Amongst a number of changes added to the site tonight (cleaner <a href="http://www.bonanzle.com/booths">Upcoming Bonanzas</a> area, anyone?), we've finally set a couple limits on various areas of the site that were causing formatting and/or usability and/or business issues. Here I'll quickly run down the new limits we've added, and the reasoning behind each limit. <ul style="list-style-type:disc"><li><strong>Booths limited to 10,000 items</strong>*. This goes hand-in-hand with the blog post from a couple weeks ago about not letting Bonanzle get overrun by drop shipping merchants, big box stores, or other mega-merchants. Bonanzle has grown because of grassroots efforts by small sellers; it's our vision to ensure that Bonanzle will always be a hospitable place to the sellers who have helped to create us. We think that this limit should help promote an atmosphere where no one seller could ever dominate policy (or hog buyers) on Bonanzle as we grow. (* because we're willing to fudge the limit a bit for users that have already registered and who have cool merchandise, like moviemagicusa with his 15k-ish items)</li><li><strong>Booth favorites limited to 15 per month since registration and 75 total</strong> (that is, if you registered 3 months ago, you can mark 15*3 = 45 favorites). Being marked as a "favorite" of a user is intended to be a special designation, but with our previously unlimited booth favoriting, there was no reason a seller couldn't sign up and "favorite" 500 booths the next day, and presumably get a number of those booths to favorite them in return to increase their standings in the list of "most favorited booths" list. In implementing this limit, we hope to make favoriting an even more special designation, while still allowing our longer-time users the opportunity to favorite a bunch of booths (we know it's can be hard to choose which are the best of the best!). Note that if you are currently in excess of these limits, you'll still have all your favorites intact, but you won't be able to add new favorites until you're under the limit. </li><li><strong>City limited to 70 characters, state to 30</strong>. We've noticed an increasing number of users lately using their location to throw in a tagline about their booth and such. While we don't have any problem with using the location field creatively, our forum/profile design was not setup in such a way that a 200 character string fits into the design smoothly. We figure 100 total characters is still enough to get in a few tagline words if that's your style. Heck, if you believe my old English teachers, greater conciseness could even lead to greater clarity!</li><li><strong>Hand picked lists in profile limited to three</strong>. Similar to above, our profile layout wasn't designed for 15 hand picked lists to fit in it without things looking "off." Your extra lists will still show up in search (and the hand picked list page, if they're less than 2 weeks old), but only the three most recently updated lists will show up in your profile.</li> </ul> I'd imagine that some of the users affected by these limits will probably have some initial questions about whether they are really necessary. Understand that in implementing these limits, we are looking toward what is going to make Bonanzle best over the <em>long term</em>, even if, in the short term, it might be bothersome to have to change this or that in your profile. Look at the bright side: at least we're not making a change to limit all forms of payment that aren't Paypal. <img src="http://www.bonanzle.com/images/emoticons/smile_6.png"> <h3>Have You Welcomed a Newb Lately?</h3>In other news, another change for today I'd like to quickly mention is that the "new users list" on the lower left side of the People page now has links to quick text the new users. If you find yourself on the People page with 15 seconds to blow, why not send some encouragement to a newly signed up user? Remember when you first signed up? Bonanzle probably seemed big and strange to you at the time. Getting a hearty "Welcome aboard!" during this initial exploration phase could be a real thrill to a Bonanzle baby. And it helps them start to get a sense of the Bountiful Goodwill (tm) 'round these parts within their first few clicks. What better? 1 2009-01-22T01:36:48-08:00 80 true true 1 2009-01-22T01:43:21-08:00 Limits_for_Beauty_and_Pleasure