Section 10.1. Connect with the Community

10.1. Connect with the Community

eBay's Community page, shown in Figure 10-1, offers a host of different ways to make connections with other eBayers: through discussion boards , chat rooms, workshops, and more.

Figure 10-1. Click the navigation bar's Community link to open up a world of connections. You can get quick access to the Feedback Forum (Section 2.1), chat with other eBayers on discussion boards or in live chats, and get answers to your questions from the volunteers in the Answer Center. The Community page is also the place to go for official eBay news, announcements, and upcoming events.

10.1.1. Discussion Boards

A discussion board is a Web page where people can "talk" to each other by posting messages and posting replies to others' messages. (In Web parlance, discussion boards are sometimes called bulletin boards .) eBay's discussion boards are threaded , which means that whenever someone starts a topic (called a thread ), all responses to that topic show up under the original post. If you want to change the topic, you can start a new thread. When you look at a discussion board, as in Figure 10-2, you're looking at the titles of various threads. To read messages posted in response to a particular topic, click the thread's title.

eBay has five kinds of discussion boards:

• Community Help Boards . Ask questions and get answers from other eBayers about all things eBay: how to use your My eBay page, how to buy items, and how to list and sell them. This is a good place to start if you have a question about eBay in general or one of its features, from About Me pages to feedback to using eBay's sellers' tools (Section 9.1.1).

• General Discussion Boards . These boards are for general topics that may or may not relate to eBay. They have cutesy names like The Front Porch, The Homestead, The Soapbox, and Night Owl's Nest. Each board has its own personality. A good one to check out when you're getting started is the "New to eBay" board.

• Category-Specific Discussion Boards . These discussions are great for collectors, hobbyists, and sellers who specialize in a certain kind of item, like Disneyana or books. Share tips and talk with like-minded people.

• Workshops . Workshops, described in detail on Section A.5.1, are a scheduled, hourlong discussion between a leader and any eBayer who wants to attend .

• eBay Giving Works . This board discusses the fund-raising auctions held through eBay Giving Works to benefit nonprofit organizations and other causes (Section 8.5). If you're interested in learning how to support your favorite cause through eBay or want to meet others who support the same cause, check out this board.

Figure 10-2. To read a discussion, from the navigation bar choose Community Discussion Boards. Click the name of a board that interests you. The page that opens contains all the current threads in that board. The pictures in the lefthand column indicate various things: the tack means that the thread will always appear at the top of the list; the lock means you can read a thread but not reply to it; the eBay logo means that the thread contains a post from an eBay employee; and the N means that you havent read that thread yet.

You can read a discussion board's threads simply by going to the navigation bar and clicking Community Discussion Boards, and then clicking any boards name (like Book Readers, Outdoor Sports, or Seller Central). A list of threads appears. Click any thread to read its messages.

Tip: Discussions can get messy as many people chime in. You can cut through the clutter by searching the discussion boards for words or phrases that relate to your topic. Just click the Search button at the bottom of any thread page. You can specify search terms, a date range, a particular eBay ID, and the number of results you want per page.

When you're reading a discussion and you want to chime in with your two cents , click "Post a reply" in the thread you want to answer; the link is at the top of the list of messages. To post, you have to sign in to the discussion boards (a separate process from signing in to eBay). After you've signed in, you see a box similar to the one shown in Figure 10-3.

UP TO SPEED
Keeping Discussions Above Board

Any get-together can turn rowdy, and eBay's discussion boards are no exception. To maintain a level of decorum, eBay has set some basic rules that apply to everyone who takes part in eBay's discussion forums. You can read the rules in full by heading to the bottom of the eBay home page and then clicking Policies .Boards, but here they are in a nutshell :

• Don't publish anything personal about someone else on the boards, including contact information, real name, or email content.

• Be yourself. Don't pretend you work for eBay or impersonate another eBayer.

• Keep it clean. Don't post anything pornographic or obscene.

• Don't post Web addresses or item numbers in a thread title.

• Don't advertise auctions or commercial Web sites. This rule includes want ads; post these to Want It Now (Section 3.1.11) instead.

• Watch the flames. Comments that include threats, hate speech, vulgarity, or profanity are subject to removal.

• Color inside the lines. Make sure that your post fits a discussion board's purpose. For example, don't complain about eBay's fees in the Feedback Help board. Also, don't discuss posts that have been pulled by eBay. And don't encourage other eBayers to violate eBay's policies.

You have to be 18 or older to participate in discussions, and if your feedback score (Section 2.1) is below 10, you can post only 10 messages a day.

If you want to report a post that violates these terms, click the Report button at the top of any message, and eBay will look into removing the post.

Anyone who violates eBay's discussion-board policy gets a warning. Anyone who ignores that warning may get a sanction , which means they can't post to any eBay board, or a suspension , which means they're kicked off the site entirely. Sanctions and suspensions can be temporary, lasting one day or longer, or they can be permanent; the final say is eBay's.

