Lestrade's

Lestrade's Lounge => The Noble Talk => Topic started by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 9th, 2017, 12:46 PM

Title: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 9th, 2017, 12:46 PM
I realized I don't have a topic to announce casual changes to the site, so let's do this.

- Added yesterday: a quick improvement to the search engine. Previously, if you made a typo and searched for "monke island" it would return no results. Now it does. You can also ommit search words, or just type words you remember from the game's name. "letter grimm" will return a result.

- Added long ago, but someone asked me for the 'feature' and didn't realize it was already there: an easy way to go from Steam and Barter game pages to Lestrade's (from which you can also go directly to Steam, Barter and ITAD pages.)

http://store.steampowered.com/app/246760/ -> replace the steampowered (or store.steampowered) with lestrades
-> http://store.lestrades.com/app/246760/ (which is the equivalent to https://lestrades.com/game/2371/)

https://barter.vg/i/2371/ -> replace the barter.vg with lestrades.com
-> https://lestrades.com/i/2371/ (which is the equivalent to https://lestrades.com/game/2371/)

Note that currently, the Barter and LT game databases are interlinked, so they're essentially 99% the same. Any Steam app on Barter you can find on LT with the same game ID. This won't be the case forever, which is why there's a difference between /i/ and /game/.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 9th, 2017, 04:49 PM
- Added links to Barter profile, Steam profile, Steamrep and Steamtrades on user profiles. (Those who are registered to LT's, of course.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 15th, 2017, 12:03 AM
- New feature: list sorting. Just go to your Wishlist, Tradables or Library, and click the dropdown that should say "Sort by..." at the top of your list. You can sort by ratio (H:W, anything beyond 1:10 or 10:1 will be simplified to that boundary), ratings (number of reviews isn't taken into account yet), number of cards, and name. You can also reverse the sorting order.

That feature isn't particularly helpful for now, but it's a preview of the trading system after all. As you can see, sorting is immediate, unlike Barter's system that forces reloading the page. I hope you enjoy it.
PS: it's not perfect yet. It'll be improved later. Right now the sorting order isn't remembered (just reload the page to restore the original sorting order of "whenever I added this to that"), and sorting isn't perfect, since it relies on basic data filtering rather than more complex math.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 18th, 2017, 04:38 PM
Reminder: trade offer system is NOT available to the public yet.

- Lestrades.com offer system status: can create offer, choose number of items per side, edit offer while creating it, submit offer, view list of pending offers from me or from others, view offers invididually, accept or decline.
- Not implemented yet: choosing individual items when there's a "4 out of 5" situation (I forgot to add a flag to my database, ahah, I'll have to rethink that because this table will be huge.....), editing offer after it's sent, cancel offer, mark as completed, countering offer.

Every time I finish something I just run to the forums to say I'm close to release. Then I look at this list and I realize "gosh, this is all gonna take another couple of days..."
So much fun!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 19th, 2017, 12:32 AM
Well, I was busy with real life today, so it's not for today. :(
And tomorrow I might only have a couple hours free. Geez.
I'm so close to completion, though. I know I don't have to hurry up, as long as it doesn't take a year to implement that, but still I'm disappointed in myself for not being able to deliver sooner. Ah, if only I liked coffee... I could use a couple nights without sleep.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: joaoarena on March 19th, 2017, 01:51 AM
It is better to postpone offer system to make sure it is ok ::)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 19th, 2017, 10:25 AM
Oh, it won't be okay even after release. I'm used to it by now... It'll be okay for 90% of users but 10% will have problems, which I'll fix. It's a developer's life after all.
What I'm focusing right now is on making it work for one person (me), then when it's 100% working for me, I'll make it work for a select few beta testers, and when it works 100% for them I'll make it public, then after that I'll work on fixing it for everyone else.

With the caveat, as I explained before, that the current database is based off Barter IDs for users, rather than Lestrade's IDs, meaning there might be a moment (maybe a few minutes, maybe several minutes) when nothing works for anyone. But it's a necessary (painful) step for the site to take off on its own.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 19th, 2017, 06:44 PM
New feature: you can now sort your tradables & wishlist by recent/older order. This is the default right now, but I still had to implement it in case you wanted to come back to it.

PS: not available for libraries because the default order over there is playtime[1], and I'd have to do an extra query to sort them all by recent order-- plus, there really isn't a recent order for now, as games are depending on what order Steam is sending them in. Anyway...
 1. Which was done so that people with large libraries could check out their times without waiting too long for their Steam page to load.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Caviezel on March 19th, 2017, 08:03 PM
Try clicking on sort by rare first, then common first, then rare first again.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 19th, 2017, 08:15 PM
If you're referring to the fact that 0:x items are sorted randomly among themselves, it's just because they all have a ratio of zero... I can fix it by setting a fake Have value of 0.1, if you want. But then some 1:Y games will be better ranked if y>x*10... and a 0.01 multiple would get rounded to zero. That's why I didn't do it (yet).
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 20th, 2017, 05:58 PM
No comments on the above? I thought it was worthy of debate ;)

Progress of the day (not available to the public): can now properly do offers like '4 out of 5'. With check boxes or radio buttons, and a script that disables unselected items.
It sounds so ...easy. why did it take me three hours to implement. >_<,
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 20th, 2017, 10:04 PM
New addition: member profile pages now include links to their Wishlist, Tradables, Library and Blacklist. Also a direct link to matches with them. And a link to their offer page, although it's not visible for now. ;)
Note that mobile devices can also view library and blacklist links, unlike on Barter (where you had to manually add "l" and "b" to the URL.)

I'm sorry for the layout, it looks really terrible, especially on mobile. I've decided that bad layout is better than no feature, and it can always be fixed later of course.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 21st, 2017, 12:23 AM
Ah, well... I'm starting to get used to this. Was hoping to release the trading system today (well, yesterday now), and ended up having to fix more and more bugs.
And in the end I restructured the internal offer creation workflow for like the 3rd time, to fix more bugs I felt could/would happen eventually.

