Site Updates - Oct 2023

Automated Post Lifecycle 
The site will now place a post that has not been edited or bumped in the last 90 days into an "Ended" status. These posts will no longer be visible in the feed OR in search results. The goal is for the community to actively manage their listings and keep the content fresh to ensure all users have a good experience. 

A user can reactivate an Ended post by going to the Managed Listings page and clicking "Reactivate" for a fee.

🛑 PLEASE READ 🛑 :Any post that has not been posted, edited or bumped in the last 90 days will be placed in an Ended status. You can reactive ended posts for free for the next 30 days. Following this grace period each reactivation will be $.50. 


Managed Listings Page - Updated
Your Managed Listings page has an improved layout including: 

• Filter by All, Active or Ended posts

• Easily bump, edit, archive or reactivate posts. 

• Track and manage your Free Quota posts 

• View Archived posts 

Night Vision Category
You can now list your Night Vision devices, lasers, etc in its own category. This can now be found when creating a post and in the category carousel on the main feed for filtering.

A note on Site Support
We have come to a point where we will not continue to keep up with all "support" tickets. We are working on a better system but please be aware that we handle all incoming issues on a priority basis. Please check out the update FAQ page foundhere to find recommendations to common issues. 

Did you know...
You can filter posts by state by clicking on the search bar and then locate Search within State at the bottom of the pop up, and select a state in the drop down. This will then filter the posts based on the selected state and your search will return results within your selection.

New Release - Tacswap Messaging

We are excited for our release coming later this week which will include a new messaging system. This change will improve the quality & speed of communications and provide a modern messaging experience.

🛑 PLEASE READ🛑

All messages in the current system will not be migrated to the new site. You will need to re-initiate any desired communications on the new messaging platform. Users will not be able to initiate or continue conversations on the old messaging platform once the upgrade is complete. You will have the ability to access old messages through a banner for a few weeks.

We understand this will create some challenges for deals in progress which is why we are notifying the community early. Start tracking any deals in progress as we get closer to December 1st. Identify any users you stay in contact through old posts and do a quick clean-up to ensure you don't loose contact with anyone in the community following the upgrade.

Happy New Year

We’re excited to share the New Year with you and wanted to thank you for making Tacswap one of the best communities within the Firearm Industry. We’ve spent the last 12 months understanding, planning, and developing a better site. You have been patient on support tickets or other issues with the site and for that we are very grateful. We’ve been largely focused on improving the technology to provide a better platform and we hope you see the effort in our latest release. You will notice overall usability, specifically on mobile devices, should be much better with improved page layouts, click-throughs, and access to information. In the background we have addressed the inconsistent but ongoing Messaging issues, sign-up challenges, and overall intuitiveness of the site. Be sure to check out the completely overhauled Search functionality as well.

As you can tell we are extremely proud of the positive feedback and growth of Tacswap. We strongly believe we are here to stay. We will be looking to you to help further improve the site through ongoing feedback. With the changes we’ve made on the platform we will now be able to add new features at a faster pace and address issues in a more timely manner. It’s been a long road to get here but it’s been worth it to put a better product out for this community.

Again, thank you for making Tacswap what it has become. It’s been great getting to know a lot of you and getting confirmation that we are creating a positive service for the industry. We often get asked about how to support Tacswap and the 2 ways you can do that directly are to (1) contribute through purchasing credits through the site here and (2) by introducing Tacswap to your 2A network. The more users we have, the more gear is available to choose from and even more importantly, we will build a bigger community to which we can transact and communicate.

Check out the updated site and let us know what you think. We hope you’re as excited as we are about what’s next.

All the best,

Adam & Joe

p.s. - I want to give a big public shoutout to @jmagner (Joe).  He’s the one who builds this site and makes it come to life based on all of your feedback.  If you ever get a chance, give him a holler …there is no Tacswap without him.

Release Highlights v3.0

Please make sure you take a minute to add our new progressive web app to your home screen on your mobile device. This will improve your user experience and will be important to enable future features such as notifications.

FEED PAGE

New Icon Bar

Updated icon bar at the top of the screen for Listings, Messaging, and Posts.

Access the feed at any time by clicking the white Tacswap logo in the top left hand corner 

Search Overhaul

Now search on username, description, geo, by clicking the magnifying glass in the search bar to narrow your search to the desired category. Search results are based on a ranking system and will present best match first in the results. Search also applies only to posts in the Active Feed so…please move your Sold posts to your Archive! 

Caught Up Notice - if you’ve ever wondered where you left off in the feed from your last visit there is now a Yellow card that will notify you when you are caught up.

TabbED PAGES

Listings

This page will now allow you to navigate through multiple tabs for My Listings, Bookmarked and Archived.

- My Listings is where you can view and manage all of your active listings including bumping the post back to the top of the feed.

- Bookmarked listings are other users listings you would like to follow.

- Archived listings are your non-active or historical listings. Once an item is sold or no longer for sale it should be moved to this folder.

Messaging

The Messaging icon will now allow you to navigate through multiple tabs for Received, Outbound and Archived messages.

- Received  Messages are messages being received based on your listings.

- Outbound Messages are messages you have initiated to other users.

- Archived is for storing old conversations.

