I dont get on with GS admin nor many of the their “know it all but done nothing” posters, so I’ll get that out of the way, 
But this latest money grab is so pissweak $20 for lifetime access… 
Their intrusive advertising is quite silly to… 
Remove this ad forever by registering!
yeah and then get even more advertising 
thank our lucky stars we still have this little haven 
not sure how/where you see that. I just visited their classifieds (selling a Boomstar 3003 there) and didn’t see any note about a fee.
Maybe if you have less than 200 posts on their site you have to pay???
I know they have post limits before you’re allowed to put something up for sale, so who knows?
Popular topic I got here…lol
Banned for chastising (well belittling) an idiot over there.
Like you, I’ve been around the block a few times with regards to gear and other music related activities, and dont suffer fools lightly.
Although there are some very knowledgeable and intelligent members over there, for the most part, its very low level and quite petty and hostile “discussion”. I wont bother to sign up again.
We dont get the diversity here, but generally its a much much more thoughtful group.
I find their more recent attempts at money grabs lamely lame.
Maybe some of the big-time posters asked for it (like 5,000-10,000+ posts). Some people are posting all the time and for them, maybe the $20 makes sense.
Also I can see this appealing to some of the High End forum members.
This forum is “free” but of course it is we the Elektron customers who are paying for it 
Here is the part about who pays for Classifieds on GS. Search for the word “green”.
Yeah, so it’s people who are still fairly new (less than 6 months) who wanted access to the classifieds.
Here’s my take on GS classifieds -
If you post something in the classifieds, it drops off the first page in a matter of an hour or two. By the end of the day, it could be multiple pages back. This effectively means that anyone just browsing the classifieds is likely to miss your ad unless they’re doing a targeted search for a particular item. You can bump up your post every 24 hours, but that gets tedious when you get little to no responses.
In the old days, you used to be allowed to post a link in the appropriate forum (i.e. in the Electronic Music forum you could post a link to a synth you were selling). This was better in that the appropriate thread could remain alive and fairly visible for a longer period of time. Now they prohibit that avenue and so generally speaking, posting most things in the GS classifieds is really just a creative writing exercise for the benefit of the 12 to 20 views you get in the first 1/2 day.
^^ Countersign that. OldGearGuy speaketh words of wisdom as always.
One of the reasons for this newer development is to curb the SCAMMERS selling items and NOT SENDING ITEMS or outright ripping people off. Best to use ebay, really.
You have to be a special kind of stupid to get banned from gearslutz…it’s usually the incredibly arrogant and snippy that may get banned but it takes outrageous acts of ignorance to get banned there.
This thread seems more like a case of ‘sour grapes’. Clunky, I have read where you were yet to send an item to a forum member here yet going on a few years? Hmmmm…! Just checked and I do not see ANYWHERE on GS Classifieds that states anything Clunky has proposed…again, “Sour Grapes” is what I am smelling.