One thing to say: doing things the same way as Barter does-- it's really annoying! But would you guys have been happy with a really simplistic 1:1 offer system while waiting for a better one...? :^^;: (Well, too late now, I'll have to finish this thing.)

Wondering if you guys would be happy with a temporary system where you can't edit your offers after sending them, where you don't receive notifications for offers received, and maybe other missing things. Just so that I could release the damn thing today (ex-tomorrow).
Plus, it would be the perfect day for a symbolic release, ah ah, so much fun.[1]
 1. Well, I'm turning into the geek I've always wanted to be. The answer to life, the universe and everything -- it will be mine now.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on March 21st, 2017, 01:44 AM
Quote from Donpeste on March 19th, 2017, 08:03 PM
Wondering if you guys would be happy with a temporary system where you can't edit your offers after sending them, where you don't receive notifications for offers received, and maybe other missing things. Just so that I could release the damn thing today (ex-tomorrow).
Sounds good
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Caviezel on March 21st, 2017, 07:17 AM
(http://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/000/517/235/23e.jpg)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: joaoarena on March 21st, 2017, 09:39 AM
Quote from Nao 尚 on March 21st, 2017, 12:23 AM
Wondering if you guys would be happy with a temporary system...
Sounds better than nothing, but some users will always be picky... hehehe
Also, from this point on would it be disconnected from barter? Will adding new games be implemented also on this side ate the same time?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 21st, 2017, 04:59 PM
I'm doing all I can ;)

Implemented or fixed today:
- Canceling an offer
- Offer list is now sorted by expiry date
- I've started working towards being able to edit offers (yes, I know I said I wouldn't do that for now...)
- New offer notifications (again-- I said I wouldn't do it, but I did it. I'm deeply sorry.)

There are probably 157 more bugs to fix...
I have no idea if I'll be able to release the system today. I'm doing all I can. I'm in crunch mode again. Heck, I was looking for volunteers to send me offers but found no one so in the end I just edited the database to send myself offers so I could test. ^^

PS: 100 posts!
PPS: I'm working for you guys on my birthday!! I hope you feel ashamed, as intended!! Send me gifts!!! I'll give access to premium filters to early birds! Already one slot filled! :eheh:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: joaoarena on March 21st, 2017, 05:34 PM
Quote from Nao 尚 on March 21st, 2017, 04:59 PM
Heck, I was looking for volunteers to send me offers but found no one so in the end I just edited the database to send myself offers so I could test. ^^

PS: 100 posts!
PPS: I'm working for you guys on my birthday!! I hope you feel ashamed, as intended!! Send me gifts!!! I'll give access to premium filters to early birds! Already one slot filled! :eheh:
Will be here for two hours or so, so I can send you offers.
Hey, congratulations on your birthday! :blush:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on March 21st, 2017, 05:37 PM
Happy Birthday ro you, happy birthday to youuuu... <3
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: nhex on March 21st, 2017, 05:41 PM
Do It. Do it Now.gif
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 21st, 2017, 06:05 PM
Implemented:
- Editing offer (works similarly to Barter, too, which wasn't a given since the way I handle things is very different.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 21st, 2017, 06:33 PM
Implemented (well, "finished" is more like it):
- Fixed 'Accept offer' (Needs more work)
- Mark Completed

Unfortunately I've run out of time. I'll be living real life for ~3 hours and I'll be back to test later tonight. I'm really pumped. If it's not a public release, at least I'll do test trades with volunteers and then I'll release it tomorrow.

I'd also like to note that currently the system uses barter user IDs in half of the queries, so I'm gonna have "a lot of fun" doing the full transition to LT user IDs later. It will probably break things, because that's what I do. (That, and accepting birthday gifts.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: impaler0815 on March 21st, 2017, 06:36 PM
Happy Birthday!! :)

Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: joaoarena on March 21st, 2017, 06:38 PM
Quote from Nao 尚 on March 21st, 2017, 06:33 PM
I'll be living real life for ~3 hours and I'll be back to test later tonight.
Eat the cake :bravo: quick and get back to work :whip:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Pika! Pika! on March 21st, 2017, 06:53 PM
Happy Birthday, Nao! Thank you for the tremendous effort you are making in building a replacement for Barter!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Nedkelly on March 21st, 2017, 07:31 PM
Happy Birthday, Nao!

You are the one who gives us all a gift, hope at least you get cake  ::)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 21st, 2017, 09:13 PM
Thanks guys!
Nope, no cake, no nothing... The cake really was a li--oh, I just got told that I'm not the first to do that joke.

At least the missus let me work on LT today rather than force me to do errands like I was supposed to do. That's a present, in itself. ;)
I should be back in around an hour... I took a few minutes to fix something else. 'Accept offer' should be 100% working now, and if I'm not mistaken we should be able to go through offer creation to offer completion without a problem (except games won't get removed from wishlists & tradables for now, since they're still linked to Barter scrapes ^^), but I'll need to make tests obviously.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 21st, 2017, 11:59 PM
I'm testing offers with a user right now, so let it be said that it was OFFICIALLY FINISHED ON MARCH 21ST :D
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 22nd, 2017, 09:44 AM
I just had to send that post at 23:59, ah ah.
But still, I received offers so that'll work for me.

