Raggart

  • Newbie
  • Posts: 7
  • Trades: 4
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #705, on April 20th, 2019, 06:54 PM »
I think Lestrade's is years ahead of Barter. Sure, there might be more (active?) users on BVG but the look and feel of the site makes me think of the early 2000s and that's not a time it was fun to work with web design & programming. So all in all I think LT's is fantastic. It's just that different sites have different uses. Ideally we would have one universal metric to trade games and we could all converge on one platform; but that's never going to happen.

Keep up the great work!

[Lestrades.com] Nao 尚

  • I'm Share-Locked
  • Administrator
  • Posts: 1,396
  • Trades: 222
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #706, on April 21st, 2019, 06:08 PM »
I just finished updating thousands of entries with their proper application type, added some parents or children, etc.
Most of the work was automated, but I still double-checked everything.
It was brutal.
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #707, on April 27th, 2019, 06:10 PM »
NEW: Where a game's rating is given, LT's will now show its 'potential' rating if there aren't enough votes to give it an official rating. These potential ratings will be shown in gray, allowing you to dismiss them if you'd rather rely on Steam's official ratings.
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #708, on April 27th, 2019, 07:08 PM »
FIX: Official Steam ratings were no longer updating. I have no idea when it started, but probably at least months ago... This is now fixed (well, "till next time it breaks", as always..?).

NEW: In tag pages, sorting by rating and popularity will now take potential ratings into account (i.e. for games with less than X reviews).

Please note: I'll probably need to update all those official ratings... At some point... It'll have to wait.
Posted: April 27th, 2019, 07:01 PM

Edit: I'll have the database update itself; just at a slower rate than before.
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #709, on April 28th, 2019, 10:57 PM »
NEW: Game pages now have descriptions! Yay!
This is an undergoing task, as I'm pulling them from Steam. I currently have no plans to update descriptions on a regular basis, I'll probably redo it once in a blue moon, because sometimes descriptions get updated. It's not a big deal for me, as I also like the idea of having a website that stores older versions of a description, lol.

Also fixed other things in the database. Gosh, so complicated...

Akylen

  • Full Member
  • Posts: 218
  • Trades: 61

[Lestrades.com] Nao 尚

  • I'm Share-Locked
  • Administrator
  • Posts: 1,396
  • Trades: 222
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #711, on May 2nd, 2019, 12:43 AM »
I don't know, I like the current layout and don't know how I could improve it without breaking the rest. The main issue is that the tags & other game details vastly differ between games, so some will only have a couple fields, others will have plenty of fields. If I put the description next to them, it'll break many pages. If I put it before the trade buttons, it might break other things.
I don't know... Opinions?
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #712, on May 8th, 2019, 12:38 AM »
NEW: Slightly better support for games from PSN, Groupees and Epic Games Store. They get their own (ugly) Epic Games and PSN icons in 'related' entries or game pages, also you can specify "+epic" or "-epic" to search for Epic games or search without them, same with "-groupees" and "-psn". There aren't a lot of Epic games right now, but that'll do. There are over 2,000 Groupees items though (mostly things like music albums that aren't actually used at Lestrade's but still inherited from the BVG game DB), so it can be helpful to filter those out when searching.

PS: I'm very tempted to mark all Groupees entries as 'junk', lol... But I guess some people might really be into trading Groupees items through the Groupees website.
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #713, on May 8th, 2019, 12:40 AM »
NEW: Search entries now include snippets from the game description if there is one. If the search term was found in the description, that part from the description will be shown instead of the beginning of the description (Google style).

I know, it looks a bit crowded now, and the colors aren't exactly great (especially since I'm now showing ratios in their usual rarity color codes instead of the default maroon I used to have), but it'll have to do for now. I still need to work on the search engine anyway.

Also, sorting is a bit better now -- games where the search term is used in the title will be shown first. Previously, the search engine would show the games with the shortest name first, even if the search term was only found in their description. Gosh, I wasted an hour just to fix that bug...

