1. Image upload restrictions... I've got pictures that you need but your website won't allow me to upload them. My suggestion, make it so you can't upload a picture that is smaller than one that is already present. If no picture is present, then accept anything. Specifically, the Argentina and Brazil TFs I have pics of MOC/MIB but they aren't large enough to get past the filter. They are x550 max for Argentina at least.
Interesting idea, but then the image restriction wouldn't be doing its job, which is to encourage people to submit large, clear, detailed pictures. I appreciate that you have existing photos, but if you took them for some other purposes chances are almost certain that they wouldn't make it past our guidelines screening, anyway. If you want to reshoot them at the larger size we'd love to have them!
2. It seems like all the European Beast Wars toys say United Kingdom release, where this is false.
Well, any toy can be linked to as many countries as you like. If you see a mistake, or know which countries to add to which toys, you're welcome to go in and do it yourself.
3. Regarding G1 products, you should add additional parts, such as cardboard insert, bubble insert or foam insert where applicable.
Now that had never occurred to me. To be honest I can't say the idea appeals much to me--we have enough trouble getting photos of the basic parts, and I don't even want to know about insert variants and different packing configurations. We'll consider this a vote for it, but you're the first to ever mention it.
4. Speaking of which, I selected a toy that I purchased looses but the current condition is MIB. This is because I bought the box for it later.
Well that's cheating, isn't it?
Technically, what you have are two instances of the toy. One is loose, and the other is just a box with no parts. That you choose to keep them together is fine, but I don't want to take the restrictions off of the widgetry to support this kind of hack. The restrictions are there to help ensure that meaningful data is entered by casual users--the data will be put into use soon to help supplement the appraisal system, so it's important to me that it be as strong as possible.
I am interested in the "view collection" page showing a MIB item with the loose image. I looked for Bombshell in your collection, and you have him down as loose. Got any more info for me?
5. Canada is not an option when adding a toy
If you mean it doesn't appear at the country level when using the toyline selector, that's true. Just pick "North America", and then you can choose Canada when filling in the "Release Info" widget near the bottom of the page. I know it's a bit confusing at the moment, but I'm still evaluating how best to handle the toyline category tree--I may wind up removing the country nodes from there entirely, and using a country filter to separate things. But for now things are pretty stable, so it's low priority.
6. A lot of toys have things in ( ) but no photographic or textual evidence to explain what they mean. For example, I search for Inferno and I find (version 2) but there is no explanation of what that means. I would presume your users don't want (or know how) to dig around the internets for hours to figure out what that means. Also searching for Insecticons comes up with different rubsign indents but there is not info or picture examples of these things. This is important for me since I have at least 10 of each of the basic ones.
Yes, that's bad, and Engledogg and I have been trying to bolster those with more descriptive titles where possible. Note that the database is now editable by anyone, so if you're interested and want to help you're welcome to do the research and contribute any changes you like. And if there are no pictures, well, it's because there are no pictures! If you have them and are ready to get busy with a camera, well, with the contest going on this is the time to do it!
7. Will we have the ability to add pre-TF toys to the collection? Such as Diaclone and Beetras, of which I have loose and MIB respectively.
Yes, absolutely. Not quite ready to go there yet (though you'll notice those lines are in the mold tree), but soon.
8. Purchase date goes back way too many years, when adding to collection, than TFs or even Pre-TFs were available. The default purchase date at times is 1940!
I picked 1940 sort of arbitrarily (the site will ultimately encompass other collectibles, and I wanted to be conservative), but it shouldn't be showing up as a default date when adding items to your collection.
Got a specific example where this happens?
9. Search results error. Searching for MM-13 brings no results
This is a tricky one. I recently "upgraded" my search system to use a built-in feature of MySQL called "full-text" searching. Unfortunately, it ignores words of 3 characters or less. There are ways to hack around this which I've done in other cases, but before I do the same for general searches I wanted to explore the possibility of moving to a virtual server (I've been given a trial month, but I haven't finished setting up the server, yet), which would let me go into the MySQL configuration and remove the 3 character limit. Please bear with me until then, and I apologize for the hassle.
10. Magazine is not an option for parts for Jetfire, LMK if this is something that is there and I am just missing it.
I've added "Magazine" as a node under the "Printed Material" category. Note that you don't have to wait for us to add the node you're looking for--just pick the one that's close enough, and it will be filled-in later by a mod when necessary. In this case you could have chosen "Printed Material". That said, is this magazine a part specific to Jetfire? We try not to get involved with all the pamphlets and brochures and other homogenous filler fluff that they stuff the boxes with.
11. Look into upgrading your hosting. Too many timeouts...
It's not always as simple as just upgrading your hosting. Most of the time (for this site, anyway) the trouble is a bottleneck in the db query queue. Rest assured that I don't take this stuff lightly--I've spent months tuning performance, optimizing queries, and writing tools to help find out where the main offenders are, and I'm nowhere near done, yet. The thing that makes finding the problem queries difficult is that I have to time them myself, meaning I cache the time just before the query fires, and again just after and take the difference. This isn't reliable, because an otherwise benign query can wind up stuck in the queue on the MySQL server, so the "time" I get back includes the waiting around time. This is something that moving to a virtual server WOULD help, as I could enable MySQL's query log and get reliable data. But I digress-the short answer is that I'm working on it.
I don't care about the contest as much as having a site with pictures on it.
If you don't care about the contest you're certainly welcome to waive any prizes you might be entitled to so that they can be distributed to the other participants. If you're really interested in seeing the site fleshed-out with photos, why not grab your camera and try a few shots? You may find you enjoy it!
Thanks for the feedback! I'm always working on the site and have some big features planned that I think you're going to like. Unfortunately, I'm just one guy so sometimes it can take a while for things to get going. But hang in there, and all will be groovy.