It's still completely broken, so I'll remove all of the fake offers tomorrow, fix the bugs, and release to the public.
Posted: March 22nd, 2017, 12:00 AM

Missing features compared to Barter:

- Countering
- Offering non-wishlisted items or asking for non-wishlisted items
- :edit: Offer comments (I want to do them right; probably something threaded that will be shared with game page comments or similar.)
- Removing tradables/wishlisted from lists after completing (this will be done as soon as I go public and I disable the scraper.)
- Removing items from offer when Editing it (after submitting it and then clicking 'Edit'-- otherwise you can remove items when you're creating the offer, so at worst until I get to fix this you can still cancel an offer and just create a new one.)
- Notifications are very, very bare. The text shown is ridiculous. ("XXX has sent you a new offer", "XXX has sent you a new declined offer", yeah, it's not even proper English, I didn't have time to work on that for more than 20 minutes.) :edit: Text fixed, still bare notifications, I need to add previews in notifications...
- :edit: Agreed to cancel and other Fail reasons aren't available yet. There's only a Complete button.

Will edit if I remember other things that are broken/missing compared to Barter.
Other than that, I think everything's there.
Posted: March 22nd, 2017, 12:04 AM

Implemented:
- Ability to disable offer notifications. (It's a bit hidden deep inside your profile settings, although not that hard to find: just go to your profile, check out the profile dropdown menu, there's a Notification section in it, and there's an 'Offers' subsection in that page.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: joaoarena on March 22nd, 2017, 11:02 AM
Is it still advisable to update tradables/games and import them here, or is it better to wait for today?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 22nd, 2017, 11:26 AM
No, you can still update them. I'll do a manual-automated final import of everyone's data right before I make everything public.

I'm considering doing a public beta, though. For a couple days-- make the trading system available for anyone to try it out, then delete everything and start from zero. But it's looking less likely because, well, my second tester didn't see any bugs so I guess it's solidified now.
I still need to implement 'Failed' offers, or just hide the damn button for now, and we should be good to go once I import everything. I'll tell you beforehand anyway.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: joaoarena on March 22nd, 2017, 11:35 AM
Great :cool:
Will be here all morning, if you need different testers.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 22nd, 2017, 02:08 PM
Implemented (earlier today):
- Wanna know if a Barter friend is on LT? Can't find their nickname? Go to their Barter profile (/u/xxxxx) and replace 'barter.vg' with 'lestrades.com', you guessed it. You'll be redirected to their LT profile, if they have one. If it redirects you to your own profile, then your friend isn't there yet.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 22nd, 2017, 08:30 PM
Implemented:
- Importing Barter library. Woohoo.
I tested on mine and got a perfect copy. Note: this also removes playtimes... :( But OTOH, I guess it adds the ability to sort by date added. I'll restore playtimes later, I think it should work.
- Adding & removing games. Not enabled for users, but implemented. See below.

Removed:
- Ability to sync with Barter. Yes, the moment has come. ;)
I'm currently syncing wishlists, blacklists, tradables and barter libraries from everyone registered at Lestrade's.
After which I'll enable the ability to add & remove games from your lists.
- My sanity.

To do:
- Tag games. Yes, this one's gonna be complicated because I'm not sure about the UI I should have for it, so please bear with me for now. ^^
- Enabling trades! lol. That one.
- Ensuring that new users get their data imported from Barter-- 'just in case'. There are, after all, 7 or 8000 Barter users who haven't been to LT's yet. I'm not counting on all of mine, but at least 500 more would make sense.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on March 22nd, 2017, 08:36 PM
Good progress. Thanks for all the work.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on March 22nd, 2017, 08:37 PM
Quote from Nao 尚 on March 22nd, 2017, 08:30 PM
Removed:
- Ability to sync with Barter. Yes, the moment has come. ;)
I'm currently syncing wishlists, blacklists, tradables and barter libraries from everyone registered at Lestrade's.
After which I'll enable the ability to add & remove games from your lists.
- My sanity.
Happy to hear nothing of value was lost.Just kidding

If you need somebody to test with, i'm happy to help out.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Quantum on March 22nd, 2017, 09:50 PM
Quote from Nao 尚 on March 22nd, 2017, 08:30 PM
Removed
- Ability to sync with Barter. Yes, the moment has come. ;)
Hmmm, would it be a problem to still allow manual sync for tradeables? I'd imagine there are quite a number of people with trades ongoing on Barter or that did visit here once & are still using Barter now and will only start using LT later.

I assume that would overwrite all tradeables here, but that'd be fine.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 23rd, 2017, 12:27 AM
@Quantum, those who haven't joined yet will be able to import from Barter. Others, not so much. I had to introduce a time limit at one point. If your lists are already on LT, then they will no longer be updated from Barter. I'm sure you can manually edit your items for a few more days. Many of us also have lists at Steamtrades-- and it's infinitely more annoying to synchronize.

@theemu, and another day without a public trading system! This time it was due (I think!) to some users who barter accounts were improperly imported, so they ended up with barter IDs like "1" instead of a real URL. There were ~25 users with such issues, I fixed them all, hopefully the scrape will reach its end this time.
But I'm also very tired, I only slept 4 hours last night, and I really need some. I'll check the database tomorrow morning. If it's working, then I'll save it, then run another scrape to synchronize everything for one last time. After that, you guys will have to move from Barter to LT and live with the lack of many 'comfort' features at Barter that I haven't had time (or the will) to implement here so far. I'll get to those.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 23rd, 2017, 01:25 AM
Quick note-- list building finished fine, but not the results I expected. I have something like 4000 tradables now, lol.
Will fix tomorrow.
Don't bother to use the match function!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 23rd, 2017, 10:22 AM
So, the 'unexpected results' were actually only for me... When scraping, if I didn't find a barter user ID I'd use the scraping user's ID, which is me, so I ended up with tradables from 20 people who registered recently and hadn't retrieved their Barter items yet. I fixed that, and I'm launching a FINAL BARTER LIST IMPORT.

That means, starting from NOW, your Barter wishlist, tradable list, blacklist and library will NO LONGER be updated.
In about 30 minutes, when everything is imported, I will retire the mass scraper (the individual Sync button is already inactive for now, and I'll end up removing it once I'm sure new users automatically get their libraries imported), and I will enable the ability to edit your lists.

