Option to disable receiving offers

Californ1a

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[Lestrades.com] Nao 尚

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Re: Option to disable receiving offers
« Reply #1, on October 24th, 2017, 12:24 AM »
Just update your signature to say you don't want to receive offers... Should stop users who come in from your profile page.

I'm not a fan of disabling offers entirely. You may miss out on a good offer. There's nothing that forces you to answer the offers. You can disable e-mail notifications of new offers. After a week offline your matches will not be unfolded by default. And if you still get offers, you can just ignore them. Really, zero drawbacks to that -- I don't expire stuff, I don't keep track of that, it's very artificial to me. (Many Barter features are pointless IMHO. Just because we're based on the same idea doesn't mean I have to do everything like it does or that it has to do everything like I do.)

If someone still has an offer running when you come back 3 months later, just comment on them to make sure they still want to do it.

Californ1a

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Re: Option to disable receiving offers
« Reply #2, on October 24th, 2017, 06:42 AM »
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on October 24th, 2017, 12:24 AM
I'm not a fan of disabling offers entirely. You may miss out on a good offer. There's nothing that forces you to answer the offers. You can disable e-mail notifications of new offers. After a week offline your matches will not be unfolded by default. And if you still get offers, you can just ignore them. Really, zero drawbacks to that -- I don't expire stuff, I don't keep track of that, it's very artificial to me. (Many Barter features are pointless IMHO. Just because we're based on the same idea doesn't mean I have to do everything like it does or that it has to do everything like I do.)
Just because you're not a fan of it doesn't mean other users of the site aren't. I like to disable offers on barter while I'm unavailable for trading so it doesn't look like I'm just outright ignoring people who send offers (because it makes me come off as utterly rude by not responding to them, and then those people may not want to send me offers in the future when I am available).

[Lestrades.com] Nao 尚

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Re: Option to disable receiving offers
« Reply #3, on October 24th, 2017, 10:23 AM »
Quote from Californ1a on October 24th, 2017, 06:42 AM
Just because you're not a fan of it doesn't mean other users of the site aren't. I like to disable offers on barter while I'm unavailable for trading so it doesn't look like I'm just outright ignoring people who send offers (because it makes me come off as utterly rude by not responding to them, and then those people may not want to send me offers in the future when I am available).
Which is why you can edit your signature to indicate that you're unavailable.
Or your personal text. There's an option somewhere. What I can do, though, is show the personal text next to user names when showing matches or perhaps when creating offers.

I'm not *against* things, it's just that I don't want to over-complicate the website. I don't know if you've noticed but Barter keeps adding more information over time, whenever I go there I'm like, "okay what the hell?", there are too many esoteric signs everywhere and nothing (nothing!) is properly documented. Whenever something is documented, it's documented in a long text that takes more space and confuses users even further (when I have to document something on a page, I add a '?' icon that you can hover or click to get an explanation, e.g. every tag is documented on every page, it's just not in-your-face, but done in a way that's immediately visible to new users.)

I respect BVG for what it is and for inspiring what Lestrade's was created for, but if the reason I opened LT's was because BVG was about to die, the reason I kept it alive after BVG came back online is because I felt there needed to be a competitor with different ideas and different implementations. Lestrade's is not "only" a Barter clone with 1000x faster matching and searching -- it's also a place to manage your library playtimes, a place to find out whether a new game is likely to be bundled in the next six months (thanks to studio statistics), a place to discuss anything on a unique forum system (or an equally fine unique comment system if you want to discuss a game or a bundle), a place to check out in a single glance if a bundle is for you (because I don't know of any other site that lists all bundles and puts the emphasis on the games' genres/tags), etc.

I'm doing what I want to do. I acknowledge that a few people have asked for the ability to mark their account as unavailable and I'll probably get to it eventually but that means having to redo the profile page and it's one of the rare things at LT's that I'm not eager to touch (because, well, the internals for that page are terrible. Then again recently I figured I could just ignore those internals and graft my usual selector code at the end of the main profile page, like BVG does, and be done with it.)

I guess in the end it's always a matter of priority. If everyone was asking for a feature I'd do it immediately. If someone does it from time to time, it'll remain in a corner of my brain, to be tackled 'when I'm done with the rest'.