Listing expiration and renewal, like Craigslist

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Listing expiration and renewal, like Craigslist

SoulReaver

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Oct 20 19:53

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#2437

Right now listings stay up forever. A big chunk of the site, I'd argue the majority, is listings from people who logged off ages ago and never came back.

Proposal: give listings a lifespan and have sellers renew them, the same way Craigslist does it.

How it could work
1. Every listing gets an expiry date, e.g. 30 days after it was posted or last renewed. Exact window is up to you, could even differ by category.
2. Before expiry the seller gets a notification/email w/ a renew link.
3. Renewing is a single click from the email, listing or the dashboard.
4. Expired listings drop out of search and browse but are not deleted. They sit in the seller's dashboard marked expired and can be reactivated anytime, w/ reviews and history still attached. After some time, like IDK a month more later, listings expired and not renewed drop out of database entirely.
5. If renewing moves a listing up in sort order, put a cooldown on it so it doesn't turn into a spam bump button.
6. On rollout, give every existing listing the full window and notify all sellers once. Active sellers renew, abandoned listings fall off on their own w/o anyone having to clean them up by hand.

Why
Keeps the site clean. What you see is what's actually for sale.
Active sellers get the visibility instead of competing w/ ghost listings.
The listing count right now only ever goes up, and since most of it is stale it doesn't say much about how the platform is actually doing. With expiration the count reflects listings that are live and maintained, which is a number that actually means something, for anyone sizing up the site.