Regarding editing lists-- for now it will be a very simple system: go to the game page, "remove from tradables/wishlist", there will be no way to directly edit your lists. This also means that it will delete the first game it finds in your list, so if you have multiple copies of a game on different sources, please wait until you remove it. I'm considering the ability to actually detect those multiple copies and allow you to remove one of them directly from the game page. :) (Barter didn't allow you to remove games from tradables from the game page, possibly because it didn't bother with figuring out which copy you wanted to delete.)

I'll be opening access to the offer system (and deleting current offers from beta testers, of course) around that time. Give me a couple hours max. to have everything up and running. :)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 23rd, 2017, 12:07 PM
- So... The database was properly imported, the scraper is now retired. It took me weeks to refine you, and in the end you only officially served for a bit over a month, still, thanks for existing!
- I'm now linking matches to user profiles on Lestrade's, rather than Barter.
- 'Inactive' links are now related to the user's last time on LT. The current threshold is one week. If you went online in the last week, you're "active". There is currently no option to mark your account as on hiatus.
- Ability to add/remove to your list is still being worked on. Give me another half hour. I wasted time writing this very post and thinking about consequences etc. This is the last thing stopping me from opening the offer system, so I'll need feedback! Here's my concern:

I was looking at my offer system, and more particularly the code that triggers when marking as completed. It removes the tradable from your list, but... Then it's no longer in the database, okay? And the offer system stores items by tradable ID, so that we can forever know that an old trade was for instance made for a Steam gift rather than cheap key of 'Bad Rats', or that it was tagged in a specific way, like "this copy is region-locked to France". However, if I remove the tradable from the list, it's data I can no longer access.

I'm looking for opinions on what to do. Since many of you are developers, and you wanna help, I'm open to suggestions really.

1/ Store tradable AND game ID in the database. It doesn't take too much space. That way, when the tradable is removed, at least we still know what game was in the trade. Who cares about whether it was a Steam gift...
2/ Store tradable, game ID, and trading tags from tradable. This potentially takes a lot of space. The advantage is I can limit the trading tags to what's important to trading, and clear them if the offer is not accepted, or it's accepted but that item isn't in the list of selected items.
3/ Store tradable only, and ALWAYS keep the tradable in the tradable table, except mark it as no longer owned. (Like, set quantity to a potential 'NULL' value, rather than zero.) This takes the most space out of all solutions. The tradable table is already quite large as it is. I can hardly imagine how large it would be if I kept all tradables from older trades. But this is probably (?) what Barter did, because I think it kept track of the store for each bundle item in an offer, even after canceling it and removing the item from your tradables. (Or did it???)
4/ Store game ID only, not tradable. Store tradable in a TEXT field along with ALL information on available items. Reduce TEXT size to minimum information needed after offer is completed. Because TEXT fields are stored in a file external to the database files (the database only holds a pointer to the object and its size), it's less likely to cause performance problems in the long term. I could even store those details in simple text files somewhere on the server, why not.

I'm more likely to go for option 1, the 'realistic' one and easiest to implement (given how much work I have, it wouldn't be a bad idea...), or option 4, the complicated but possibly most useful one.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on March 23rd, 2017, 12:47 PM
I would think option 1 is more then enough, for the use cases that will probably occur on the site.
Yes, there may be solutions that offer more comfort in ciche szenarios, but i don't think the added benefit would hpld up against the added complexity / the added time of your life devoted to implement a feature that is probably not useful for most of the userbase.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Silyus on March 23rd, 2017, 01:26 PM
IMHO option 2, but keep everything in a separate table, which stores only transactions already made, and purge it (on daily basis) of the transitions older than a week or so.
The tags should be useful to resolve troubles from the people involved in the trade which, in case, should arise early after the trade is done (hence the pruning after a week).
I can assume that the trade history is accessed only rarely (compared to other actions made by the user) so an overhead introduced by this solution shouldn't be a problem.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 23rd, 2017, 02:56 PM
I'm only trying to think of the far future. If we end up having millions of previous trade offers, with an average of 5-6 games per offer that'd mean quite a lot of rows in that table... Meaning potentially slower trade feature, too (although at this point I can either remove trades from over a year prior or something).
The reason I'm asking this now is because once the trade system is open, well... It'll be harder to patch. In fact, MANY things will be harder to patch now on the site. ^^
I'm actually in the process of converting all barter IDs to LT IDs right now (although I was planning to do it later), because I fear that someone might make an operation on their lists exactly at the time I'm updating the IDs-- meaning potentially deleting someone else's tradable.
Really-- solidity comes first. It's just like releasing a game too early for its own good, eh?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 23rd, 2017, 04:32 PM
Just FYI, I re-imported Barter lists a few minutes ago.
I overhauled ALL of my code (believe me it was annoying >_<) to only use LT IDs, as mentioned above. It had to be done at one point.
I'm currently testing everything.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Silyus on March 23rd, 2017, 05:16 PM
Quote from Nao 尚 on March 23rd, 2017, 02:56 PM
I'm only trying to think of the far future. If we end up having millions of previous trade offers, with an average of 5-6 games per offer that'd mean quite a lot of rows in that table... Meaning potentially slower trade feature, too (although at this point I can either remove trades from over a year prior or something).
That's the reason I was suggesting to prune every offer older than a week. In this way you'll have only to deal with the number of trades done in a week, which will hardly reach 1M.
I was also suggesting to keep the trade history in a separate table so you don't have to load it every time an user want to look at their tradables (most of the time), but only when he wants to check his history (fairly rarely).
To be crystal clear, I'm just telling this only to defend the solution I proposed, not to push you in a specific direction.
Frankly I really appreciate the work you've done so far, also only you know how things are implemented, so feel free to implement the solution you think it's best (even considering how much more effort you want to put in this project).
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 23rd, 2017, 08:04 PM
Yep, no problem.
I've tested offers again and I'm still getting side issues, reason enough to postpone.
Never in my life have I postponed something day to day that much. Even the original opening of the website only took me 3 or 4 more says than initially announced... it's not easy redoing in a few days what barter took months to implement in the first place.

