Advertising in closed groups is difficult because the group is closed, no one wants spam, and because often advertising equals spam, no one wants advertising. Yet everyone also wants to know, when they want to know.
In this respect a portal is often the best choice, a single place where members of the group can go to find advertising. Well isn't that just like the yellow pages books? Pretty much, except that access is limited by paying for the advertising. This paying question is one of the issues that the open community Craigslist.com deals with.
In order to provide a portal for the small group, that is free, I have created the experimental site http://BuyFromBahais.com. It serves a place where other Baha'i businesses and artisans may post ads about themselves with links to their own sites. It is searchable and able to serve, like the yellow pages, as the place to start looking for products or services that are provided by Baha'is.
Interesting challenges always occur in public facing web sites. Spammers, both human and computer, arrive to see what fun they can have at your expense. Therefore it must be made difficult for this to happen and there must be a remedy when it does. The ability for the community to flag offending ads allows many eyes to participate in the monitoring of the web site.
Users may upload an image along with each ad they post. In addition, each user may upload a banner ad, that will be displayed on the top of the web site from time to time.
Initial users are being invited to post ads by virtue of other announcements that they have made. Thus testing will proceed with motivated users.
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