joelfreak said:I am a charter FW member, a regular reader and contributor to the Hot Deals and Travel board, and I just had an experience that has come close to turning me off completely to FW. A member made a posting in Travel asking for help getting him arrangements to see the Mets and Yankees in NYC this weekend. He stated he was looking for travel, and tickets to the games. I replied, IN THE THREAD, stating that I am a season ticket holder, and would be happy to help the guy out by selling him tickets at face value, since I don't go to every game of the year. This post was deleted due to "self promotion", and the fact that FW isn't here to promote "consumer to consumer sales". I can definitely understand this answer if I had started a thread in Travel or HD stating that I had tickets and was selling them. But when someone posts a request thread, and someone posts to try to help someone else out, that should be allowed, WITHIN the thread. A great example of this right now is in the Nissan thread in Hot Deals, where people are posting about organizing group buys, and even a post or two I believe are from dealers, all meant to HELP FW MEMBERS. I believe that we must allow for reasonable leeway with the rules, especially if someone is answering a request from another FW member. What also set me off is the reaction of 1 or 2 members who rudely posted in reply to my posting, accusing me of "self promotion". FW was a place founded on the basis of people helping people save money and find deals. I really hope we have not gotten to the point were rules fly in the face of common sense and helping others.Thanks for posting this in here. It opens up the door for us to offer a bit more clarity as to the “why” behind things that happen on our end.

When I looked for your deleted message, I found that the reason for the deletion was that “buying and trading is not one of FatWallet’s core competencies. Therefore, we decline to be involved in the process in any way.” So the issue wasn’t really one of self-promoting. If that’s what you heard, I apologize for the miscommunication; indeed, you weren’t doing that at all. The reason your post was deleted was for offering to sell publically on our site.

According to my understanding, there is also another reason beside the issue of core competency that leads us away from allowing users to sell to one another. We want to facilitate a certain kind of communal spirit. We want users to gather primarily to share freely their knowledge and insight with the community so that all can be enriched. This is contradictory to the spirit of selling, which usually (though not always) has the goal of enriching the one rather than the many. Those two goals (enriching the community, enriching the one) can often (though not always) run at odds with each other. So our guiding principle here is the promotion of a communal spirit nurtured by a sense of mutuality.

Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate your willingness to help out a fellow FatWallet member. That’s great! It sounds like you were promoting the communal spirit we are seeking. And unfortunately, your goodwill got ran over as we continue down the path we’ve chosen in order to pursue that kind of community.

We really don’t want community goodwill to get trampled. So, if anyone has any thoughts as to how we might be able to open the door to selling in a way that strongly promotes the overall wellbeing of the community, I sure would like to hear it. After all, If it can truly strengthen the community, then maybe we could work toward making it one of our key competencies.