Maybe tonight though. I'll need testers in about an hour.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on March 23rd, 2017, 08:22 PM
Quote from Nao 尚 on March 23rd, 2017, 08:04 PM
Maybe tonight though. I'll need testers in about an hour.
Tester 1 standing by
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: joaoarena on March 23rd, 2017, 09:48 PM
Is it safe to start adding trade items, or only just a test?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Quantum on March 23rd, 2017, 09:56 PM
Option 2 sounds best for the future as it would allow all kinds of interesting data mining possibilities based on the tags that were on the tradeables (and allow historic viewing for users). To prevent performance / scaling issues I agree with Silyus that'd it'd be interesting to either make a separate table for tradeables in completed trades and / or to regularly run a script that moves completed tradeables older then i.e. a year to a separate database / storage location.

Purely for the initial startup I'd personally worry most about getting the database model right & not worry too much about these scaling issues yet as i.e. making a script to move tradeables older then a year to a separate database would be something that can be done afterwards / sliced from the initial release. Changing the database model however is always very annoying.

Note: Barter only has 90.000 complete offers in 2 years & 500.000 completed offers. In that sense a week seems very short. Which is why I mentioned a year here.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 24th, 2017, 01:02 PM
A week would be way too short, yes.
A year makes more sense, anything beyond six months to be is just digging into nostalgia. ;)

BUG FIX: users weren't able to vote in polls. Oops.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 25th, 2017, 12:12 AM
Fix/Addition: Offers where one (or both) side(s) have a '1 out of 4', '3 out of 5' or whatever but no '5 out of 5' choice, will always keep their checkbox next to items, to make it more obvious that it's not a 5 out of 5 offer. That is, you'll still have to look at the '3 of the 4 items below' or whatever to see how many items are requested/offered, but alternatively if you don't see the checkboxes, you'll know that all items are being offered.

Bug fix: if clicking multiple times on 'Add to (list)', you could end up with multiple copies in your list. Now the button will be silently disabled as soon as you click it. I'll probably do that on more items, like 'Accept offer' or whatever.
Posted: March 24th, 2017, 10:39 PM

Okay, I disabled the disabling of buttons. (Yeah that's nearly funny.)
The problem is that disabled buttons don't submit a value. So if there are multiple submit buttons in the same form, LT will be unable to know which was clicked. This made it impossible to send an offer... :(

I'll look into it a bit more.
Posted: March 24th, 2017, 11:25 PM

Okay, that was a nasty one, but it should work now. Double-submit prevented, and no features appear to be broken. Please tell me ASAP if you find something broken when clicking a button!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 25th, 2017, 12:37 AM
Feature I forgot to mention: go to /search/ manually to search posts on the forum.

NEW FEATURE: new users (and only them) should now be able to import their Barter lists. If you added items manually to your lists, please remove them first, to avoid duplicate entries.
Needs testing! Because obviously I'm not a new user... ^^ It only took a dozen lines of code and I've read it multiple times, it shouldn't cause any issues.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on March 25th, 2017, 01:12 AM
Just finished my first trade here!
Wohoo!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 25th, 2017, 11:56 AM
Congrats ;)

BUG FIX: Problems with new users being unable to import their lists from Barter.
You can now simply go to your Wishlist, Tradables, Blacklist or Library, and you should find a 'Sync from Barter.vg' button. Click it, wait, and there you go, your list is on Lestrade's with tags and all.

@Alex, I think you can safely reset the memory limit to 200M. My math is now done on a 250KB PHP file that contains a hardcoded array with all Steam IDs and corresponding Barter URLs. Really, it couldn't be simpler and faster to process. Heck, it's not even the biggest PHP file in Wedge. ;)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 25th, 2017, 02:53 PM
NEW: when you receive an offer notification in the top-left corner, whether accepted, declined or whatever, click the notification (not the link) to show a preview of it, without leaving your current page. :)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 25th, 2017, 05:08 PM
FIX: Unique trades were improperly counted. Should be good now.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Zyon on March 25th, 2017, 06:31 PM
Sync with barter doesnt work / dont do anything. no button to see anywhere to add different games my a game list. pretty useless
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Forum Conventions on March 25th, 2017, 06:36 PM
Quote from Zyon on March 25th, 2017, 06:31 PM
Sync with barter doesnt work / dont do anything. no button to see anywhere to add different games my a game list. pretty useless
https://lestrades.com/trading/29/lestrade-s-101-wip/
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: tservo2049 on March 25th, 2017, 10:36 PM
I just got around to joining here, I also am not seeing anything happen when I hit the Import button, am I SOL for syncing with Barter?

I guess I can add tradables manually, but it doesn't look like there is any way to add what site they are on (Humble, etc.)., is that information only populated when users were syncing from Barter?

If I'm not able to sync from Barter, will my wishlist and library eventually sync from Steam itself?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 25th, 2017, 11:21 PM
Remember that once you choose to add items manually, you lose the ability to import your stuff from Barter.
I can unlock it manually but I'm not going to do that on a regular basis. ^^

I'll have a look at importing from Barter again. It's obvious there's something wrong in my rewrite.
Also, Steam syncing will come at one point. (Steam library syncing is already written but I need to make sure it doesn't screw up everything; wishlist syncing needs to be written in the first place, but I guess I can reuse my library syncing code.)