Akylen

  • Full Member
  • Posts: 218
  • Trades: 61

[Lestrades.com] Nao 尚

  • I'm Share-Locked
  • Administrator
  • Posts: 1,396
  • Trades: 222
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #715, on May 8th, 2019, 11:39 PM »
Well, technically they're supported, it's just that the search engine usually doesn't bother allowing for +/- manipulations of them. (I don't even have to properly support them to add support for that manipulation; it's just that I don't really think about it...)
Feel free to ask for anything you'd need, though.
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #716, on May 11th, 2019, 11:51 AM »
NEW: I've done a ton of maintenance work on Lestrade's this week while I was a bit sick. (Or did that make me sick..?), and I don't want to get into all the details I changed, but I'll try to remember them and document them.

A sample page: https://lestrades.com/game/65/ now shows related items in a cleaner way. Parents, children and siblings are separated clearly now, packages are also sorted differently (see how the 'packaged child' ends up at the end of the list), and delisted items are also shown last (but before packages are handled). This should make it easier to find your way through games like Civ V or Train Sim or Paradox stuff that have a lot of DLCs and children in general.

NEW: This is more a Wedge feature than Lestrade's (and I'm planning to backport it), but when you're clicking the '...' between page numbers on paginated areas, the site will now show you the 25 previous and next entries, instead of only the 50 next entries. Which is very useful if you're trying to get from page 921 of the game database to page 905, for instance.

I'm also, for the record (nothing visible here), working on a history of changes in the game database, but it's far from perfect for now. I've been recording changes for years now but I never bothered to show them, or record a date for them, which makes it a bit hard to determine when a change occurred. I'm now recording the date, but I'll also need to record any (important) automated changes. Which is a bit annoying because right now there's so much that I'm recording for my personal logs and then deleting as soon as I finish checking everything's doing well. (I need to check automated changes so that I can submit fixes to the BVG database, which itself is automatically synced from the Steam API, SteamKit2, Steam-Tracker, stuff like that.)
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #717, on May 11th, 2019, 12:00 PM »
NEW: Oh yes, I forgot... Offer pages now show country flags next to trader names, so you can safely comment in the trader's language if you'd like. It was prompted by the fact that for the n-th time I received an offer from a French user, and did most of the conversation in English with them, only to realize late in the process that we were both French. Always an awkard moment, although it's fine to default to English when you're not aware of it, of course!
This is just a tentative feature; feel free to ask for improvements.
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #718, on May 13th, 2019, 12:29 AM »
NEW: If a Steam package was removed from Steam, it's likely you can't see its banner in bundles and offer pages. Up until now, it would attempt to show an alternative version of the banner (which likely also didn't exist), and then would fall back to a generic banner. From now on, it'll instead attempt to show the banner of the oldest game in the package, which is more likely to exist, and to be the most important game in the package. If the package only contains DLCs, it'll fall back to the generic banner instead.

Note: this is only for bundles and offers. Not that I can't do the rest... But I can't bother to write the same code everywhere. I'll need to see if I can write a more generic function to show banners.
Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
« Reply #719, on May 15th, 2019, 12:01 AM »
NEW: Moved 'add to..'/'remove from..' buttons below game banners, on the left of game tags, as opposed to below all of those. This is an attempt to redesign the system as per multiple suggestions over the past, I'm not too convinced but you tell me. One of the issues (I need to work on the HTML order) is that in responsive mode (mobile), the buttons will be placed too high.

NEW: Updated all game prices to their current ones (previously, they were all 'stuck' to their 2017 prices if they were online before that), also added new entries, 'lowest price seen' (it is definitely NOT as accurate as ITAD especially since it only has the lowest Steam price in the last couple of years, but it's a fine way to estimate a game's value on the official market in case it's put on sale frequently[1]), and 'highest price seen', which is interesting for instance in cases where a game was previously commercial, but recently went free-to-play. Again, this isn't extremely accurate, so if you find any errors, you can report them anywhere you like. Or just ignore them.
These additional details are only show on game pages. Other pages (e.g. game lists) will only show the current usual price & the current price if it's on sale.
 1. Note, this is based on information I've been gathering for the last couple of years without using it. Sometimes, you just find some code and think, 'hey, what's this doing here..?' -- whole lot of fun. I could scrape lowest price dta from ITAD, but I'm not in a hurry to do it -- ITAD is also known for some weird errors. Also, I'm not positive that if the lowest price occurred in 2014, it's of any consequence on its trade value. In fact, I'm convinced it's not.