Been thinking about this for the past few days, and even more so this morning in light of Nils’s recent encounter with ben-hart. Not sure how much I have to contribute beyond what’s been said already, but FWIW:
I’d like to be cognizant of the fact that there are people who visit the forum often but don’t post much. I am a lot less active myself these days for various reasons, and I belong to a few other forums where my post count is quite low, sometimes in the single digits. But when it comes to business, I deal honestly with other people and I get irritated personally when they don’t take me at my word.
That said, we’re touching upon larger questions in this thread that concern everyone who does business electronically: How do you know who you are talking to? How can you establish trust between two parties who do not have a precedent relationship? The answers are not trivial: Lots of professional mathematicians make their living by creating cryptographic techniques that (to take one example) banks use to ensure the safe transfer of money.
I’m not saying we need to take things to that level on our buy/sell/trade page. But I am saying that if you are not, in some tangible way, a known quantity to the people you are dealing with, you cannot reasonably expect them to trust you. It’s human nature, and the less active members of a community need to accept this as a fact of life.
Perhaps post counts alone are not the best benchmark, because it would be all too easy for a scammer to make a few dozen innocuous posts of a few words apiece before striking. But we do have an easy way to check what members have said and done in the past via their profile page. So whether we make a hard and fast rule concerning post numbers (or anything else), I do not find it unreasonable for buyers to expect more than a seller’s word that they and their gear are legit.
So my humble $0.02: If you one day might offer your property on a forum and expect success when you do, get involved and be involved actively as much as you can. Potential buyers can and will talk about you, and you want them to have reasons to say good things.