NEW: https://lestrades.com/bundles/
It's just a placeholder page I added for joaoarena since I saw he attempted to visit that page. And yes I'd already accounted for that URL, just didn't have anything there. :P I'll work on it later, because right now it's ugly, but at least it shows you where the ITAD import is at. Basically, six months old for now :( I really need to catch up.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: devotee on March 25th, 2017, 11:51 PM
Quote from Nao 尚 on March 25th, 2017, 11:21 PM
Also, Steam syncing will come at one point. (Steam library syncing is already written but I need to make sure it doesn't screw up everything; wishlist syncing needs to be written in the first place, but I guess I can reuse my library syncing code.)
Ah, I was going to ask about it because I added a couple of games yesterday to my tradables, but I didn't remove them from my wishlist to check if they were automatically removed when a Steam library/wishlist sync was run. I saw today that they still are on my wishlist, so I thought about asking if Lestrades wasn't syncing with Steam, or if it was just that the sync hadn't been executed yet.
Quote from Nao 尚 on March 25th, 2017, 11:21 PM
It's just a placeholder page I added for joaoarena since I saw he attempted to visit that page.
I must confess I also checked that page before I wrote my post about bundles, hihihi :whistle:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 26th, 2017, 12:53 AM
BUG FIX: New users can FINALLY properly import their Barter lists.
This was tested with tservo2049 and confirmed working on all lists (wishlist, tradables, library, blacklist).

The error was all mine, I'd added a fail-safe test to allow myself to sync libraries for users requesting it (the 'I can do it manually for you' from above), but I'd put my test one line too early, where it wasn't valid at that point, and as such, everyone would get locked out of list importing (including my fail-safe).
There was one way to make it work though, through the use of a long-form URL, but it's no longer needed.

@devotee, wishlist syncing is something that scares me. I've got a nice horror story about the Steam game list that I regularly import (for later use), and at one point (back when I was on your server), I'd realized the unique index wasn't working well, and I'd ended up with a table that was like 20 times larger than what it should have been. ^^
Posted: March 25th, 2017, 11:57 PM

I noticed that since yesterday morning, isthereanydeal.com is no longer accessible to me. I'm getting timeouts. I've checked my firewall, etc, nothing special. I'm using the Google DNS servers mostly. Anyone else having trouble with them...? Is it specific to France?
I know there are people who still see the site. But it'll prove hard for me to retrieve the last 6 months worth of bundles at ITAD if I can't download the site's bundle list... ^^ (Okay, probably a VPN thing might work...)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: devotee on March 26th, 2017, 01:12 AM
Quote from Nao 尚 on March 26th, 2017, 12:53 AM
I noticed that since yesterday morning, isthereanydeal.com is no longer accessible to me. I'm getting timeouts. I've checked my firewall, etc, nothing special. I'm using the Google DNS servers mostly. Anyone else having trouble with them...? Is it specific to France?
Works for me from home (Spain) and from two different servers hosted in France (OVH and Online). If you're doing many requests to ITAD you might want to use an API key or if you have contact with the ITAD owner, you could ask him if they would allow your IP (or the IP from the server hosting Lestrades) to be a little more aggressive than a regular user who would just browse their site.

Regarding the wishlist, should we manage it manually for now then (game page -> remove from wishlist)? Or would syncing the library (removing new items owned from the wishlist -if they are not tagged as 'extra'-) work?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: CUE on March 26th, 2017, 11:41 AM
Quote from Nao 尚 on March 26th, 2017, 12:53 AM
BUG FIX: New users can FINALLY properly import their Barter lists.
This was tested with tservo2049 and confirmed working on all lists (wishlist, tradables, library, blacklist).
Not for me:
- whislist empty, the import button redirects me to the barter blacklist
- tradables empty, the import button redirects me to the barter blacklist
- backlist empty, the import button redirects me to the barter blacklist (my list is empty)
- library OK

https://s25.postimg.org/c61x2mb3z/image.png
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 26th, 2017, 03:16 PM
@devotee, I'm not talking about communication between LT and ITAD, that's working AFAIK (and yes I'm using the API with a key), I'm talking about myself here. I've tried with a VPN extension: German-based IP works, French-based IP fails, so I'm leaning towards routing problems (at the European level). What surprises me is that you say it's working on your server, since its traffic originates from the same sub-network as my own IP does...
Posted: March 26th, 2017, 03:12 PM

Re: wishlist, I noticed that I didn't get The Lost Crown removed from my wishlist after my latest trade, its quantity wasn't even down by 1. Do you mean it's the same for everyone..? Because it's supposed to be removed from your wishlist (or, at least, decreased in quantity-- that's the difference compared to Barter, I consider a wishlist in a trade to be immediately removable, whether or not you remove it; in order to acquire several copies you simply 'need' to set quantities on the wishlisted item-- when I enable tagging, obviously.) (Yes, I'd opened a parenthesis.)
Anyway, no, I'm not planning to have library syncing with Steam influence wishlist removal. However, I will definitely add a notice on Wishlist pages with a list of games that are found in your library and in your wishlist as well, so that you can remove them if you want. I'll need to remember that, though...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 26th, 2017, 03:20 PM
@CUE, I'm not exactly sure why this wouldn't work for you. Please try again, I've added some code to let me check if your import failed or it is considered 'successful' by LT.
Also, it shouldn't redirect you to your blacklist page, unless you're importing your blacklist... ^^ The page where you land indicates what list you just tried to update.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 26th, 2017, 03:30 PM
NEW/FIX: Now showing trading tags in game lists on offer pages. Previously they were only shown in the checkbox list while creating the offer. Which, granted, isn't very useful for the end user!
NEW: Barter icon on profile pages (previously it showed the link, but no icon.)
FIX: You can now keep your offers in 'creation' status for longer than your session's expiry date (they usually last a couple hours). I was checking for session data even while working on stuff that doesn't matter, so now I'm only checking it when submitting the offer. If you haven't touched your offer page in a while and want to submit it, make SURE to press the Preview button first, then check your offer's content, THEN press the Send button. This will save you from getting a 'session expired' error.
FIX: Since I'm no longer syncing with Barter, I've made it clear it's an 'import' now, if you're new to the site and you get to see the button.

