Am wondering why it is so difficult to find providers at the spur of the moment on TER. One has to literally go through several pages of ads to figure out which provider is available at what location for that day.

I'm sure there's got be some simpler interface that can show  a list of providers for a given day/location.

Some providers who place visiting ads much in advance might not be getting the whole benefit of their ad it seems.

So, if you want to find who is available today at a location - DC - one has to scroll through multiple pages as dates are all over the place. Is there not a better way?

Provider ads could become so much more effective than what they are today.

-- Modified on 9/7/2017 6:54:24 PM

This suggestion comes up fairly often. I think it's a good idea and so does the guy who proposes it every few months.  He's pretty regular about that, Joe.
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I'm not sure if it is best done via the boards. It would require a lot of programming to sort thru the date of a posted ad and the actual text with the visiting dates.
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How about if TER added a calendar (using some free, open source calendar program)? Start with the major, most active cities plus an "Other Cities" calendar.  At first, Providers would have to manually enter their own touring schedules. And that means access controls to allow entering name and dates, and changing or deleting the info, too. Details to be worked out. ... Give it a chance to get some reasonable feedback from clients ("easy to search") and Providers ("doubled my business").  
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The calendar "boxes" or "lines" might get pretty crowded in some places.  Many an agency calendar can have 2-4 Names in one day's box. Click the hot linked name to get to her agency profile page. A TER calendar "box" might have 100+ names in some cities, if the ladies started using it.
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I do not think an "Available Now" button on a Profile is helpful. A client has to go to that Profile to see the "Available Now" flag.  What if Providers had an "Available Now" or "Available Today" button via their Profiles? TER software would periodically scan and aggregate all of the "Available Today"s into a list someplace. .... But that loses city / location info.
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P411 is not strictly a competitor of TER, but I think that P411 has an "Available Now" feature.  TER should definitely try to come up with something to provide such "Available Today" info.
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EDIT: And use a more descriptive subject line so people will know what you're posting about and be able to find the thread more easily. "Availability Calendar for each Region" or something like that.

-- Modified on 9/8/2017 6:22:28 AM

Yup, regular joe, that's me  

I'd created this post for General Discussion as I wasn't giving any suggestion per se, just venting my frustration at TER Admin for having the Ad feature that really really doesn't work. Hence the original title. And TER admin moved the post to this board.

If TER admin had to look for last minute appointments, they'd understand how painful the process is and if providers start to understand then that would impact ads as well.

How many clients look at an ad announcing visit a few weeks later and put it on their calendar? I suspect a large majority look at ads when they're ready to 'go'.  

Funny thing is TER admin seems to be silent on this issue. The least they can do is offer some feedback - if they like or if they don't like, so we can have a discussion. But radio silence seems like a NCNS to me

I just posted about this on a NYC board. It's a great idea

Implementation would be easy. On the ad
Forum, just add two extra fields (from date and to date)

This could be automatically displayed in the subject, but more importantly, you could then make a date field a search parameter

It's not just for "today only". In my case I'm curious who would be around on Thursday. Some
Providers post 1 day in advance, others months,
So I would have to search months worth of posts to see it all.

Ideally these two simple fields and a date field in the search covers it all.

Clients posted a daily who's available today, available during the week, or available for the weekend in regional boards? Then the providers can reply.
That would make this way more seamless.
It is hard on our end with the ad boards, especially for those of us who travel. Instead of replying to iso, unless they are looking for something in particular, we can just have a master thread.