People selling items in General

That is true. Anything that the devs put in place would be circumvented.
However, what if most of the community purposely punished those that did do it. Just not buying from them would be a severe enough punishment. Once people realize that they can't sell anything by posting in general, they'll start posting in Trade.

I'm just posting this as something that I'd like to do to help out the average player.
I know that the people that post in the forums are anything but average. However, I do expect a large amount of people to read this.

Recently I have gotten tired of constantly seeing people posting in general about selling items or buying items.
I do not like this, and I doubt anyone else likes this because it makes it difficult to keep up a conversation or PUG a group, if you are being flooded with people buying or selling items.

I do not know a solution to all the problems.
So, I'm just suggesting an idea that would force people to sell in trade chat if they want people to buy their items.
My idea is that if you see anyone posting in general chat do not buy from them.
If it is something you want, ask them to use trade chat and then you would buy their items.
For the people that block trade chat, I ask that you create a new chat pane that only shows trade. This way you would not worry about trade chat blocking general and people would be able to sell items to you, where they otherwise wouldn't.

I believe this will work if enough people stop buying from sellers in general chat. I also believe this will fail if no one helps. So I ask that you help me make our community, and through it our gameplay, better.

That is all.

This is indeed a problem and IMHO it is outright disrespectful. By using the trade channel, you are not missing any potential customers. It is on by default so the only people that cannot see it are the people who are not interested in buying or selling wares from it and have elected to use the provided tools and turn it off.

And you've not made use of Chat Tabs?

Why have all these fixes when you can fix it yourself.
I have tabs for all the channels. It works.

Actually, you would be missing customers.
Some people still buy things, even though their trade chat is off.
I have bought many things when I wasn't looking for them.
Forcing the sellers into trade chat, would only solve one problem.
We also need to keep trade chat on. This way the sellers still get all of the customers they would normally get, and general chat gets less congested.

We don't NEED to keep trade chat on. It gets turned off so that we don't have to see trade spam. The sellers need to respect that and not flood general chat with their trade spam. Trade chat is there for that reason.

Perhaps we are missing the point here? With the exception of people who want to trade mats for tier 27 modifications, a majority of the other people are trying to avoid the Bioware tax on the GTN (which can be severe on high ticket cartel items like the skill for example). If they removed it, (and why not...Does it serve any purpose to the economy), it would likely dramatically reduce the trade spam.