(I should probably post those notices in a closed topic and have another topic to allow commenting on them... Otherwise it'll get confusing.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 26th, 2017, 04:46 PM
NEW: bundle pages now indicate whether you own a game or not. (Do you get where this is leading..? Yeah? Well it'll have to wait a bit longer, as I don't have time to complete the feature for now. :^^;:)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on March 26th, 2017, 05:17 PM
Quote from Nao 尚 on March 26th, 2017, 04:46 PM
NEW: bundle pages now indicate whether you own a game or not. (Do you get where this is leading..? Yeah? Well it'll have to wait a bit longer, as I don't have time to complete the feature for now. :^^;:)
Could you do the same for blacklisted games? 
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 26th, 2017, 05:33 PM
If it doesn't then it's a bug. I tested with owned, but I match against all 4 lists.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on March 26th, 2017, 05:36 PM
Quote from Nao 尚 on March 26th, 2017, 05:33 PM
If it doesn't then it's a bug. I tested with owned, but I match against all 4 lists.
My bad, it's working.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on March 26th, 2017, 05:42 PM
Quote from Nao 尚 on March 26th, 2017, 04:46 PM
NEW: bundle pages now indicate whether you own a game or not. (Do you get where this is leading..? Yeah? Well it'll have to wait a bit longer, as I don't have time to complete the feature for now. :^^;:)
The bundles URL should be visible. Maybe another tab for bundles? I am sure new users will miss this one out.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: joaoarena on March 26th, 2017, 05:59 PM
Quote from Nao 尚 on March 25th, 2017, 11:21 PM
NEW: https://lestrades.com/bundles/
It's just a placeholder page I added for joaoarena since I saw he attempted to visit that page.
Thanks, very helpful :cool:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: CUE on March 26th, 2017, 07:17 PM
Quote from Nao 尚 on March 26th, 2017, 03:30 PM
Quote from Nao 尚 on March 26th, 2017, 03:20 PM
@CUE, I'm not exactly sure why this wouldn't work for you. Please try again, I've added some code to let me check if your import failed or it is considered 'successful' by LT.
Also, it shouldn't redirect you to your blacklist page, unless you're importing your blacklist... ^^ The page where you land indicates what list you just tried to update.
NEW/FIX: Now showing trading tags in game lists on offer pages. Previously they were only shown in the checkbox list while creating the offer. Which, granted, isn't very useful for the end user!
NEW: Barter icon on profile pages (previously it showed the link, but no icon.)
FIX: You can now keep your offers in 'creation' status for longer than your session's expiry date (they usually last a couple hours). I was checking for session data even while working on stuff that doesn't matter, so now I'm only checking it when submitting the offer. If you haven't touched your offer page in a while and want to submit it, make SURE to press the Preview button first, then check your offer's content, THEN press the Send button. This will save you from getting a 'session expired' error.
FIX: Since I'm no longer syncing with Barter, I've made it clear it's an 'import' now, if you're new to the site and you get to see the button.

(I should probably post those notices in a closed topic and have another topic to allow commenting on them... Otherwise it'll get confusing.)
Now work fine, thanks a lot :)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 26th, 2017, 11:11 PM
@humpaaa, so what was going wrong on your side? :^^;:
Quote from Akylen on March 26th, 2017, 05:42 PM
The bundles URL should be visible. Maybe another tab for bundles? I am sure new users will miss this one out.
I agree. Maybe not an extra tab, though, I don't know. I'll think about it.

NEW: Game pages now show you the number of completed trades, and a link to trades that involved you. (Just like on Barter of course ;))
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: devotee on March 27th, 2017, 11:04 AM
Quote from Nao 尚 on March 26th, 2017, 03:16 PM
What surprises me is that you say it's working on your server, since its traffic originates from the same sub-network as my own IP does...
That's exactly why I did that specific test :P Maybe domestic users and dedicated servers have different routes. Does it work now?

Regarding wishlists, I will try to remember to check if a game is removed from the wishlist once you complete a trade for it but I guess it isn't (wasn't?) working because I still have "Adventure Time: The Secret Of The Nameless Kingdom" and "The Detail Episode 2 - From The Ashes" on my wishlist despite having traded them with you. I haven't added them to my library yet, so it would only affect removing the games when completing a trade. At least not when they're found in your Steam library, or removed from your Steam wishlist, which is not done right now if I understood you correctly:
Quote from Nao 尚 on March 26th, 2017, 03:16 PM
Anyway, no, I'm not planning to have library syncing with Steam influence wishlist removal.
So the only way to remove a item you own from the wishlist will be by completing a trade for it or manually removing it from the wishlist? :hmm: Those are a couple of things I don't like right now:

1. Tradable is removed when completing a trade. I mean, quantity is diminished by one, but since you can't edit the tradables right now, you can't modify the quantities. I usually don't keep track of the number of keys I own for a game, so I'd rather have the option to remove items at the completion of a trade (like Barter does) instead. As we discussed, this can be easily fixed/cheated by setting all your tradables to x99, for example (when quantities will be modifiable). However, I can see how this would work in the long term if a system to store your own Steam keys on Lestrades is added, since adding your keys here would let you know how many copies you have for it. But as I said, that's something I would expect in the long run...

