Stickied "How to write a good BST thread."

Hey all! I’ve been digging through the BSTs looking at what I might want to get after the holiday season has passed. And I found that about half of the BSTs were great, easy to look through and understand. And about half of them were rather bothersome.

I’d say the main deciding factor in how much I liked the BST, and how much time I spent in it. Was whether or not they had pictures in their thread directly, with nice little prices above them. Or if they just had a link to their fllickr, some of which had their non yo-yo pictures mixed in with the yo-yos. I don’t know which yo-yo is which by looking at them. And I often don’t even know what brand makes it if they just list the name.

I thought it would be great if we tried to clean up the BST a bit by writing a sticky as to how to post a good one! I am not the person to write this, I certainly don’t have the experience. Anyone out there interested?

People can’t even read the “don’t post if you don’t have pictures” sticky, expecting them to read and follow something even more complicated is never going to happen. For the most part I just use how good/bad someone’s BST is as how good/bad they are likely to be if I am to trade with them or purchase something from them.

When people take a single blurry picture of 30 yoyos and don’t say much beyond “no lowballz, CLWY ONLY FOR MY MAGIC YOYOS lol” I assume that they are young, dumb and take poor care of their belongings because they probably didn’t pay for them so if for some reason I decide to contact them for some sort of exchange (already extremely unlikely) then I will assume that their definition of “near mint” means “the last time I did an around the world with the yoyo it hit the ceiling fan at full speed”.

So far avoiding these people and sticking with the people who take clear pictures with a camera of reasonable quality (my camera is terrible but I think my BST as a whole is decent and the pictures clearly show what a person will be receiving) has resulted in every yoyo I have received via the BST being in exactly the condition I expected/hoped, save 1 where I bought a whole collection based on a few clearly favorable photos (lesson learned) and PayPal sided with me on my dispute.

3 Likes

^^^^ Sage advice. Thanks oops.

I think there already is one or at least an example of one.