eBay: The Missing Manual

Other Places to Talk About eBay

You can stick around eBay to discuss it with other eBayers, but if you want a no-holds-barred discussion, look beyond eBay itself. All eBay-sponsored discussions and chats have a Report button or link at the top, and eBay will remove posts that violate its policies (Section 10.1.1) and sometimes suspend eBayers from posting.

So if you want to get down and dirty, check out one of the other places online you can go to discuss eBay. You can find eBay-related groups on sites like Google and Yahoo! and forums on a number of sites.

Google Groups

Usenet is a network of discussion groups, called newsgroups, that began in 1979 with a couple of computers linked by a single network and grew into a huge, complex system that links millions of people and computers to more than 20,000 active newsgroups. Topics include everything you can imagine—and probably more. There are dozens of groups devoted to eBay and online auctions.

The easiest way to check out Usenet is through Google, which has hosted the groups since 2001. Point your Web browser to www.google.com and then click the Groups link (or just go to http://groups.google.com). Type ebay or "online auctions" into the text box and then click Search Groups. The page that opens looks like the one in Figure 10-12.

Figure 10-12. If you want to find groups that are explicitly about eBay, click a link next to "Related groups": ...