To post a new thread on a discussion board, go to Community Discussion Boards and click the name of the discussion board you want. Sign in to the discussion boards (if you havent already). Look above the threads, on the right side of the page, and then click "Post a topic" to get to the box shown in Figure 10-3.

Figure 10-3. When you start a new thread or reply to a current post, type your message in the text box. You can add smiley faces, formatting, and check your spelling. (To use all these features, you must have JavaScript enabled on your browser; on most browsers, you can control this setting from the Tools menu.) Click Preview to see what your post will look like. If you're happy with what you've written, click Post Message to put it up on the discussion board.

Note: On the discussion boards, eBay staffers are called Pinks because the ID/timestamp bar on each message they post is (you guessed it) pink. For regular eBayers, these bars are gray. And if a staffer reprimands an eBayer (usually because the eBayer posted something inappropriate), it's called being "pinkslapped."

UP TO SPEED
Community Values

eBay operates by five principles that it calls community values , a set of beliefs that support all activities on eBay. Here is how eBay defines those values (to see them online, on the navigation bar, click Community, and look on the righthand side of the Community page):

• People are basically good.

• Everyone has something to contribute.

• An honest, open environment brings out the best in people.

• Each person deserves recognition and respect.

• eBayers should treat other people the way they want to be treated.

Trust, openness, and honesty are what make eBay work; without them, you wouldn't even think of buying from a stranger. And because a group can't really call itself a community if its members don't talk to each other, eBay provides a place for discussions.

As with all activity on the site, eBay expects eBayers to remember and uphold its community values when they interact with each other in the Community area. (But just in case you forget, there are plenty of rules in place to govern board use. See the box on Section 10.1.1.)

10.1.2. Groups

eBay groups are online clubs created and administered by eBayers. Besides chiming in on discussions, group members can receive newsletters, answer polls , and look at and post photo albums. To find eBay groups, from the navigation bar select Community Groups. When you do, the main Groups page shown in Figure 10-4 appears. Because groups are defined, set up, and maintained by eBayers, you might find them more fine- tuned to your interests than the eBay-created discussion boards.

Figure 10-4. The eBay Groups page shows a sampling of the thousands of groups on eBay. You can search groups by keyword, to find other eBayers with a particular interest, or by Zip code, to find groups whose members live near you. Mentoring groups help eBay newbies learn their way around. Click View All or any subcategory to see more groups.

To join a group, click its title. You see the group's Welcome page, like the example shown in Figure 10-5. This gives you the scoop on when the group was formed , who leads it, and whether there's been recent activity. Public groups , like the group in Figure 10-5, are open to everyone; just click the Join Group button to join. If you want to join a private group , you have to get approval. Click the Join Now button, explain in the text box that appears why you'd like to join, and then click the Send Request button to email your request to the Group Leader. When the leader has approved your application, you'll get an email. Then you can read messages, post, and do everything else you can do on a public group.

After you've joined a group, you can set preferences to customize the way you interact with the group. You can specify how many messages you want to see at a time, how you want to receive email from the group, and more, as shown in Figure 10-6.

Figure 10-5. Before you join an eBay Group, you can look at its Welcome page but not participate in discussions or polls, or look at events and photo albums. Once you've become a member, the left-hand menu links become active. When looking for a group to join, look for one with lots of members and a recent Last Update; this one, with more than 1,800 members, is likely to be an active group.

Figure 10-6. Set the number of items you want to display when you're looking at group discussions. You can also watch certain discussion threads, which means you receive email notification when someone posts a new message in that thread.

But if you can't find a group that's right for you, no problem. Just start your own. To do so, from the navigation bar click Community Groups and sign in to Groups (like the discussion boards, Groups require a separate sign-in ). Then, in the Groups main page (back in Figure 10-4), click the Start Group link and then fill out the form that appears.

Note: You have to have a Feedback Score of 50 or better and have been a registered eBayer for at least 90 days to start a group.

10.1.3. Answer Center

Imagine you had a mentor, an eBayer with lots of transactions under her belt, ready and willing to listen to your questions and give you the straight scoop in reply. Now imagine that you had a few dozen such mentors.

You dothey hang out at the Answer Center. The Answer Center (AC) is where you can go to ask questionsand get smart answers from knowledgeable, experienced eBayers.

You can get to the AC from the navigation bar: select either Community Answer Center or Help Community Answer Center. Either choice takes you to the ACs main page, shown in Figure 10-7, where you can click a topic (Bidding, Feedback, Technical Issues, Trust & Safety, and so on) to read posts on the board related to that topic. You can search for a topic (use the Search box shown in Figure 10-7) or read any thread without signing in, but you have to sign in to the AC to post. To sign in, click any topic; on the page that opens, look under the board's name for the "Sign in" link. Click it, sign in, and you can post your question.

