Tracking which decks contain cards, Trade enhancements, Joomla plugin

Hello,

A couple of weeks later than it should have been, we bring you a nice february update. (It's late because I managed to turn my laptop into a brick by spilling a cup of Earl Grey on it )

Trading improvements

First, as suggested by many of you, a user's feedback score does not take into account canceled and local trades anymore. This way, instead of saying "+5 out of 20 total trades" your feedback scores will now show a nicer looking "+5 out of 5 finished mail trades".

Secondly, the chat was really annoying because you would miss messages that others wrote to you, as we did not have any kind of notification system in place. We've now made the first step towards improving that, and when you have unread chat messages, there will be a little indicator next to the 'Trades' link in the menu:

In an upcoming version we'll also implement some customizable email notifications.

As suggested by Shoe in a feedback thread, the trade listing could use some more indicators of the trade's status. I heartily agreed, and added some nice icons to the listing. As with most things on the website, if the icons are a little cryptic, mousing over them will show you what each means.

Which decks a card is in

Another long standing feature request, mentioned by many of you, and for good reason, was the ability to track which decks use certain cards from an inventory.

If you visit your inventory, now there is a 4th column, representing how many cards of that type are used in your decks. The number itself is a link to a section of the cards' page which will list exactly which decks that you own contain that card.

It has been discussed in some feedback threads that many people have active decks and unfinished or archived decks, and this tracking should apply only to the decks one marks as active. This is also an idea I like quite a bit, and would like to implement for a future update. (maybe along with deck ratings and history )

Joomla plugin

As some people have Joomla websites and forums (via extensions such as Kuena), we have created a small plugin compatible with Joomla 1.5 onwards that enables you to show card links with tooltips on your website. For more information, please see the help page: http://deckbox.org/help/tooltips#joomla.

As always, feedback of all sorts is appreciated

Have fun!

Update 23.02.2012

Performance improvements

Since sunday, some people that have a lot of cards in their inventories / wishlists had performance problems when viewing these sets. (Pages loading very long or not at all). These issues have been fixed.

Another performance issue happens with displaying very large decks (300-600 cards). While trying to figure out a way to make these display faster, I have realized that I'm fixing the wrong problem .

People are actually using decks to store a large number of cards because there is no concept of a Custom set. So when you want to store a cube idea, or a list of cards from your favorite artist, or a list of loaned out cards, you have no way to do that except creating a deck for it. So making these decks display faster is not the solution, adding a Custom set is. These could be paginated, sortable and filterable, and would be much better at storing and tracking these types of collections. Expect this feature soon.

Trading opportunities

Profile listings has also been slow for people with large tradelists and wishlists because of the dreaded trading opportunities widget. Effectiveness and options for this widget have been discussed a few months back in this thread: http://deckbox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=1102.

The truth of the matter is that the widget is near useless for people with many cards in their wishlist in its current implementation. Such an important part of card collecting as finding trade partners deserves a more intelligent and complex report.

There is quite a bit more to discuss about this, as it touches on the topic of "tags" (such as marking cards in your wishlist as important or high-prio), and I intend to write a more detailed forum post about it in the Site Feedback section this weekend, also asking for your ideas and input.

Small but important

There's also a little feature in this update, when viewing another user's profile page, the card intersection listing now shows prices. (preypacer, sorry it took so long ).