[New] EMC Market Buy/Sell Portal - Suggestions/Bug Reports

I'm not sure how to do enchanted books. Should I just have listings for some of the most common enchanted books? I can't think of any decent way to handle books with multiple enchantments and I think this is how most enchanting shops work anyways?

New Features

• Added all EMC-exclusive promotional items, and nether stars.
• Added enchanted books for every enchantment. There are now 714 unique items you can buy/sell.
• Added average prices to the display.

Tweaks

• Added icons for iron and diamond hoes, as well as enchanted books.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where the verification code could have symbols that weren't accepted by the verification system.
• Fixed a bug where item names containing apostrophes would break the search output.

Could you add unit price to each row, e.g.

Item | Qty | Price | U.Price | ...
Diamond | 10 | 755 | 75.5 | ...
...

Done. I had to make the page wider though. I don't know why I didn't think of doing that earlier.

As I was noticing that items which get sold out are not reappearing (simply due to the low volume of edits which actually occur in practice, and the relatively small impact that our ~10 users who actually contribute their rupee history), and relevant useful shops disappearing effectively forever, even when they may have restocked since, I've now made a fairly fundamental change to the database.

Listings track the number of times they have been 'sold out' and each time, they disappear for progressively longer. What this means is that you will at the moment have a bunch of extra sold-out entries until things sort out. Please mark them as 'Out' or 'Full' if you come across them. If the shop does not exist at all, use the 'Gone' link. In a few days or maybe a week, these listings should sort themselves out and appear significantly less often.

This is amazing. Why the hell are you not on the dev team, working on the API. Your work is incredible.

I'd certainly be willing to help with an API but haven't been invited.

Lots of new changes. My main focus has been making the bulk adder as fast and efficient and smooth as possible, because there are still a LOT of shops which aren't listed and as of yet, most people haven't even added their own shops entirely, let alone helped to populate others.

New Features

• Added categories! Now you can compare the prices on multiple comparable items such as different types of logs, wool, stained glass, clay, etc... This makes finding things like wood incredibly easy. There are currently several categories such as Wood, Wool, Stairs, Wood Stairs, Slabs, Wood Slabs, Planks, Logs, Heads, Eggs, Stained Glass, and Stained Clay.
• Along with the above change, straightforward crafting can also be accounted for. For example, searching for diamonds also compares prices on any diamond blocks (and vice versa). It works with one way transformations as well, so searching 'Stone' will list places to sell 'Stone Bricks' and searching 'Stone Bricks' will list places to buy 'Stone', but not vice versa. (You cannot turn stone brick into stone in any way.) All prices are adjusted into units of the base item for easy comparison. These additional items are shown by default but can be turned off as well if you would prefer.
• Added a 'sold out' feature which is separate from removing listings. Items which are marked 'sold out' disappear for a period of time. The more they are sold out, the longer they disappear for. This means that items which have been sold out in the past can eventually reappear without anything having to be modified. (They could have been restocked in the meantime.) I felt it was important to distinguish between shops that were sold out and shops that didn't even exist. Unfortunately, as I can't know why shops were removed in the past, any items previously removed will have to be removed again (which should not take too long).
• Added new features to allow you to make bulk changes to items in your account. For example, some listings will appear on the wrong residence, and you can move them. You can also bulk relist or bulk delete items using checkboxes. Your account also displays items which are sold out or removed by other users so you can adjust stock or fix them.
• Entirely added many shops/malls large and small including 406, 411, 707, 2000, 3120, 3851, 4266, 4335, 6697, 13131. The fastest way to add a shop is to take screenshots of all the chests and then scroll through them as you use the bulk adder. This process of adding all the shops served to expand the database while letting me test all the new features and improve the process substantially. There are now over 5,000 listings!
• Fairly large changes to the way the bulk adder works to make it a lot faster. Notable changes include:
  • It saves the items as you go! I accidentally hit a link when entering items for one shop, lost about half an hour of work, and wanted to save anyone else the frustration. As well as not losing any data, it also avoids having to wait while the submission for multiple items occurs (which can get unreasonably long with hundreds of items).
  • To save a massive amount of time for shops that sell all items in a category (or nearly all of them), you can search up the category and it will add all the items to the bulk adder. For example, you can add all types of wool at once or all types of wood. Then you just paste in prices.
  • If the item you choose is already listed at your shop, the listings appear automatically so you can edit them and don't end up wasting time adding listings that you already added.
  • You can hit escape to clear the listings if the display gets too cluttered.
  • Added buttons at the bottom to save all changes and clear all items.
• Upgraded the search bar to allow keyboard input. I know Manic and others mentioned how they used the keyboard to do things and I myself also use it a whole lot as well. You can now scroll through items with the arrow keys and use the enter key to select one. Escape will close the search bar. This change improves every search bar on the site as the code is shared.
• Added a directory of shops and a page for each shop. In the future, I plan to allow some customization to each shop page.
• Added settings to searches. Right now there is only a server and a comparable setting. This means you can choose to only display items from your server.
• Added some enchanted tools and birch slabs.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a long-standing bug where you could type two characters in the search box really fast and if the results of the first character arrived after the results of both, it would end up displaying the results of just the first character.
• Fixed so items with quotes can be added to shops via the Bulk Adder.
• Fixed images not loading on baked potato, chiseled red sandstone, light gray stained glass, light gray stained clay, and possible a few others.
• Removed a second entry 'Wither Skull' versus 'Wither Head'.

