Man, if you guys were running a web site for a community, it would still be running on a BBS system from the 90's because "change sucks".
This is turning into a complaint thread, it appears. The fact is that in the past ~20 years of running an online forum, every single change I've made - from a little one to a larger one - was met with a "this sucks" chorus from a vocal group.
As for QuietM4 trying to stir up site supporters - the fact is that there are very few [much appreciated!] supporters who actually put their money where their mouth is and donate $2 to $10 per month (you can count them on your hands), and the majority of them already had access to the formerly locked-down classifieds. In fact, only two users joined as a patron to get access to the classifieds. All the others already had access. They supported the site with a few bucks because they appreciated it. You're acting as if two users paid a lump sum to 'get something' and I owe it to continue the status quo. The supporting members/patrons had access to the site several weeks prior to anyone else even being aware of it existing to test it, provide feedback, etc.
As for those who are providing constructive feedback over blindly complaining - thank you. The AZSAuctions.com site has been modified dozens of times over the last few weeks based on feedback I've received on it.
The name of the new site was meant to be a subtle reference to a commonly used acronym for this web forum - and not to overtly link the two. The idea is for AZSAuctions.com be a standalone site. If you didn't know about this web forums site, you would not be able to find it from just knowing about the AZSAuctions.com site. The logo also incorporates firearms, outdoors and Arizona.
As far as the categories - I've mentioned it multiple times in several other threads about the site. I started making the categories out of scratch, based on what people had listed in these classifieds over time. After spending a couple hours mapping it, decided that there were enough distinct categories people had used here on AZS that it would be easier to just find a list that someone had already created and import it into my database. So I did that. There are undoubtedly categories that will very likely never be used - but the only thing I've done to that list I found and imported, was to remove the adult categories and add more specific ones to the Sporting Goods "shooting" categories to add more specificity. I coded it in a manner so that when you browse categories, it won't show any that don't have at least one ad in them. The only time you will see the other categories is when listing an item - and even then, you still need to pick a top level category and sub-category for firearm stuff - so unless I am misunderstanding, the only complaint here is that you may have to scroll down a bit to select "Sporting Goods" as the initial category for a gun-related item. While I may eventually take the time to remove things like "Doll Collections" (didn't even know it was in there), it's low on the list to address because it doesn't really matter for the reasons I mentioned previously. It doesn't seem to be an inconvenience to have it there. Originally, I had FIVE nested categories, but moved it to three based on feedback. If I step back to two, I will eventually get complaints that it's not specific enough. While it would be easier early on with less traffic and users, it would take quite a bit of effort and fixing to add those later on.
As for requiring the "State" field - yes. I'm sure you would've been pissed early on when I originally required a full address to create an account. I scaled that back to just username, email and a password. Though if you list something for sale, yeah, you need to include your state. If you just add the City and State in you profile, it will auto-add those when you list something for sale. Why is city and state required? Because this caters to face-to-face transactions and it is much easier for a seller to just add a state and city so a potential buyer knows when he's looking at items and can see the location. Will we get many outside AZ? Probably not, but it's at least an option since sellers can also choose to ship stuff.
As for pictures - first off, I think you misread the site limit - it's 240 Kb, not 24 kb. Photo sizes on "free" sites has been a fight in almost all forums and classifieds. When you have several dozen users (much less hundreds of users) who are trying to upload a few raw 20 MB, 4000 x 6500 images from their phones to each of their ads, that gets expensive to host those for everyone and the size is ridiculous and un-necessary for a web site. You don't need anything even remotely that large. So my options would be to charge for picture hosting (didn't want to do), or force all pictures to be hosted externally (also, didn't want to do). At some point I will try to incorporate a function that auto-resizes it when you upload your raw, 20 MB 4000x6500 image - but that takes time and expense to do. Unfortunately, I'm a one-man-show when it comes to this, I don't have an army of developers like "OfferUp" does. So, I went with a middle-ground which is covered here: https://www.azsauctions.com/v2/faq
Read the FAQ and it explains your options with pictures pretty well.
