General Settings

This page allows you to control various settings regarding the listing process, as detailed below

Set the maximum length in characters that will be allowed for the user to enter in their description.

Choosing yes will only allow users to place their listings in categories that do not have subcategories in them, thus making them choose the lowest subcategories to place their listings. Choosing no will allow users to place listings in any category.

Checking yes will allow the use of a rich text editor for the description field only. This will allow the seller to more easily enter HTML into their description. This will provide more efficient formatting capabilities within the description field for the HTML savvy, and not so savvy.

You can choose to display the categories in alphabetical order while sellers are choosing a category within the listing process and within the edit category process.

Specify the number of columns of categories to display to the seller while they are listing an item.

This setting allows you to display the category icon in front of the category name during the Listing Process. The icon displayed will be the same one that has been assigned to each category within the following admin menu: Categories > Category Setup > [Edit] Category

If used, the voting system allows a visitor to vote on a listing by choosing 'recommended', 'ok', or 'not recommended'. Votes are tallied and comment recorded so that other visitors, as well as, the seller can view the feedback. This setting allows you to configure it so that a visitor may only vote once per listing. If the system detects that the visitor has already voted on the listing (based upon your selection for this setting), that visitor may not vote again.

You can determine the maximum number of votes that will be displayed on each results page for the listing.

You can determine the number of columns that your checkboxes will be displayed on the listing page. Checkboxes are category questions and are displayed using the Checkbox Template. However, you still need to specify the number of columns to display the results within the template.

Specify the maximum length that a word can be entered in the system. This setting is used to stop sellers who may place unusually long words within their listing, which could cause a problem within the html that is used to display the page.

If this setting is set to a non-zero value, users who are logged into the site when they use a Contact Seller form will see an additional option on that form: the option to ask their question “publicly.” If they do so, the seller will have the opportunity on the response form to make his answer also be public. If and only if both the question and answer are marked Public, the question and answer will appear in the Public Questions section of the Listing Details page for the associated listing.

The site admin (or any multi-admin user with “delete” permission) can, if needed, remove the “public” status of a specific question and answer pair, which will remove them from being shown in the public questions area.

If the setting is disabled (by entering a value of 0), the Public Questions/Answers and the options to create them will not appear.

This setting defines if listing renewals will be accepted and the period that the listing can be renewed from the end of the listing. If this is set to 0, no listing renewals will be accepted. If set to a positive value, that will be the number of days before and after listing expiration that the listing can be renewed.

This setting determines if and for how many days from the day a listing started a user can place extra feature upgrades on the listing. If this value is set to 0, no upgrades will be allowed on any listing. Available upgrades are bolding, better placement, featured listing or the addition of an attention getter. The reason for putting a limit on the number of days to allow upgrades is that the listing is renewed when an upgrade is successfully added. This means the listing will be given its chosen duration from the date the upgrade was added.

As an example, consider a user who places a 30 day listing and wants to come back and add an extra feature after 3 days (let’s assume you set this limit to 7 days). If the user successfully purchases the upgrade, those extra features will be added to the listing and a new expiration date will be set — 30 days from the upgrade date which makes this particular listing run 33 days. This was done to let the user take full advantage of the upgrade which is for the full duration they chose initially.

If you choose yes, then when the seller edits their listing it will automatically be considered a “new” listing and therefore be placed at the top of the “newest listings” tables on the site.

Choosing Yes will allow sellers the option to “copy” an existing listing into a new one. This listing created by this is not a renewal of the old listing, but rather a completely new listing that is automatically populated with the data from the source listing. This can be useful if your users sell multiple items that are very similar.

Once you turn on this feature the copy option then becomes available within the manage this listing options within the My Current Listings and My Expired Listings client side management pages. Note that non-archived listings in the My Expired Listings list will fully copy over as once a listing has been archived much of it's data has been compressed or lost and so can't be copied to the new listing.

Choosing yes will allow your users to use the standard auction format for their auctions.

Choosing yes will allow your users to use the dutch auction format for their auctions.

Dutch auctions are a form of auction where the quantity of items within the dutch auction are sold separately. Within a dutch auction the bidder enters their bid and the number of total quantity within the auction they are bidding for. If they bid $1.00 for 3 of the total 10 items in the dutch auction they could potentially win those 3 items at the possible cost of $1.00 each. At the end of the auction the amount paid for each item auctioned is determined by the amount bid and amount bid on. The highest bidder gets the number of items of the total they bid on (as long as not more than the total quantity). If there are any quantity left the next high bidders amount bid on is removed from the remaining total. This is done until the total quantity is accounted for. The last winning bidder may not win the full quantity of items they bid on. At this point the final bid for all items in the dutch auction is fixed as the bid made by the lowest bid actually winning any of the total quantity. All bidders pay this same amount for each item of the total quantity they won.

This setting defines when the bid history link will be displayed.

Choosing yes will allow a user to maintain a blacklist of buyers who are not allowed to access his/her auctions.

Choosing yes will allow a user to maintain an invited list of buyers who are the only users allowed to access his/her auctions.

This setting defines whether the Auction Start Date field will be displayed. If no then Auction Start Date will default to current time. If yes and Allow auction end time is set to no, then Duration (defaulted to minimum value set by client) will be added to Auction Start Date or current time (whichever is greater) for calculation of Auction End Date.

