Rather than sending a private email to each of you, I thought it might be interesting to see if anyone else using your valuable services would find merit in the following BrainFart...
Wouldn't it be interesting to be able to see live statistics of counts of the brands & model numbers of the equipment in order of popularity being advertised in the Want Ads of QTH.com??
I am unsure if this would be easily done or if it would be a pain-in-the-drain -- just a thought that it would be neat to be able to see trends and movement of equipment --
Anything is possible, of course. But this would require that when an ad is listed, one would have to use a drop-down menu of Manufacturers, and specific Models. This isn't necessarily bad, but it would be different from how it is done today, and maybe would take longer to place an ad.... and then how would you handle multiple items in an ad?
When you create the form to post your ad, you can start the form with 2 options.
1. Select for single item post
2. Select for multiple listings within a single post
If you select single item post, you only have one option to selcet the equipment type, which then prompts additional sub selections which are dependant on the main equipment type selection. (i.e. Kenwood>TS-480SAT)
If you select multiple listings within a single post, you get multiple drop down menus within each segment for the listing verbage. THe user can select how many items they want to list which will open that many listing decription areas. Each area can allow up to 1000 characters and will have a corresponding drop down equipment selection menu.
When I was in the market for an HF transceiver I found that the format a person chose to describe the model would skew search results. For example, I have seen a Kenwood TS-850SAT listed as a TS850S AT, TS850, TS-850S(AT) etc.
Requiring a pull-down menu would also standardize the way model numbers are entered and allow a single search to turn up all relevant results.