Tweaks

• Before, if you typed something and didn't click or select an option, it wouldn't work to search. Now, it simply selected the top item. (As that's usually the one you want.)
• Searching now searches for items matching both the name and shop name, which means you get slightly better luck finding certain items (like 'Light Gray Wool' which is called 'Silver Wool' in the shop system or 'Lapis Lazuli' which is also 'Blue Dye').
• Moved the search bar to the bottom of the bulk add page. It's much more convenient there.
• Minor changes to the names of several items such as light gray items, individual bricks, wood pressure plates, wither skulls.
• Reduced default quantities on hundreds of items.
• Added an image for individual bricks.

Back End

• Entirely new logging system (to track edits), to reflect the additional parameters added by selling out and fix some inefficiencies in the old system.
• Added caching for search suggestions. This should make them appear faster as you type, although it now means I need to clear the cache anytime I add new items.
• Created a tool to clear the cache.
• Cleaned up backend files.

Thanks so much for everyone for the support and feedback! It would be great if you can help me get more shops added to the database. Here are the steps:

1. Go to %appdata%/screenshots. Create a subfolder and move any loose pictures into it.
2. Open Minecraft and find your favourite shop which is not fully listed.
3. Press F1 to hide the menu. Then press F2 in front of each chest shop at the residence. If you happen to come across any exchanges, you can see which chest lets you sell to it and make a guess based on that. (You can attempt a sale without having any of that item in your hand and it will tell you if the chest is full.) For the best result, get close to the shop so you can read the writing well. You can take pictures of more than one chest shop at a time to save time later.
4. Close Minecraft, and open the website. Register an account (if you haven't already).
5. Go to the 'Bulk Adder' from the menu at the bottom of the page.
6. Open a image viewer in another window and navigate to the %appdata%/screenshot directory.
7. For each image, search it up and add the pricing. Once you have completed the image and saved the information, you can delete the saved screenshot to clear up disk space.
8. Let me know any feedback you have on the system! Even something small.

Thanks again everyone!

Wow, incredible!

I searched for iron ingot and 4 of the buy ones are iron block, and none of the sell were iron ingot - they were water bucket, anvil, rail and bucket!

Yes. Those items are all directly comparable to iron ingots.

For example, 1 iron block can be crafted directly into 9 iron ingots.

If you have iron ingots, you can craft 3 into a bucket, 31 into an anvil, or 6 into 16 rails. Aside from sticks and a water source, there are no other items needed. All of these pay more than selling the iron directly as ingots.

All the items are converted into a base unit price of iron ingots. So you know how much you pay/get per iron ingot.

The feedback I'm getting is that this is unexpected, so unless I hear from a couple others who really appreciate the feature I'm planning to disable it by default. Either way, it's a setting you can change using the 'Show Comparable' checkbox at the top.

i think disabled by default please.

It's already been done.

This is awesome, awesome stuff. Thank you so much for all your work. A suggestion: How about some analytics for shop owners? For instance, I'd like to see on my particular server what the most available items are -- and the most rare, sorted that way. That way when I'm planning out my shop, I don't go and sell smooth stone and it's the #1 most popular item on the server, so I won't get many sales, or can't charge spit. If I knew that, say, brown wool was pretty rare, I could specialize in it. Or I could try for a monopoly on X or Y based on price/quantity.

Being able to see some spreads of item availability across the server would be super-cool. Thanks again!

And also, perhaps, sales data per server? So we can see the biggest sellers both in quantity and total r?

There isn't enough data available to produce that. If a certain number of shops list an item, it doesn't mean it's available. In fact, more than half of all chest shops are sold out. Even if you could tell how many shops sell an item, it still wouldn't let you know how much they had available. One shop could adequately meet the needs for the whole server, or several shops could fail horribly at it.

The best way to find out what items to sell is to listen to the chat and see what people ask for. ie 'who sells ____'. You can also look at the search volume. http://www.azoundria.com/emc/market/volume.php. Or just sell items you yourself would buy. That way, you know they are desired and you can also use them if they aren't sold.

Oh, I see, you can tell if a shop has an item, but not if it has stock, and therein lies the difference. Or rather, had an item at some point in the past, and may or may not now.

I'm getting a 403 - Forbidden every time I try to load the site now...is that just me or is that Hostgator in general?

Yep it's down, and I've done some optimizations and just waiting over 24 hours for a response from their end.

The reason it's down is because of the script which is involved with parsing the rupee history, which uses a lot of CPU.

This is really a great tool! I am very new to EMC, but even after 2 days I'm sick of how the shopping works. This solves that problem. Thanks!

What was your problem with the shopping?

It was difficult to find shops at first till I went hunting through the forums, and even more difficult to find a specific item. Price comparing meant lots of note taking I love to build with jungle wood. Of course after hunting through the waste, I find every tree/sapling except jungle. I go looking through the shops I've found, and of course they're out of stock. Ugh.

That tool on the forum thread was great. Granted, I still don't have a jungle sapling because no one on smp8 seems to have one at the moment, but I found a really cool reasonable priced shop at 17177 through the tool. Huzzah! At least I know a good place to go if I ever want to buy something now