Account

The Registration, Verification, & Purchase Credits processes have all been overhauled for much improved experience.

User Profile Page

User Profiles pages are here! Click on the username at the top of the post and you will be directed to a new User Profile page.

This page is currently public and is meant to provide you a quick verification of a user. Here is what you need to know about this new page:

Badges

The following are a list of badges we are launching with and parameters to earn each:

Verified - user has been verified thru existing verification process. Verify to post items for sale, message other users, and make comments.

Verify here: https://www.tacswap.com/billing

Expert - user has made over 100 posts.

Supporter - over $25 in credits purchased. Use credits to bump posts early and use other premium features that are coming soon.

Comms - user has over 100 comments posted and/or feedback given.

User Profile Page tabs

Active - All current active posts of the user.

Archive - A history of a users previous posts. This should help validate the users past sales and use of the platform. See the “Other Changes” below for a couple of other notes on archiving listings.

Feedback - pick positive, neutral or negative and leave feedback. Best practices are to reference the item purchased and comment on price, comms, and shipping. We ask that this is used and not abused for honest user feedback. We will expand on this feature as we monitor how this is used by the community.

Feedback system includes positive, neutral, or negative experience along with text feedback.

IMPORTANT NOTES - PLEASE READ

Existing feedback and narrative posts: Moving forward we are expecting that the post feed will be for WTS/WTB/WTT ads ONLY. We are now providing functionality for feedback and user profiles. Please do NOT create or bump feedback posts or use the WTB function for any other narrative (i.e. drama).

Advertising in posts: Please refrain from advertising your business websites or “Gear For Sale” accounts on other platforms like Instagram. We are NOT an advertising site and we’ve spent a ton of time/money building this site for our community. We will be working on some things for merchants in the future including advertising opportunities.

Multiple posts of same item: Please do not post the same item multiple times. If you want to bring your post to the top of the feed please use the “bump” feature. Each post cost Tacswap $$$ and we are doing our best to not have to charge to post items. Please use the site as intended and keep it fair for everyone in the community.

If a user doesn’t want to use the site as intended we reserve the right to delete the post and, if necessary, suspend accounts.

Other Changes:

Listings - there are 2 new options under My Listings:

1. Archive Listing (Sold) - use this button when your item has sold. This will then move the post to Archive in your User Profile Page.

2. Permanently Delete - use this button if you want to remove the post and not show this listing under the Archive tab.

What’s Next

1. Greatly improved search and filter options

2. Improved page layouts for My Listings and Messaging pages

3. Multiple Images

.

Updated User Experience

Another week and another update to Tacswap.  Since our last update on June 3rd we’ve been able to greatly reduce scam accounts.  Overall we’ve seen >90% reduction site wide of scam posts, comments and new accounts.  Please continue to use caution and go through best practices with sellers while we roll out some additional scam reduction features in the near future (more on that in a minute). 

What’s New

Progressive Web App – this is what Joe has been working on for months now and is giving us the ability to really move the application forward with new features.  Here’s a few things you will notice immediately:

-       Goodbye “Load More” button- you will now have “infinite scroll”.   You may notice some delay as items are loaded if you are scrolling fast but overall this is a greatly improved feature.

-       New Icons – we have removed the message and comment text and replaced them with icons.  These should be straightforward but go ahead and click around.

-       In Feed Comments – reducing the need to move to new pages we’ve added the ability to pop-up comments. 

-       Image Ratios – we’re now displaying images at the same ratio you upload them at.  This should give buyers a better view in their feed of items.

-       Item Description – we’ve limited the item description on the feed for a better scrolling experience.

-       Scroll position – one of my pet peeves was a user would lose their position in the feed if you went to leave a message or comment.  In most cases you should return to your last position in the feed by using browser gestures and/or the browsers back button.

What’s Next

We know the biggest question is going to be why didn't Tacswap add a user feedback system so let’s get this addressed:

 We have a User profile page currently in design and it is the absolute next item to be released.  This is not a full-blown user feedback scoring system but will leverage users’ verification date, # of posts, # of comments, and other verifiable data that a seller would want to share with a potential buyer. 

 Why not a full-blown user feedback system – It’s expensive to design, it takes a long time to build, it’s very intrusive to our user experience, etc, etc.  Doesn’t mean we won’t introduce one sometime in the future but we think there are ways we can address some concerns through other features that can be done more quickly. 

 Our normal reminder… there are only 2 guys running Tacswap and only 1 of those guys can sling code.  We are doing everything we can to get some much needed improvements added to the site.  We hope you’ve seen some great improvements over the last few months and hope you’ll stick around for some even better stuff coming up. 

Account verification required

The top priority of TacSwap is to create a safe marketplace to buy, sell and trade tactical gear. As we move toward this goal, we’ve taken the step of enforcing account verification in order to post a listing, comment on a post, or directly message a user.

Requiring our users to become Verified gives us another layer of information verification that we can not achieve through traditional accounts alone. We expect this will help to curb the amount of bad actors operating on our marketplace.

We understand that this could negatively impact the number of items being posted, however we expect the quality of the listings will continue to improve, as will site security.  In addition, we are working on new features to improve the user experience and reduce fraudulent activity.     

If you have any questions , place contact us directly at support@tacswap.com