[Anthony S.]

Nobody thinks conducting auctions on Net54 is a bad idea. Quite the contrary, the individuals who first raised their concerns about the effect that auctions would have on sellers if they are all listed in the same category, all pointed out that they thought auctions were a positive development (myself included).

Nor is the problem that Frank took the initiative to see if auctions would work on the BST. His auction was successful. It seems obvious they'll work just fine.

The problem, for sellers, lies in the inevitable growing popularity of auctions on the BST. Frank proved they'll work. They're fun. Hell, I already have a card in mind that I want to auction. One person running an auction doesn't adversely effect sellers. Ten to fifteen people running auctions concurrently would have a profound effect on sellers.

I know from personal experience, ie the page view counter on my imageevent website, that when my sales listings are at the top of a BST forum I get a helluva lot more page views than I do when they get knocked down a few spots. When I'm selling several cards I often get 100 plus page views in the first day. By the 3rd or 4th day, when my post has meandered toward the bottom of the page, I might get 2-5 page views. And when I bump my post back up to the top a week later, I immediately get 30-40 views that day. And that translates to sales. So if someone is trying to sell several different cards and they keep getting knocked further down the forum by multiple auctions in which people are raising bids for a solitary card by a dollar or two at a time, I can see it becoming very frustrating for sellers. Because whereas right now the process of getting knocked down the page can take several days, adding a slew of popular auctions could shorten that period to a matter of hours.

Combining two of the less frequented BST categories in order to make room for a new separate auction category seems to me to be a great solution.