So...where do you trade your sports cards at? This has been a tough question for me lately. I want to start getting rid of my duplicate cards to decrease the size of my collection. For now I'm going to create either word documents or PDF files and just post them on here but there has got to be a website dedicated to just trading doesn't there? Hmmm well until I find out or until someone tells me, I'll just prepare to post what I have for trade and go from there. More to follow on this subject!!
In order of personal preference, I trade at:
ReplyDeleteThe Bench Trading
http://www.thebenchtrading.com
As far as I'm concerned, this is the most civilized and well moderated general trading forum on the web, especially for baseball cards. I don't really collect anything else, so I can't speak for the best boards for other sports, but I consider The Bench the best for general purpose baseball. The easily have the highest ratio of literate, honest and polite traders to idiots of any board on the web.
Next on the list would be where I started trading, SportsCardForum.com. They're fairly well run, have good traffic, but unfortunately they inherited a lot of the less desirable refugees from the old Beckett Message Boards when they closed a few years back. The site has gotten a lot better, as many of the power-tripping moderators have been let go, and lots of the troublemakers have been banned. However, it still has a large population of extremely immature and grammar-phobic members.
Freedom Cardboard's forum (http://www.freedomcardboard.com/forum/) is another good site with lots of traffic and some very knowledgeable and talkative members. In general the atmosphere is probably slightly more mature than SCF, but the language filter is most definitely off. Lots of overlap in membership with the previously mentioned boards. I don't trade much there, but that's mainly due to my interests being farther and farther out of the mainstream (it gets tough to trade when you don't collect any current sets). Plenty of ranting and bashing, but still a fun place to hang out, and the moderators only put up with so much before breaking out the ban-hammer.
A more specialized forum is Net54baseball.com. They are strictly a vintage-oriented forum, but you won't find a more knowledgeable or experienced group of collectors anywhere. Lots of the folks there are regular contributors to the Standard Catalog of Baseball Cards. They don't take any crap, so while you might see some fairly spirited discussions, no outright attacks are tolerated, and they have a high standard for their membership.
Jason, thanks for the detailed reply. I will definitely try out these sites. I've always collected but never traded and now I have just way to many duplicates for a collection and need to start cleaning up! lol Thanks again.
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ReplyDeleteMy biggest advice for any sites you join is to be sure to read the entire Terms of Service or Acceptable Use Policy, and by all means read the Frequently Asked Questions before diving in and asking questions. Lots of new members breeze through all of that, completely missing the rules, and end up getting angry and getting themselves banned because they didn't read the rules, and start breaking them immediately.
ReplyDeleteAll of the trading sites have their specific sets of rules due to issues that have occurred at those sites. None of the rules are arbitrary, they all have good reasons.
Take the time to introduce yourself in the Welcome threads, and definitely take a few days of just lurking and reading before diving right in. See how the sites operate, get a feel for the culture there and see how best to fit in. The sites are different, so what flies on one site, might be frowned upon at another.
And make liberal use of the ignore list for other members. All sites just seem to have idiots. If you find a certain member just really annoys you, either personally, or by what or how they post, do not engage them, just add them to your ignore list, and suddenly that site will be a much more pleasant place to hang out and trade.
I will definitely read those rules. I am really ready to start trading so like you said I want to know the process inside and out. I can only hope there are a lot more honest people out there then not.
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