A lot of people have been wondering why we don't use the member collection data we have to flesh-out the appraisal system. Well, it's a great idea, but I've been dreading the work because there was a huge flaw in our data. See, back when I was a younger and happier Shmax (re: dumber), and was first designing the collection tracking system, I was determined to make the "Add to my collection" button be strictly one-click. To that end, I tried to come up with reasonable default values for everything. I thought I was being very clever by defaulting the "Date bought" field to the date that the toy was released on. I figured that most people probably buy a toy roughly when it hits the shelves, and that there would be no problem.
The trouble, of course, is that when we're computing appraisal data, we need to be sure that the "date bought" information is at least reasonably trustworthy. See the problem, yet? Well, let's say you're an uber-collector, and you just bought a sealed g1 "Optimus Prime" for $3000. You go to add it to your collection. You click the "Add button", and the little shiny row appears. You enter the "price paid", but you don't pay any attention to the "date bought", because it's already filled-in with something, in this case "01/01/1985".
So if we were try to create a graph of data during that period, we'd see these crazy spikes of thousands of dollars mixed in with the $12-15 retail data points we would expect.
I decided to finally confront the problem, and I'm afraid a lot of you uber-collectors aren't going to like the solution I came up with much--I wiped out all "date bought" data for all collection records where the "date bought" exactly matched the release date, and was older than 6 months. Please don't hate me. Before you go running off for torches and pitchforks, be aware that I've made it easy for you to spot the changes, and to fix them. You've probably already noticed the blinking number at the top of the page; this is showing how many items in your collection now have a blanked "date bought" value. Click on the "View Alerts" option in the Membership menu, and you'll see a list of all the items that need your attention.
There are 3 ways to make one of these alerts go away:
- you can re-set the "date bought" to something (don't be afraid to use the "release date" shortcut, if that was indeed correct) using the calendar widget.
- if you really don't know when you bought the toy, or you just don't care but are annoyed by the alert, you can click the alert icon, then click "Dismiss Alert".
- You can do nothing and just wait until August 14th, 2011, when the alert will expire all by itself and fade away.
The good news is that our collection data set is now pure enough to start augmenting the appraisal system with your data. There's still some work to be done on that, but in short it means that as long you enter what you paid for each toy you buy, there will always be at least one data point for the appraisal, which means that the value should be as accurate as possible.
Sorry again for this, folks. If you want to blame somebody, blame Shmax of 3 years ago for not thinking ahead, and be glad that the appraisal system is about to go from interesting novelty to razor-sharp tool of inifinite awesomeness.
