Topic: Previewing the next "2.0" release of deckbox
What it is
The "2.0" release of deckbox is not 100% complete, but we're getting there . To show you what is coming, and to allow people to provide feedback on the changes before they go live, we have set up a testing deployment of deckbox, at:
http://alpha.deckbox.org (the password is let me see)
It's not yet a release candidate, so it's still a bit slow and probably a bit buggy, as we're working on polishing the remaining issues.
The database is copied from deckbox.org on Monday, 26th of November. You can sign in with your user, and all data should be there as it was on monday.
Important: this is a copy of the official data. Any change you make on alpha.deckbox.org will not be present on deckbox.org, and vice-versa.
No emails are sent from alpha.deckbox.org, so if you try out proposing trades or messaging other users they will not be notified of this.
Now let's see what's changing in this release.
MtG Collections
The biggest focus and challenge was to allow easier import and management of detailed cards in MtG collections. The old "Edit details" dialog was not cutting it.
You will find in the Add Cards dialog that we have merged the simple card input with the advanced one, bringing - we hope - the best of both worlds.
We now have "defaults" selectors for edition, condition and language, so you can set them once and have them applied to all cards you add from then on. Defaults can be set to empty if you do not want to have extra information about your cards. The defaults are present also in the add card list input.
A new input option is the CSV import. The CSV file format is conveniently the one we export, so exporting your collection works as a backup too, since you can import it again with one click, with all the card information, like editions, conditions, foil etc.
Some other related changes, in no particular order:
aside from foil, textless and promo, we now have a new flag: signed
card languages are now written in english
we have added 2 new card conditions, as described here: http://alpha.deckbox.org/help/card_conditions
as an effect of the collection changes, trades now show detailed cards, with edition and condition, if you have selected them in your inventory
Inventory has now the option to Mark all cards as tradeble
You can now sort and filter by the edition you set on cards, and by foil status
Cards in your inventory that are used in decks or are present in current ongoing trades are marked with an icon (a clickable icon )
Pricing
There has been much discussion about pricing in deckbox, and for good reason. The average price over all printings of a card was not accurate or useful enough. From now on, in all cases where you specify an edition for a card, we will show the price for that edition. (The card tooltip should also show the proper printing for that edition).
Also, in all cases where you do not specify an edition, the card price becomes its price in its last main set (i.e. not in Duel Decks, Commander packages etc). Estimated values for decks and collections will go down a bit because of this.
Trades
There are some changes to users' trade pages and individual trade pages to accomodate the new detailed cards collections. But we are not yet finished with the changes, the final version will be modeled by this post: http://deckbox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=26094#p26094
We have some bigger changes to trading rules and policies which deserve their own post in Announcements, and we will prepare that for next week.
Other features
Facebook login - You can now login with your facebook account if you connect it from your profile page, or just by using the Facebook button in the login dialog. Be advised though that you should have your deckbox email identical to the one you use on facebook for the login button to work. This does not work on alpha.deckbox.org yet, but it will once the release is live.
Terms and Conditions - We now have a first draft of more legalese-language Terms and Conditions 1 and Privacy Policy2. Second drafts coming next week with the trade changes mentioned above.
Infrastructure - last but not least, we have a very large number of infrastructure changes on all levels of the stack - database migrations, programming language version upgrades, web framework upgrades and structural changes. You guys don't see all that, but you have to take our word for it that all this makes it easier for us to deliver faster, stabler, nicer features in the future.
Whew, that was a big wall of text . As always, looking forward to your feedback, positive or negative, it really helps us build a better website. There's issues we already know about, but probably there are more issues that we don't yet know about, so if
something crashes, we'd love to know
Cheers,
Sebi