Think back to when you were 13 or 14 years old. For most people, it is an awkward time, filled with big changes, big dreams, and more often than not, bumps in the road as one tries to grow. These growing pains are normal, and successfully overcoming obstacles makes us stronger. Audiogon is now 14 years old, and we are experiencing some growing pains too as we strive to grow into a more dynamic, responsive, safe, and interactive marketplace.
Despite rumors to the contrary, our ownership has not changed during these 14 years. The same people who brought you this marketplace in the first place are committed to rescale and enhance it today. We have been working hard to respond to your feedback, implementing your suggested changes, and in some cases, bringing back features that you missed from our old site. As good as the old site was, we are confident that the new one will be better, and we are counting on community feedback to continue to help shape it.
Looking forward, we have some exciting updates to share with you this week.
- New Feature: Friendly URL’s are now live, Your listing title will now be displayed in the URL, friendly URL’s are used to provide more-relevant links to web pages. Therefore your listings will be more prominent on search engine results.
- We have improved your ability to manage your listings. You can now easily re-list and sort expired listings by date.
- Auctions are back! They went live this week and we are pleased to offer this again.
- Application Errors-how frustrating, we have been getting these too. Since our launch in January, search engines have been re-indexing the pages (not just current listings, but past listings) on our site, sometimes creating an overload on the system. These application errors are a temporary problem (i.e. a growing pain) while this rendering takes place, and we are working with the major search engines to minimize the disruption.
- On-site Messaging is coming soon. Protecting our community from fraud and providing a secure marketplace for our members is a top priority here at Audiogon. We know that our community wants to communicate with one another and our new on-site messaging system will provide a secure venue for that interaction. We are not trying to monitor your communications with one another or create an enforcement mechanism for sales commissions. Instead, we are trying to protect our members from fraud. Audiogon will continue to mediate disputes between members when they engage in on-site transactions, but we cannot be held responsible for communications and transactions that take place off-site. The community made it clear that being able to message one another is very important, and we are working hard to facilitate this interaction.
What else would you like to see?
We firmly believe that you, our members, are the true reason Audiogon has been such a wonderful marketplace and community for audiophiles alike. We would like to give you a chance to help drive the direction of the site and are working on a suggestion box so you can easily reach out to us.
- What else do you want to see from Audiogon?
- What would you like to see us doing better?
For now we would love to initiate a broader discussion here on the blog. Let us know what you think in the comments.
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