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There are a number of questions that are highly localised in nature, or might not fit at all with the current site.

The thought struck me that there may be scope for classified adverts (or possibly auctions) as a sister site in the same branding (once decided); or some kind of directory of related companies (studios/printing services/modelling agencies/etc) with the ability for people from here to add reviews. As an example, I'd rather sell a lens to someone with a reasonable reputation on here, then risk being fleeced by some scam on "another auction site"; Similarly, I'd rather buy form someone that hasn't asked a bunch load of questions about cleaning fungus from lenses...

Both options would allow for the site to fund itself to a certain degree (pay x to be a featured studio/pay to list/etc.), but I wonder how other people would feel about this? Do you think there would be scope for other things?

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I think that leveraging reputation here for classifieds would be great. While I'm not sure how it would be a revenue driver, it might be a worthwhile driver of Q&A traffic. My intuition is that there is quite a demand for reliable online trading spaces; for example, the marketplace at PentaxForums.com is small but works very well. And eBay is really a crapshoot for photo gear.

Now there is a difference between answering questions well and delivering products as advertised and paying promptly. Whether there is enough difference to merit a second rep system, I'm not sure.

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Maybe useful to have a product recommendations bit that we could migrate questions from the main site that are in the grey area of being subjective.

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    I think we're a long way from having sufficient content to break out certain categories of questions into a separate space. – Reid Aug 23 '10 at 17:29
  • @Reid Subjective questions shouldn't be on the main site in the first place, so it wouldn't remove any from the main site at its expense – Rowland Shaw Aug 23 '10 at 18:49
  • Maybe so, but we are not closing very many questions as subjective, so I don't see the demand for a separate space at this point. – Reid Aug 23 '10 at 21:56
  • @Reid what about the other ideas though? – Rowland Shaw Aug 24 '10 at 11:16
  • Oh sorry. :) I will opine in answers so people can vote. – Reid Aug 25 '10 at 19:23

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