This setting defines whether the Auction End Date field will be displayed. If yes and the value set by client is less than or equal to current time, then Duration (if set to anything other than zero/null which is the default when this switch is yes) will be added to Auction Start Date or current time (whichever is greater if 'Allow auction start time is set to yes) to create Auction End Date. Otherwise, ANY value greater than or equal to current time will Override ANY Duration setting.

This setting defines whether the buy now option will be available until the reserve price is met or will go away after the first bid is placed.

Choosing yes will allow a user to edit an auction after its creation but before the first bid is placed. Otherwise, an auction will not be editable at all after it is created.

Choosing yes will allow a user to modify the starting bid, reserve price, and buy now price of an auction after its creation but before the first bid is placed. Otherwise, an auction's prices will not be editable after the auction is created.

This setting, in conjunction with allow auction start time defines whether an auction may be viewed after it is placed but before the auction starts.

These settings define how long an auction will be extended if a new bid is received within a chosen amount of time from the auction's end.

• Set the first dropdown to the amount of time to extend an auction.
  IMPORTANT: This setting is entirely dependent upon the second dropdown.

• Set the second dropdown to the amount of time before an auction ends that a bidder can extend an auction. This will happen automatically if the bid is made within the chosen time period.
  IMPORTANT: Setting the second value to 0 will disable this feature.

This setting defines whether a user will be allowed to delete his/her own live auctions.

Choosing yes will cause a listing to open in a new window when a user clicks to view it.

This is the size of the popup window, in pixels, if Popup Listing Display when Browsing Categories is turned on.

Choosing yes will cause an image to open at its full size in a new window if its thumbnail is clicked while browsing category and search results, mirroring the functionality of clicking on a thumbnail within the ad details page.

These settings deal with how long before things expire or get archived. All settings, unless otherwise noted, can be set to 0 seconds to disable that thing from being expired/removed.

These settings are used directly by various Cron Tasks.

This setting is for how much time a user's cart is left intact before it is removed. Default is 1 week (7 days). You can set the value to 0 seconds to make the cart never expire, however we discourage this on high traffic sites as it can cause a lot of extra database usage. We also discourage setting this to be less than the amount of time the user's session expires (default of 1 hour).

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The Cart system allows a user to start placing a listing (or renew/edit/upgrade a listing, extend subscription, etc), then leave and come back at a later time to resume what they were doing. This setting affects how long a cart will remain in the system before it is removed. Once it is removed, if the user still wants to continue, they will have to start over.

This setting is for how long after a listing has expired, before moving it to the archive table and removing extra data no longer needed for the listing. Default is 30 days. We recommend leaving this setting at 30 days for high traffic sites for better performance¹⁾.

Once a listing has been archived, it can no longer be renewed regardless of the “renewal period” setting. If “copy to new listing” beta feature is enable, in most cases an archived listing will be able to be copied to a new listing, but the images, category, category questions, and possibly other data, will need to be re-entered when placing the copied listing.

The archive setting is important and should be kept as low as you can for the speed of the site and convenience of your customers. The archive is there to keep your site fast. If the software kept all listings in the same place for the life of the installation the database would gradually get slower and slower beccause the size of the database would continually get larger thus slowing the site. Your server would also fill up with images from past listings also slowing it further. So when a listing is archived the images attached to it are removed from the server and the listing information is compressed (losing some data) and moved from the “live” listing database table to the “archived” listing table. Hopefully this explains that when a listing is archived it is of little use to be renewable as much of the data that was there is no longer there.

If you are not sure, leave this setting at the default 30 days.

This setting is for how long after a listing has been archived, before it is totally removed from the system. Default is “0 seconds”, when set to 0 seconds the feature is disabled, so that no archived listings will be removed. For high traffic sites, we recommend setting this to 30-90 days to reduce the database size. Once an archived listing is removed, it can not be retrieved or viewed or “copy to new listing” since it will no longer exist in the system.

This setting is for how long before order data, and any contained order item data, will be removed from the system. The default is 1 year (365 days), but we recommend extending this if your site typically has listings that last for a very long period of time.

You can disable orders from being removed by changing the setting to 0 seconds, however we discourage this. The “database size” for orders and order items can add up very fast (to enable some of the more advanced features), so reducing this time may improve your site's performance if the site has a large quantity of new orders. If you do reduce the time before orders or items are removed, we recommend to make it at least as long as the User Cart Expiration setting as it stores most cart data in an order, but that recommendation is not enforced. ²⁾

Note that when an order or contained order item is removed, it does not affect any live listings or other “live” data such as user's subscription length³⁾. However when an order item has been removed because it has “expired” according to the time setting here, certain features will no longer be possible. Features like the ability to undo a listing edit or upgrade just by changing the status from “active” to “canceled” on an order/item.

This setting is similar to Remove Orders & Items, except that it pertains to Invoices that are attached to the orders, and transactions that record when a payment is made. We recommend setting this setting to be the same as what you set Remove Orders & Items to.

This setting is for how long before a user communication (message appearing in “my messages” within “my account” for each user) is removed from the system. This will remove read and un-read messages alike. Default is 0 seconds (disabled/never remove old messages), but if you run a high traffic site we recommend a setting of 1-3 months (30-90 days).

This setting is for how long before Recurring Billing data will be removed from the system, after the user has stopped paying or has canceled the recurring payments. Default is 90 Days, we recommend keeping this at least 2-3 weeks to allow a “buffer” period in case the user is just late on payment or there is some error in updating the recurring billing status. Once the recurring billing data is removed, automatic renewals for that recurring billing are no longer possible.