Suggestions for future upgrades...

[Guest]

[LikORish-Spider]

I am new here, so I don't want to stir up any feathers. What is there now, is great. Very resourceful and informative. Almost like looking at a stock.

When I first used this guide (last nite) I was disapointed  to see only a few card sets. I use the NSU book (subscription), but looking something up online w/ pictures to boot, is awesome.

I guess what I'm saying, I was expecting to find every card set that has been made so far to date. I am just realizing that this is kind of new. I would luv to be able to go to this price guide and find a card from say, Terminator 3, Batman & Robin, 24, etc, etc.... 

Gr8 job for what's there now though! 

NSU's price list is incorrect for Prisioner of Azkaban. They list the Honey Dukes Candy ( and isn't it Honeydukes? NOT Honey Dukes?) card as the 25 case incentive. Everyone knows that it's the 10 case incentive.
The correct 25 case incentive is the Pear Tree Leaves card. I have told them about it months ago and I know tha Tom said he sent them an e-mail about it after I saw that he was a contribuitor to the NSU price list. Still nothing. I mean how long would it take someone to correct this. They are in the file all of the time adding new cards. DUH!!! MAbe they just accept mediocrity and don't strive for excellence. CRAP!! If they want to set themselves up as the best NS card source of information they should work at it, especially when readers bother to send them the help. CRAP again! "Stupid is as Stupid does."- Forrest Gump

[Roz]

... and they still call the Whomping Willow, the Whooping Willow despite me telling them otherwise about 50 times... ahh well.

We strive for top notch quality in everything we do in the price guide, and the contributors, programmers and even the fool who sets up the new sets can be proud of it .

You can call it a flaw if you like but we only make price guides for the cards we obsess about, but if you are volunteering to enter some past sets then PM me, the problem is of course that there are few or no auctions out there for them, so the data will not be verifiable

[Roz]

Also, the statue forum keeps track of all ENDED statue/replica auctions. They might use a program or spider-bot that does this automatically. You might want to look at it and perhaps contact him how he does it.

It's more than possible and Mark's more than capable but we need thousands of dollars for access to ebay's database in order to do it automatically AND it can be flawed, it can easily miss auctions (don't forget, humans list cards, not machines with a standardised description). He funds it with affiliate links to ebay and affiliate links to the manufacturer's site, advertising donations etc etc etc. We don't have that kind of money and can only just afford the bandwidth we use by funding it from our own pockets... unless you are volunteering to fund it  of course

However, his site is just a list of each ended auction whereas I really think that Mark's "click on this card to see a picture of it, the price trends, current and past prices and a link to each auction" is really much clearer and simpler to use... not to mention a LOT easier on the eye

[Jason]

I unless you are volunteering to fund it  of course

How much money are we talking about?

[Roz]

I haven't looked into this for a while, but this is as I remember it:

First eBay charge a $200 fee for checking our program and database to check it's appropriate useage (etc etc), then it would be around $500 a year for "membership" of the programme, and then $1.60 for each 1,000 times we access the ebay database, so probably (at current useage, although it might go up if we implemented the access into the program) that would be just another $40 or so per year I think.

So a start up cost of around $740, and thereafter just over $500 per year. (plus we have to persuade Mark to spend the time coding it... which he's usually pretty good about, but he's a busy guy )

Perhaps we are a victim of our own success - I think if we only wanted to check the database for a few items a day it would be much cheaper or even free but for the volume we'd use it would be classified as commercial.

Mark and I already spend enough on the site for hosting and bandwidth use, after a fair number of hiccups we splashed out on a dedicated server for the Shack, so we're already all out on this one.

[Jason]

Have you considered a gallery subscription service for people? The way the price guide is set out is very smart indeed, with your options to view thumbnails or sets by list and all the other options. I imagine there are several members who would pay a small monthly fee to have this sort of thing set up for them to upload and organize there images to. Nothing drastic just something like ttp://www.theyakshack.co.uk/username_of_subscriber  they could have there own webmail accounts or what ever and you would be getting some of the money back for the server. Just thought I would toss that out there for you to consider. I mean I could be totally wrong and you have no space left at all on this thing or you have no inclination to do anything of the sort lol never mind me I shall shut up now