Like eBay's other discussion boards, the AC lets eBayers ask questions and answer them. But eBay does a few things differently in the AC, making it your best place to get focused help from other eBayers:

• Each question can have no more than 10 follow-up answers, which prevents threads from getting too long or going off topic.

• Any registered eBayer can ask a question (you must be signed in to the AC to ask), but only eBayers with a feedback score of ten or more can answer. In the AC, you know the people answering your question have experience.

• To keep the Q&As from getting cluttered up with cute cartoons and pet photos, you can't use HTML in AC posts; eBay has disabled HTML in the AC. (The exception is the Photos/HTML board, where using HTML is relevant to the questions.)

• The AC's format is a little different from the eBay Discussion Boards (Section 10.1.1). In the AC, when you look at the list of threads for a topic (like Auction Listings or PayPal), the entire question (not just a subject line) appears. So you can read the whole question before you look at its answers.

• You can set up a watch on threads that interest you. eBay will send you an email when a new post appears in a thread you are watching. To watch a thread, look at the top of any discussion thread to find the binoculars icon, which you can see in Figure 10-8. Right next to the binoculars, if you click Watch this Question, you'll get email with a link to the discussion when someone posts a new answer.

Figure 10-7. The best place to start in the AC is the Answer Center FAQ, which gets you up to speed on what the AC is all about. Click any topic to read questions and answers related to that topic. If you want to search the AC, type a keyword that relates to your question (like shill or escrow) into the Search box and then click the Search button. The Advanced Answer Center Search link opens a page where you can narrow your search, as explained on Section 10.1.4.

Figure 10-8. To watch a thread in the Answer Center, click the Watch this Question link next to the binoculars. You can receive notifications by email when someone posts a new answerimmediately, daily, weekly, or not at all.

Before you ask a question in the AC, spend a little time searching through its threads for your topic (Figure 10-9). You'll find that a lot of other eBayers have had the same questions you do, and you can get a real education from the answers.

Figure 10-9. To search the AC archives, type your search term in the text box and then click Search. An Advanced AC Search lets you choose a date range (so you're not looking at last year's answers), search for posts from a particular eBayer (in case you've noticed someone whose advice really hits home), and specify from 10 to 30 results per page.

To ask a question, make sure you're signed in to the AC (Section 10.1.3), then go to the topic that best fits your question: Packaging & Shipping if you want advice on getting a hard-to-pack item ready to go, International Trading if you have a question about customs forms, and so on. On the topic's main page, just above the list of threads, click the Ask New Question link. (If you don't see the link, you're not signed in to the AC.) A page appears where you can type in a subject and your question; click Post Message when you're done.

To answer a question, click the Answer link at the bottom of any thread; a page opens where you can type and submit your reply. You won't see an Answer link if you have a feedback score of less than 10 (unless the question you're responding to was yoursanyone can post a follow-up to their own question), and the Answer link disappears when a thread is full (when it has 10 posts).

Tip: Remember that the folks who answer questions in the AC are regular eBayers volunteering their time and eBay wisdom. So when you post a question, show a little respect. Any AC regular will tell you that the attitude you exhibit when you ask a question directly affects the attitude with which AC gurus answer it. As long you're polite, they'll explain something like the UPI process for the umpteenth time.

10.1.4. Chat Rooms

Discussion-board threads can span days, weekssome of them keep going for years . If you're looking for something a bit more I-want-to-talk-to-someone-right-this-second, you might be interested in chat rooms.

A chat room is kind of like an online living room, where people hang out and chat with each other in real time. You type in a message like, "How's the weather?" and others immediately respond with messages of their own: "Two feet of snow here in Bangor, Maine"; "It's raining in Atlanta"; "Snow? What's snow? I live in Hawaii"; and so on. Whenever you refresh your screen by clicking your browser's Refresh/ Reload button, you see the new messages posted since the last time you refreshed it.

With eBay Chat Rooms, while you're searching or managing auctions in one browser window, you can open another and join in the conversation with other eBayers. Many chatters like to post pictures, too, from cartoon characters to photos of pets and their local area. Chat rooms feel a little disorganized until you get used to following the flow of the conversation. Messages don't appear in nice, orderly threads; instead, they show up in chronological order, and several conversations are always going on at once. And messages don't stick around for more than a day, so you can't search the chat rooms the way you can search Discussion Boards. Even so, chat rooms are fun and worth a look (or a lurk).

Tip: Chat rooms can be, well, chatty. Their discussions contain a lot of off-topic posts, as well as hellos and goodbyes as people enter and leave. If you're the kind of person who starts biting his fingernails when things get off-topic, choose a discussion board instead. (The Answer Center is your best bet for ontopic posts.) But if you need a quick answer to a specific question and Live Help is too busy, the member chat rooms can help. There are always some eBayers hanging out in them.

