Ad's that live forever

[phatmanace]

Folks,

Have you ever considered allowing an ad 'archive'?- I'm guessing that once an Ad is marked as sold, they are removed a short time afterwards.

The problem is that quite often, people post links to ad's in forums. The forum posts live in perpetuity, but the ads don't.

I only ask as it's a bit annoying when you're skimming through archives posts, someone asks something like "what should I look for in a good s2000", someone else posts a link to an Ad, but it only works for a short time.

-ace

[Mr Will]

Ads are removed thirty days after they expire, or when the user chooses to delete them.

They are kept on record (minus the images) indefinately though, so it should be possible to change the link to look in the archive when the advert is no longer live, so I will add it to the list of ideas.

[phatmanace]

Mr Will said:

Ads are removed thirty days after they expire, or when the user chooses to delete them.

They are kept on record (minus the images) indefinately though, so it should be possible to change the link to look in the archive when the advert is no longer live, so I will add it to the list of ideas.

great - although the images are normally the most useful bit :-)

is that just a bandwidth/space issue?

[Mr Will]

The images are a storage issue, with up to 9 pictures per advert and 50000 adverts, they mount up pretty quickly.

The ads being moved to an archive is more of a performance issue. By keeping the ads database smaller the entire site runs a lot faster, especially with the number of complicated searches that are carried out on the ads.

[phatmanace]

Mr Will said:

The images are a storage issue, with up to 9 pictures per advert and 50000 adverts, they mount up pretty quickly.

The ads being moved to an archive is more of a performance issue. By keeping the ads database smaller the entire site runs a lot faster, especially with the number of complicated searches that are carried out on the ads.

yes, all perfectly reasonable. I was just curious.

I guess anything else is pretty horrible to code; such as doing a search and replace on all forum posts and replacing any links to a given PH ad with inline images and ad description {just before you archive the ad}



-a

[Mr Will]

It would be easier to make the ads pages look somewhere else if they can't find the advert in the main database, rather than trying to change the links, but either way it does not solve the image problem.