Thai Visa Classifieds.

[Formaleins]

Has anyone actually looked at the classifieds section? How do they actually manage to make such a mess of it?

 

Take any of the popular categories, Motorcycles for example. Obviously anyone paying for their "Featured Ad" would expect it to be listed with higher priority than the free ads, which it appears to work.

 

However, when you get to the free ads, the logical process in my mind would be that the latest listing would be the first in the queue after the featured. Seems not to be the case, there are new ads appearing halfway down the listings, new ads near the end and new ads near the beginning.

 

Just check out the expiry dates! Some of the ads expiring in 29 days are way after ads expiring in a week.

 

Also, the listing dates are complete rubbish, they have the listing dates using a future date - a lot of them appear to sat "POSTED 27th FEB 2017" - Just completely sloppy data, sloppy programming and sloppy quality control.

 

If you want to check out any new bikes listed you have to scroll through 80 odd entries to make sure that some slob hasn't entered it second from last. A royal pain in the ass. (probably don't give a damn as long as they get the money from the featured ads - The non paying peasants can get lost, sadly, the more and more items that build up in the list, the less likely I am to waste my time scrolling through them and the less likely anyone is likely to find a buyer.

 

Be interesting to see the proportion of solid sales for posters in their 30 day free period using this terrible new format compared to the percentage of sales under the old system.

 

They also for god knows what reason decided to stick in a time clock on the top left - It tells you the time in Thailand, very useful, except it doesn't update, so it basically shows you the time you opened the page and remains there, any one have any idea why someone would think that was a clever idea?

Edited February 2, 2017 by Formaleins

[Maestro]

Regarding the time stamp at the top left of classified pages, if I want to know the current time I can

• get up, go to the window and luck at the clock on the church tower
• glance at the time display at the bottom right corner of my Windows-operated computer monitor
• shift my eyes slightly to the left and read the time on my wrist watch
• hunt for my mobile phone and check the time on that
• etc

It makes sense to me that the time display on the classifieds page should be static, to indicate up to what point in time the page I am currently looking at has been updated. Apparently, a new ad being posted after I loaded the page does not automatically refresh the page, which I consider to be a good thing because an automatic refreshing would probably make the page jump all over the place, which would irritate me.

 

[Maestro]

Regarding the order in which the ads are listed, I note your preference for a listing of the standard ads (free ads) in reverse chronological order, ie newest ad first. This may be your personal preference, but would it also be the preference of the majority of the readers of the classifieds?

 

The basic question, it seems to me, is what algorithm is used for the order of listing the ads. At a first glance I see that the listing is 

• not in alphabetical order
• not in chronological order of expiration dates
• not in reverse chronological order  of expiration dates

What else could it possibly be? Your having brought up this subject has made me curious. Is it in chronological or reverse chronological order of the dates on which the ads were posted? Is it in descending order of the numbers of views the ads have so far had? Is it a random order? What rhyme or reason is there to it?