To start chatting, from the navigation bar go to Community Chat Rooms, and then click the name of the room youd like to enter. To follow the conversation, you have to refresh the screen every minute or so. Or scroll down the page and type a message in the box shown in Figure 10-10 and click the "Save my Message!" button to join in. (You must be registered and signed in to Groups in order to chat.)

There are two kinds of chat rooms: general and category-specific. In the general chat rooms, you can talk about pretty much anything at all; but technically speaking, each general chat room does have an official focus:

• The eBay Caf . The caf goes way back; it was eBay's first discussion area. A lot of the regulars have known each other for years. Discussions range from eBay gossip to thoughts on current events to what's going on in the chatters' lives. The AOL Caf is a similar room for people who use AOL.

• Holiday Board . Although people do talk about holidays here, they also talk about their families, the weather, and whatever they've been up to.

• Giving Board . This room is for big-hearted eBayers who help others. People post their stories and request help, cards, and prayers; others post fundraising ideas and resources where people can get help.

• Discuss eBay's Newest Features . This is a lively chat room where participants don't hesitate to speak their minds. Chatters do discuss eBay's newest features, and a lot of other topics besidesand they're never shy about the aspects of eBay they don't like.

• Images/HTML Board . This is a good place to get advice if you need to spruce up your auctions with photos and formatting gewgaws. Some very computer savvy people hang out here.

• eBay Q&A . If you've got questions, the eBayers here have answers. Ask about anything related to eBaybuying, selling, services, how to report a problem and you'll get a quick and knowledgeable answer.

• eBay International Boards . If you buy or sell internationally, you'll be interested in the other global thinkers here. Try the international chat rooms to meet eBayers from all over the world. Besides the general International Board, there are chat rooms for the U.K., Australia, Canada, and Germany (auf Deutsch, nat rlich!).

  

  Figure 10-10. The text box where you type your message appears just above the list of messages already posted. If you know HTML (Appendix B gets you started), you can include tags in your text to spiff up your posts. To refresh the board and look at new messages, click the Reload button. If you don't want to reload all the posts each time you refresh, use the drop-down list to set the reload time to the last five minutes (you can set this interval between five minutes and 24 hours). Then when you refresh, you'll see only the posts made in the last five minutes (or whatever interval you've chosen ).

  
  

• Emergency Contact . The volunteers here provide a truly useful service. If your computer crashes, an accident or illness puts you temporarily out of commission, or you have another emergency that interferes with your eBay activity, they will get in touch with your trading partners and explain what's happened . Or, if you can't get in touch with another eBayer, the volunteers will try to help you track that person down.

Note: The Emergency Contact chat room is for help with contacting people. It's not for just any situation you consider urgent, although the regulars here show great patience in directing people with questions about fraud, eBay features, listing problems, and so on, to the right place.

UP TO SPEED
Netiquette

If you've never participated in a discussion board or live chat, be aware that certain rules and expectations are in play when you're interacting with others. The quickest way to make enemies of people you've never met is to treat these forums like some sort of free-for-all.

Netiquette (short for Internet etiquette) dictates that before you post, you take a few minutes to peruse eBay's board usage policy (Section 10.1.1). Next, spend a little time reading the board or observing the chat room that interests you. You'll get a feel for the culture and tone of the place, and you may even find the answer to your question before you have to ask it.

When posting, use conventional capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. Be sure your Caps Lock key isn't on; using all capital letters IS AKIN TO SHOUTING AND SO ARE MULTIPLE EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!!! Read over your question with the same scrutiny you'd give a business letter. Use "magic words" like please and thank you . Don't use profanity or indulge in name-calling.

Because of the limited number of answers allowed for any question posted in the Answer Center (10 tops), people using this board frown upon piggybacking . Piggybacking is when you change the topic of a thread without starting a new thread yourself. For example, if you're on the Answer Center's Packaging & Shipping board reading someone's question about how to pack a clown-shaped piggy bank, and one of the answers mentions plastic peanuts and you get to thinking, "Hmm I wonder if anyone here knows a good source of packing peanuts," don't hit the Answer link to post your question.

Instead, click the Return to Questions link above the posts, and then look above the list of questions for the Ask New Question link. Click that to start a new thread, and ask away. If you don't start a new thread, your question may get over looked and you're burning up the original thread's precious 10 posts.

Cross-posting , which is posting identical threads on more than one board, and clones , which are exact repetitions of an earlier question posted as a new thread, are also bad ideas. (Rude!) Choose one board that seems to fit your question best, post once, and have a little patience as you wait for an answer. Someone will help you out before long.

Keep in mind that it's not just you who can report posts that violate eBay's policies; other eBayers can, too. (Each message has a Report button right next to the posting time.) Play nice.