Making "Great Deals" private?

[NablaSquaredG]

I think this was already suggested, but I can't find the thread.

Best example is this deal:


Over 700 of those cards were sold for a great price within a couple of hours. I'm almost certain that a majority was picked up by either a reseller or some big company... (Update: Yes, that's the case. See https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...2x100gbe-nic-for-229.40336/page-2#post-380002)

Which is the reason why I don't post deals here. That's just not fair and I hate when that happens.
Seriously, we're not deal hunters for some big companies trying to save money or resellers trying to maximize their profits. I don't think STH should take part in this and instead focus on the "Home" part in STH, i.e. serving homelabs or homedatacenters.


In my opinion the Great Deals section should be made non-public and even better, only accessible by active forum members (e.g. 20+ / 50+ / 100+ posts, depending on what mood you're in)

 

[tjk]

I couldn't agree more.

 

[Jaket]

Not quite a bad idea how many posts do I have now? Lets make it that+ lol

 

[ano]

I at least got 6, but yes, I love the deals shared.

 

[i386]

No. I mean what were your plans for 200+ nics?

 

[mach3.2]

Excellent deal, but at the end of the day I can't quite justify $230 shipped just so I can run it at 10GbE on ESXi 8.

Maybe in 3 years I'll find more affordable CX5s.

 

[Switchback028]

I agree with this, but the issue is that a lot of people on this forum ARE resellers but are also active. This may slow down the problem but won't ultimately fix it.

 

[piranha32]

I think that's a great idea to restrict access to the section, or at least make it non-indexable by search engines. However, limiting access to members with X posts will not help to deter resellers, and will only hurt the community.
Count me among the members who joined the forum because they needed help with building a home lab, and being able to access "Great Deals" helped me a lot to jump start the project. At that time I had maybe one or 3 posts, so with proposed restrictions in place, I wouldn't be able to see the posts.
OTOH, many resellers are already present and active on the forum, and for a new one, it will not be a problem to post 10, 50 or even 100 of BS messages, just to bump up the counter.

 

[rtech]

People who are doing reselling already have account here with email notifications for Great Deals section so making this section member-only doesn't help.
Making Great Deals non-indexable is useless because resellers are recieving emails.
Post count can help but will alsol hurt non reseller members so while you have good intentions your proposals are unworkable.

 

[piranha32]

Making Great Deals non-indexable is useless because resellers are recieving emails.

Only manual verification of every single account can filter out resellers who do not hide their activity. Even that will not help to filter out resellers who don't disclose their activities. Cutting off all resellers from access to the section is unrealistic, however hiding it from search engines will at least make it more difficult to discover for those, who google for deals.

 

[Jaket]

Yeah it's a tricky one and we just never know who bought or will buy out everything. I know I've bought a chunk of things here and there at times. However, I typically try and not be that guy who takes everything either.

At the end of the day they're also taking a risk at least. Granted I'm sure this seller took $100 or something for the whole lot of those.

 

[Stephan]

Flipping that many cards is not without risk. Some may be defective. Original seller may come up with yet more cards, holding down the price. And cross-flashing all those cards? Takes time. If you can cough up 100k and can sell those cards for a profit, good for you.

I am saying, keep them open. Even if it's rough, just let Mr Market decide. Use OEM numbers in your own saved searches. If the price is really good, be quick. Ask the seller if he can get more.

In this curious case of 700 cards, I think it has nothing to do with STH. Smells like a datacenter owner migrating cheap to 100 Gbps. Or some embargoed country via a string of shell companies. Or both.

 

[rtech]

Only manual verification of every single account can filter out resellers who do not hide their activity. Even that will not help to filter out resellers who don't disclose their activities. Cutting off all resellers from access to the section is unrealistic, however hiding it from search engines will at least make it more difficult to discover for those, who google for deals.

Please explain why googling for deals is bad thing and why should STH prohibit such thing which will directly limit STH exposure to search engine robots?

 

[samat.io]

Was there evidence that the reseller came from STH? If not, it's no difference whether the forum is private or not. And if so, then how would you filter out STH accounts that /are/ resellers?

ebay auctions are public and not private or exclusive to STH — making STH forums private does not fix this problem.

 

[NablaSquaredG]

Was there evidence that the reseller came from STH? If not, it's no difference whether the forum is private or not. And if so, then how would you filter out STH accounts that /are/ resellers?

ebay auctions are public and not private or exclusive to STH — making STH forums private does not fix this problem.

The deal has been on my watchlist for weeks with only a very small number of cards sold.

It is extremely unlikely that this was a coincidence, i.e. somebody willing to buy 700 cards discovery the deal just a couple of hours after it has been posted in STH.



Generally, it seems like the only solution, at least for me, is to not post deals here (as I've already been doing that, for exactly those reasons), but instead only share them with a small circle of trusted labbers. The ConnectX-6 deal has been on my watchlist for weeks and that also applies for the majority of deals on ebay that are posted here.

 

[rtech]

Maybe we could have something like want list with tags so you could send Great Deals based on tags they had on want list?

Very rough idea not sure if Patrick would be interested in implementing this.

 

[Patrick]

So first off, I am bummed I missed that deal. I woke up at 1AM in Taipei for the Apple announcement, had meetings from 3-6AM, then started my journey back arriving yesterday evening. I probably would have bought at least a dozen of those.

Even being bummed I missed it, making Great Deals private does not help much. Things like sales on eBay, Newegg, or elsewhere are public. Even if we made a private forum, then organizations would just make accounts and still have access.

Going a step further, what if we put it behind a subscription upgrade? $2/mo, $5/mo to get access to great deals? Whoever is spending over $100,000 on those cards is going to have the budget to spend a few dollars for the exclusivity while the person who is just trying to scrape by on a cheap homelab may not be able to afford the subscription making that more exclusive to larger buyers.

TBH - We have long thought about making the entire STH forums a small subscription not really for the revenue, but just to prevent spammers. As much as forum spam is a pain (thanks to jet lag I woke up at 3:15AM and just deleted 45 overnight spam registrations) I am more nervous that something like a $25/ year subscription (or around $2/mo) would make the forums too exclusive.

 

[tinfoil3d]

Personally I'm not paying that much for a platform to share my professionally or experimentally acquired knowledge on a voluntary basis. Even with all the great help and great members sharing great information, I can live without it, you know. Not like paying a fee would equal donating directly to the people who posted some useful knowledge. I do appreciate the Patrick and his team behind STH, that's true. I may want to donate to keep this forum running but that's about it, and that'll be my intention not a paywall-enforced action. That's just my personal view here.

And yeah, publicly available stuff is publicly available, chances are if not you then someone else would either share it or buy it out before you come up with a decision of whether to tell anyone about it or buy it yourself. I can also spam 10,20,50, or 100500 messages if that's all that gets me behind a closed door, just like anyone else.
Approach to spam can partially be solved by not allowing anyone new and/or without some positive reputation to post in FS/WTB/Deals (because that gets amplified as many of us are subbed to those forums). Spam registrations would be less of a problem in this case too. First post can be auto-moderated with some generic rules and then held for manual review.
We can also just make forum invite-only based and restrict it from being indexed, that's also one potential solution to spam.

 

[ano]

its a double edged sword, but it seems most solutions have a more negative effect than anyone wants.

 

[MiniKnight]

First post can be auto-moderated with some generic rules and then held for manual review.

Then there's the question of who is the manual review when nobody is paying.

Something I really like about the forums is how little advertising there is on here compared to many other forums I'm on.

At least @Patrick shows up and gives a thoughtful response. I'm less active on here than I've been years ago because of life. I'd probably still pay a few bucks a year to keep it going.