If you have a piece of glass, for instance but cannot find any information on the mark, you can go to the Glass & pottery board and find people who are willing to help you identify it.

If you need help figuring the right setting to use on your camera to photograph some jewelry, the Photography board people will help you.

On the other hand, questions on the General Discussion Boards are often greeted with hostility and ridicule by many of the frequent posters. Many are still helpful and friendly, but many others not.

I saw a thread in which somebody brand new and full of excitement posted some innocent questions looking for advice & was greeted with a post (paraphrased) that said :

“Do you want us to come over to your house, write your listing, take your photos, answer your customers questions, pack your boxes and drive them to the Post Office, too? everyone here learned all of these things on their own through trial and error and many years experience. I am so tired of people coming here looking for all the answers.”

I’m sorry – but isn’t a community forum a place to go and ask questions of more experienced users?

If you don’t want to help people by answering their questions, why would you be there at all?

Community Help Boards that don’t actually offer help are not of much use.

A few months ago paypal was sending me very strange e-mail (can’t remember what they were anymore) I quickly went to the powersellers board and saw a whole slew of people talking about these strange e-mails. Thus, I knew that I did not have to call paypal because this was happening to a lot more than just me. Saved me a lot of time and worry.

Other than that, I stay away. Things get negative too quickly and like you stated, you risk your head being chopped off because some way-to-sensative person reads you post with the wrong tone.

Fast forward – As an Education Specialist Trained by eBay I introduce many people to the site. Because of the contentious tone on many of the boards I rarely, if ever, suggest these newbies venture there.

If the Discussion Boards had remained informative and less volatile, I believe they would have continued to enhance the community feel of eBay.

As Seth Godin describes ‘talkers’, the people on eBay’s Discussion Boards would have been eBay’s ‘talkers’ – people who were positive about the site and would promote it.

Instead, many of the Discussion Boards have become confrontational and negative. These people are ‘talkers’ but I expect they’re not the kind that eBay envisioned. So what was once, in my opinion, a supportive community is now gone & the site has become more impersonal with little community feel.

Free-for-alls can be good if people are coming together and agree on standards, but I’m not sure that’s true on discussion boards. Everybody I speak to says they don’t go there, or they used to and now don’t because of the tone.

I don’t hang out on the discussion boards. When I tried to answer people’s questions, I got harrassed and libelled because of who I was. When I posted similar answers in other topics but under a posting ID, I was mostly left alone. Then, I was bothered that I was getting venom for being me, and just walked away. Yes, I promise I was answering questions without promoting my company or anything we do. Just answering questions.

My eBay community are my Twitter pals. I think community is important to eBay because it had that. Nobody thinks about an Amazon community. I think community is important, but we make our own. Many of us are making it on Twitter and through blogs, videos, and other online communities.

I know that personality is important to online selling. I know that personality makes a difference to online shoppers. eBay knows that too, and has made statements about that… like in Jan 2007, eBay said that based on their internal research, shoppers who felt that a listing had fun, excitement, or personality were nearly twice as likely to bid or buy.

So while I’d say eBay could run without their “community” aspects, I think personality and good marketing are needed.

Great post! Makes me think about a post I was going to write, though on a slightly different topic…