I have never OPed in the Marketplace forum, so I'm not very familiar with how posting in there works. I do, however, browse from time to time. Often I've noticed OPs requesting the threads to be closed. How about giving the OP in this particular forum the option to lock their own thread?
Self-deleting may not be a good idea, as it gives buyer and sellers an idea about prices, post formatting, etc.
The problem is them posting, requesting the thread be closed, when they should be reporting. Maybe you could help us out, and sight them for us as you lurk through.
Also we don't require them to be closed and it could be an issue at some point if people just keep closing their own threads. So for now we'll keep it the way it is.
Any chance it would be possible to actually just delete the "closed/sold" threads rather than just leaving them in the forums? This would save a lot of time by preventing any need for people perusing the Marketplace posts to read through posts about items that have already been sold, because any threads still in the Marketplace would be for active items (similar to the way Craigslist works). I've spent a lot of time looking through threads only to get to the final post that says "Sold. Mods please close", so I wish it would effectively say "Sold. Mods please delete.".
I would not want to see threads deleted once items are sold.
It is helpful to see what kind of prices items were sold for, whether one is a buyer or a seller. That would be helpful to see what is a "ballpark" price that one should expect to receive if he is a seller or pay if he is a buyer.
Yes, it's helpful to get some feeling for market value of used devices, but it's still pointless to look through a thread and not know it's closed/sold until the final post. If nothing else, there should be a way to see which threads are no long active so it's easier to find and read only the new posts. Once I've seen a post that's sold/closed and seen what the item was sold for, I'd rather not end up accidentally looking through it again later when I revisit the Marketplace.
