SA Dealers News and opinions about topics in general

I have made further changes to the ad creation form on www.sellstuff.co.za, so now if you try and create an ad and it fails on the PHP validation, your form will redisplay with the values you entered in, which is nice.

Also when your ad is created successfully your newly created ad is displayed, which it should have done, but I had a bit of a bug in my code

Added to that I now check for email addresses in the ad fields in PHP as well, you see some people just don’t listen when you ask nicely, then everyone is impacted.

Lastly I moved things around on the form a bit so that the first thing you see on the form is the actual form and not all the warnings that I will de-activate your ads and account etc. I think this looks better.

Posted under Classifeds Sites Updates

It may seem like I have been neglecting the site (ok I have , a bit …), but I have made a few changes that I just never actually announced.

First off I added a search feature which is quite quick and dirty, but works. I would like to extend this in future but don’t seem to be getting the time!

Secondly I have added a few conditions to new ads being placed. Why? Because the site was being filled with so much duplicate ads and irrelevant ads that I have had enough, so now any ad placed for an affiliate web site etc. will be de-activated and continued attempts by a user will lead to thier account being disabled and all their ads removed. The same goes for ads placed in the wrong category, or ads placed in multiple categories.

I also noticed a disturbing trend where people add thier email address in thier ad, this is a VERY BAD IDEA! The largest majority of the traffic to the site comes from search engines, which means that your information is indexable, which in turn means that anyone who writes a script to go through webpages and find email addresses can pick your address up and start spamming you. I added the contact form specifically so to avoid this, in addition I get cc’ed on the contact through the site, meaning that if someone finds a way to send spam through the site I can figure it out an block that too.

Posted under Classifeds Sites Updates