit the main topic like Airplanes. If you drill down into any specific category like "Jets" then you don't see pages and pages. This is because when clicking airplanes ALL the listings and features bubble up from all the categories below it.

To make jumping ahead easier or jumping back we have individual page numbers like the forums do.

I was finding that users were complaining about scrolling past the features on every single page and it was bugging me too since once you have seen them it is redundant to show them on every subsequent page over and over.

The featured ads are listings. You said you have to scroll past them to get to the "regular" listings. In reality the ads are ALL listings. The only thing different is that the seller opted for being a feature instead of sitting in the general sort order of the non-featured listings.

Now let's compare to forum behaviour where a guy could bump his ad by simply adding a picture or saying "I'll toss in shipping". Now he is back at the top of the list. His listing isn't current it could be 3 weeks old and he just bumped himself back to the top. Worse yet say 20 ads in a forum are all over a week old and 20 users post to those ads asking questions. You wake up and the FIRST 20 ADS are all these old ads you have seen listed days ago but are now at the top of the list just because somebody asked a question on them. I've seen this happen to ads weeks and months old on the forums. It has no rhyme or reason and is extremely inefficient.

I cannot begin to tell you how many complaints I got about lack of features and other undesirable behaviour of a pseudo-classified system like the discussion forums were. Discussion forums are built for discussions and are not well suited for buying and selling in volume. We simply outgrew them. If you want a lot of activity and choice this is the next progression.

I could have let the discussion based swap shops slowly die a death as they crushed under their own weight but as an owner of this site I could not let that happen. Not everyone knows what I know. Everyone has not fielded the 1000's of emails and PM"s regarding the shortcomings of the old swap based discussion forums. From where I sit my vision is clear about where we had to go to survive and continue to serve the membership. Some will fall to the wayside. When cars came along many refused to drive them as their horse worked just fine. If it ain't broke....So I ask. How many of you ride horses instead of drive cars to work?

No need to reply.