BST Rule Suggestion

[cellophane]

I would like to propose an adjustment to the BST rules to have sale posts add/keep the final selling price in the post for posterity in addition to the Sold modification. Especially helpful for folks like myself that are not buying & selling all the time to have some sort of reference point, or just to satisfy curiosity. It is a tiny bit more work for the seller, but they have to modify it anyway to change it to Sold, so...

🍻

[Daltech]

Bro. Do you work for the IRS. Are you from the department of not filing alternative income? You taking a deductions census? Just step back a minute and think past being able to see what something sold for as a reference for your future potential sale of an item.

[Grendel]

man, I think you need less coffee or other stimulants.

[Daltech]

It’s a pun, from trailer park boys. “Why you
Counting my you know what I’m sayings, you taking a you what I’m census? You from the department of you know what I’m sayings”. J-roc and the rock pile tap in!!!

[Grendel]

Quotes around the quote would have helped, not everyone is up on the Trailer Park Boys but would have understood you were "quoting" something. Without quotes well you sounded like an unhinged tin foil hat wearing conspiracy nut. Good to know

[Daltech]

I vote “nay”.

[Myrkul]

I'm in favor of this. It would be really nice to get a better idea of the price things normally go for, especially since the bluebook is never updated.

The concept that the IRS has the resources to track random paintball websites and THEN track the user names of each member and match it to each person is kind of silly.

[Daltech]

Wow. The digital divide is real. You boys need to read up on the latest capabilities of digital forensics. Y’all must not work in IT. Your routers probably still have the factory MAC address. If y’all wanna play Al Capone with your taxes be my guest, but don’t say you haven’t been warned.

A MAC (Media Access Control) address, sometimes referred to as a hardware or physical address, is a unique, 12-character alphanumeric attribute that is used to identify individual electronic devices on a network.

Hey Admin, would you turn over your logs if subpoenaed? Or would you take the logs to Belizé to protect your users? Rhetorical question…

A little light reading…

There’s a new job for those 87,000 new employees at the Internal Revenue Service, and it isn’t chasing billionaires. It’s digging around to discover if you reported that extra $600 you made from selling grandma’s heirlooms at your garage sale.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-irs-goes-after-your-side-hustle-transaction-threshold-venmo-democrats-11670362529

[Myrkul]

Even if you are correct, which I doubt, I'm SUPER not worried about it. If the IRS has the sale information, then they also know that I usually overpaid for it in the first place, dumped a crap ton of expensive parts on it, THEN got bored with it and sold it. 100% of the time I'm selling at a loss. I don't mind because I got my enjoyment out of it, but it's not a taxable.

[Daltech]

Funny. I wasn’t even really trying to prove you wrong. But I did. I like how the article says “heirlooms”. Kinda just like all those markers that get found in the ol’ storage unit. Not so silly anymore is it?

[tyronejk]

I'm in favor too.

To tinhat-Daltech: yes, it still is silly.

[Daltech]

Haha. I’ll chill until some educated users on this forum chime in. In the mean time. Flame 🔥 away.

Im silly, a tin hat, etc. What else y’all got? Chicken little?

Next, let’s start a thread about breaking the law and why it should be justified. The mods will love that.

[Grendel]

Been asked and discussed before, while I am in favor and really not worried about the IRS at all there is a significant proportion of our membership which worries about this and will not comply. They are the same ones who worry about a picture of a trigger <rolls eyes>. I leave my prices in my posts but I also do not update them with what was in the end negotiated. Use them as you will

[Daltech]

Covering the trigger in pictures is a trend because social media algorithms down grade images deemed not for the public good, it’s mistakenly assumed that it applies unanimously across the internet. The trend of covering the trigger began when flippers started flipping sales on Fakebook and instacrack. The two concepts don’t really relate. One is a trend based upon paranoia and desire to “trick” the algorithm, while other is undeniably real. Like not wearing a seatbelt.

[Grendel]

They are the same, that algorithm thing and the trigger images is "group think" correlation without the data to support. I have gone to the trouble in the past to show some that it is a fallacy of logic but they stick to their "group think" paranoia. The worry that the IRS is using AI to comb obscure forums for evidence of un-reported income is right up there. As part of my job I scrape customer data from the web for use in field performance analytics for a multi-billion dollar company and even when I already have the data and need to change a NLP model to look for something new the costs are astronomical. Hell we have a better working model right now that one of the elements is looking at cost/value [$$] paid and sentiment and the company will not pay to run the new model on our historical data. AI is not near as smart and simple to work with as what most people assume. At this time leaving price on this forum is a no risk endeavor. I mine this type of data for doing predictive analytics using data scraped from the internet and am not worried at all. This is not paypal or other financial transaction based business the raw data is not there and would have to be modeled using NLP to even start collecting the data and just having the data does not mean you can make sense out of it it take many iterations to do that.

[Daltech]

Thank you for your understanding and the well thought out response. Makes sense.

[Daltech]

Is this juice really worth the squeeze guys?

[KMDPB]

I vote yes as well, MCB is one of the last if not last places on the internet where one can reliably search for paintball related information and such info is saved and not just lost into the modern social media powered black hole. Many times I have wondered what the value is of some obscure paintball item, only to find a singular sale listing of said item with only SOLD and no price... as for the tax implications you're probably going to get a 1099 from paypal anyway and if payment was f&f and you dont want to report it, dont worry, the IRS doesnt care about you unless you're making big money, money bigger than any paintball stuff is gonna bring you. The world is not as complex and cynical as facebook will lead you to believe.

[Levi]

Finding the asking price replaced with *SOLD* is really annoying when I'm trying to figure out what to ask for something.

It seems near impossible to enforce any of this though. Considering that once the item sells, the threat of taking the thread down doesn't really have any teeth. What we have now is probably as good as it gets.

[BrickHaus]

I think a lot of people full on delete sales threads after it's sold.

[Hellion360]

Yeah, keeping the prices is good for everybody. But you can't really enforce it in a meaningful way. Just encourage folks to leave it in officially.

[superman]

I have lost count of the times that i have been messaged asking if something is still for sale when the item not only has the price with sold written next to it but also had sold as the last post. I solved the problem myself and either remove the price or remove the entire post. It was pretty frequent and im not even referring to the long running threads either.

[Grendel]

There is nothing you can do about lazy. Me I use typically strike outs on my price and suffix the end of the line with sold and will still occasionally get the question is it still available. I do way less then you do so if annoys me I can imagine your annoyance

[tyronejk]

What could technically be done, with some code, is to maintain a publicly viewable table with sales thread titles in one column and sale price in a second column.

1. This would be anonymous, for those who care about that.
2. It would allow sellers to delete their sales threads to avoid being contacted about items that are long-gone.

I think this could be made relatively simply by maintaining a UUID for each thread in the sales sections, scanning the first post for the largest single number, and saving this data to a table. And whenever one of these top-level posts are edited, find the matching row in the table using the UUID and update the "sales number" found, since the actual sale will probably be close to the last updated value.

This wouldn't be perfect, but could be better than nothing.

[Grendel]

Yup, it would be pretty easy to scrape MCB B/S/T threads for changes over time and record the Posted price if only members would put them in the same spot or use standard syntax. Unfortunately finding a price in any one OP sometimes is like trying to decipher hieroglyphics without the Rosetta Stone. The listing tool that Carter has provided is a good way to do that standardization but sadly the membership is still too inconsistent. It can still be done but the logic is fairly complicated and would have to evolve as members deviate by being what they think is "cute" and "funny". My company pays me a lot of money to do this and I am far from the only one on our team, just not worth my time/effort to try and make sense out of unstructured threads/posts for this purpose.