Right now it’s not possible for users to reply to Job seeking and offering threads.
Let’s try to make it possible.
The alleged problems that caused the moderators to close threads for replies were:
Spam
Bumping.
Regarding bumping, a solution with a 72 hour limit has been put in place. It would get a little more complicated if users were allowed to reply to threads. But a manual enforcement of a 72 hour rule is not crazy. Additionally, the 72 hour rule could be hardcoded so that users could be blocked from creating double posts 72 hours apart. Does they can only bump their thread by replying to users or once every 72 hours.
Spam: The threads should stay on topic. And the topic should be the candidate looking for a job and his past projects in the case of the “Seeking a job” forum, and the company/job that is seeking candidates in the case of the “Job offering”.
So questions regarding the candidate, his past projects, his resume, would be allowed in the candidate’s thread, but info about your own project would not. And they should be handled in private messages or conversations. If it’s possible, you could develop a feature that allows for posts to be moved to private conversations, so when people make off topic replies, the users can report it, and the mods can move it rather than delete it.
In the case of " Job offerings", again, questions about the job opening, the company, the requirements, would be welcome. But info about the candidate, exchange of information or simple posts saying “I’m interested” should be moved to a private conversation.
Please contribute any ideas or feedback so we can have a better and more open market in this forum.
Unity doesn’t have any obligation here, and commercial/collaboration forum is just more like a newspaper ad, you put the ad out and people respond, or not. There’s no replying to an ad without going to the person who sent it, privately. This works.
Commercial/Collaboration forum is not for a discussion. Why would it be? You have that discussion by using the contact details.
Are you able to tell me what improvements might occur if there were replies, given it’s an ad, and people should respond to the poster directly?
IIRC when replies were allowed aside from the mentioned things there were also a lot of trolling or just behavior that required moderating. What hippocoder said about the section sounds also pretty logical.
No, it was constant trolling/fighting, and it was very real, not alleged. Since there’s no real point in public replies anyway, as hippocoder points out, it seems to be working out quite well. The only issue is occasionally people don’t leave any way to contact them, but if they can’t be bothered to do that, it’s a pretty good clue that you don’t want to work with them anyway.
As someone who unabashedly keeps their posts updated within the “laws of the land” here, I can say the lack of getting direct replies on our threads has not harmed our ability to reach people and is probably improving it, since we can stay on target with a relevant message. If any work was done at all on that particular forum it would be I’d love to see a way to organize our posts better. Bumping large threads becomes unwieldy since when I want to inform people of something new (such as a new service, or just a new showcase) I can’t just update the post for the bump but rather have to make a new post, which means after a year or so we’re on a high page number.
Not to hijack your idea - which is excellent to discuss btw - but really I’d rather see post edits in THAT forum only bump posts, so we could have maybe 3-5 posts covering different genres/styles and then update them with new content as needed rather than ending up with 50+ posts after a couple years.
The forums are a great resource in both finding talent and helping developers, it is unlikely we’d see any value gained from others bumping our posts for us since it would likely add even more pages of noise, even if it wasn’t trolling/spamming. I’d just rather get an email or PM!
If I was looking for someone to troll, that’s where I’d go. For a lot of my teen years, trolling was 95% of my internet activity. Serious people make good targets. The restriction makes sense.
Same can be said of the entire internet. There is always a lot of noise filtering that has to go on.
That said, I would have liked to leave a nasty comment on the paid job thread of the guy that tried to pay me to do his university assignment for him. The potential ramifications of accepting a job like that are crazy.
(2/5 star rating)
“This product murdered my entire family - DO NOT BUY”
No kidding. It’s useful for practicing big data techniques though. In college I filled a database with a few hundred thousand entries in a day just by periodically gathering new tweets with the keyword “sandwich”.
Some kids got into in my last semester for doing this. The guy who did their assignment… the code didn’t compile… and 1 kid paid for it then shared it with 2 other students! 3 identical code samples that didn’t work and the professor proved they paid for it by finding them on a site where it’s common practice!
I did you with the idea of slipping in a note that details to the teacher exactly how the student had engaged in piracy. Maybe a link to a www buried somewhere with a message I could change between the submission date and the time of marking.
I decided not to risk it. My school has a blanket policy that lets them cancel a degree retroactively if you engage in academic dishonesty. So I’d be throwing away the last ten years and screwing myself over for life for a mere fifty bucks. Hardly an appealing move.
I did email his school with his offer though. Never heard back from them.
Makes plenty of sense, but still terrifying to consider. Imagine all that debt and then you lose the degree. You don’t even keep that silly little paper that says you can do the things you could have done whether or not you went to college!
Chemical engineering is much more professional then software. Loosing my degree would take away my legal right to do chemical engineering. No company would touch me. And since there is no such thing as an indie chem eng…
Yeah, it’s an important piece of paper to hang on to.
Did you ever think about that before choosing that field? That’s truly terrifying.
I guess we can try to get back on topic before this thread dies of natural causes.
I usually contact the authors of offer threads by the contact information the person leaves there. If there’s nothing, start a discussion. If you can’t start a discussion with the person and they left no contact information, you probably saved yourself a lot of time and annoyance because that was probably some (age < 17) year old from (random country) who wanted to give you 5 USD to make their entire game.
The high entrance barrier attracted me to it. The less people that can do a job the more you get paid for it. That said managing systems that can kill people if you mess up in a cost cutting environment can get old quickly. Still, I’ll start a new job soon and have another couple of years of honey moon period.
Do you consider an enraged hippo to be natural causes?
Anyway, back to topic I’ve sourced about a dozen jobs from the forums. Most don’t go anywhere. Mention a price and a lot of people just disappear. I’ve taken to stating an approximate price up front, making the relationship fail-fast.
The successes I’ve had have come out of users with a high presence on this forum who I have an existing relationship with, rather then anyone advertising.