Some forums put a post count minimum on access to the classified section. Not sure if the benefits of public access to the adds outweigh the risk of scammers creating fly by night accounts and scamming adds.
Sometimes that’s not a bad idea. It’s useful in preventing people from simply visiting the site daily to hit us Classified sections.
On the other hand, if someone needed to get up to 100 posts or 200 posts just to be able to access the Classified, it wouldn’t take long to post a lot of “I agree”, “x2”, “Yup”, “Very cool” posts to reach that number. I’ve seen that on other sites, and that’s not good either.
I’ve bought and sold in this Classified section. 100% of the time it was a good experience. Always use PayPal. It’s not 100% foolproof and perfect, but it’s as close as you’re gonna get.