After some very lengthy discussions, and all of your input from the TF Development 2006 thread, we are doing a serious upgrade of the Marketplace. All of your comments in here have been said before, they have all been noted and we have been working on it. Bennett brought up the fact we seem to be a budget warehouse for services/products and asked how we can overcome this. We may never be able to overcome this, so we need to look to the future and understand that low prices may be a fact of life in our industry. We need to approach this topic in a different manner, and look at guiding the members towards being more professional, and looking at their industry in a more serious way, rather than trying to make a quick buck out of it. This is for ALL of us to do, not just the staff, we all need to act more professionally, we all need to work together to help guide the budget oriented members towards pricing realistically. How do we do this? I don't know the perfect answer, but creating paid posts is not the way. We have some ideas that will be happening to counteract a lot of the budget services/products, but they won't be perfect.

iTrader and the vB upgrade are the no1 priority for now. This will reduce the scammers and bumpers, and bring in some professionalism to the Marketplace. If you aren't professional in your business dealings this will be highlighted in your buyer/seller profile via comments from members you have ripped off/scammed. You will not be able to bump posts, they will remain in a timeline order based on first post date/time, not last post. These two additions will shift the emphasis to members acting more professional, as you will be visibly accountable for your actions once these are implemented. As for the time these will be implemented, I don't know. It is being worked on as you read this. The upgrades have to be seamless, tested and suitable for purpose, before they go live. Don't come back crying to me if it takes too long to implement this stuff, it is out of the general staffs hands. You all know there have been delays, but the wait will be more than worth it.

On top of the vB and iTrader upgrades, there are a whole raft of ideas we are going to implement for the Marketplace. I am not going to tell you any of these until they happen, except you can expect Marketplace Guidelines to be written up, this will include rules, expected behaviours, guidance on buying/selling etc. This will be a large series of documents, intended as a guideline to help everyone in the Marketplace (including staff).