2. Adding a game to your Steam library won't automatically remove it from your wishlist. I'd rather have it removed (unless it's tagged as "+extra"), otherwise you have to remember to remove games you buy/activate on Steam (not from a trade) yourself. The idea of a warning is not bad, but it's a bit redundant when the logical thing to do is to remove a game from the wishlist if the system finds out you own it (again, unless the game is tagged as "+extra").
Quote from Nao 尚 on March 26th, 2017, 04:46 PM
NEW: bundle pages now indicate whether you own a game or not.
Weeee!!! Thanks!! :yahoo:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: devotee on March 27th, 2017, 11:08 AM
Quote from Nao 尚 on March 26th, 2017, 11:11 PM
I agree. Maybe not an extra tab, though, I don't know. I'll think about it.
My vote is for adding it on the top, between "My Messages" and the language selection dropdown (since it's going to be an important section of the site, once it's running full speed I'm guessing it's something that will be heavily used) or just behind, where the "Home / Profile / Members" menu is.

If it's added to the top, it might be neat to also add a counter to notify you how many new bundles have been added since your last visit/check of the bundles page (just an idea, not a priority).
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 27th, 2017, 06:55 PM
FIX: Well.......... Lestrade's is back online, obviously. :P

Much thanks to Alex for acting like a child and killing it without warning.
Much REAL thanks to devotee for stepping up (despite our common frustrations two months ago) and hosting Lestrades.com again, like he used to! There are still bugs to fix, but I'll get there.

NEW: Well....... Given that devotee has a better server, matching speeds are now through the roof. We're talking about 6 to 10 times faster. This is what I developed the site with. This is what excited me so much. The site feels so much faster and more responsive. I hope you all enjoy it.

(Note: this is from the point of view of someone who actually lives about 10km away from the server itself. So not only that, but my FTP access is now instantaneous and I can develop much faster.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: gamecreature on March 27th, 2017, 07:27 PM
Welcome back!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: joaoarena on March 27th, 2017, 07:39 PM
Great to have Lestrades back :)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Milouze on March 27th, 2017, 08:20 PM
I am happy to see Lestrades back online. Thank you for assisting Nao on this Devotee.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: nexusdan on March 27th, 2017, 08:27 PM
Oh, nice! Thanks to everybody :)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: dragonfly59 on March 27th, 2017, 09:12 PM
Thanks for the great friend who help for back lestrades :-) & thanks nao for the works you made for us

Sorry for my bad english :)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 28th, 2017, 01:19 AM
Yeah, he's been working all evening to help me move my other sites as well.
I don't want to impose so maybe I won't settle on this server, but I'm really glad I made the move. Alex's server was really too slow, even after the upgrade.
I'm tiring, I'm off to bed. Happy trading guys ;)
I'll resume development tomorrow, if all goes well.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: abbelyn on March 28th, 2017, 01:33 PM
Yay for the new host =)  Thanks Nao and Devotee
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on March 28th, 2017, 04:13 PM
After barter returned, how will syncing be done now? 
For example, a added ~2000 titles to my blacklist at barter yesterday. Can i easily sync the list here, or would i need to manage both lists individually, since you separated from barter data?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on March 29th, 2017, 12:41 AM
Is the search broken? Doesn't seem to work anymore.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on March 29th, 2017, 02:40 AM
Quote from Akylen on March 29th, 2017, 12:41 AM
Is the search broken? Doesn't seem to work anymore.
Works for me
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 29th, 2017, 10:03 AM
Just reload the page if it doesn't work. If you kept a tab open for too long the session might have regenerated and some actions won't work without a page reload.

Yeah, I dunno why there's a session check for search. I probably should remove it. It's a remnant from the original purpose of that search box.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: nhex on March 29th, 2017, 10:30 AM
Hey, my notifications seem stuck at 2 - I'm guessing because I have 2 offers that haven't been read?
Also I'm a little unclear about how to redit my tradeables/library or resync w/Steam.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 29th, 2017, 11:37 AM
1/ How notifications work:
- The number on them indicates how many notifications you haven't read yet. An unread notification is a notification you haven't followed up on, e.g. clicked the link or clicked outside the link to load a preview. (Yes, there's a preview for offers, too. They will mark your notification as read, and your offer will be put into Pending mode, as opposed to Unread.)
- If the number is on an orange background, it means new notifications were sent since the last time you opened the notification popup.
- To decrease the number of notifications, either expand all previews, or click the 'Mark as read' link on the popup. Your notifications will be hidden, but you can still them by clicking the 'Latest' tab in the popup.

Yes, it's a pretty solid system. Not perfect, but I never do perfect, I strive for perfection and do good enough. That's my motto. :P

2/ Editing lists can be done by going to a game page and clicking the Add/Remove buttons below the game banner, similarly to Barter. I will implement site-wide editing as soon as I'm done with all the fixes I have to do to the website because of the server move. (Not that the new server is particularly buggy, but since I also maintain the public source code of the framework behind Wedge, I need to accomodate for all types of platforms, and being on a new platform allows me to ensure it works great for those platforms as well.) (THANK GOD I'm not behind Nginx anymore, though... I'm never, ever touching that again in my life!!)

3/ Syncing libraries with Steam was disabled last weekend I'm afraid. I should be able to re-enable it but I'm tired, and I'm wary of doing a mistake that could break user libraries. I'd need to back them up first, and it's the biggest table on the site, so... Just being careful.

As a reminder, the site is currently in early beta. I'd say around v0.5 or so. I consider I've done half the done before I can call it 'feature complete'. After which I'll work on further iterations. Hopefully for many years. :)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 29th, 2017, 03:36 PM
NEW: When sending an offer, LT will now show x0 quantity tradables/wishlists in the list, disabled, with a mention saying that's a no-no. Just for information-- and in case you want to try & convince the user to trade those items with you.

Sorry, nothing 'usable' for a trade, but I've just resumed work after fixing the last few annoying bugs due to the server move. (There's still one around, but it won't affect anyone, so it's fine, and only devotee can fix it I think.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 29th, 2017, 06:56 PM
FIX: Notification popups could end up being unscrollable due to a CSS issue.

FIX: the offer system was (quite a bit) broken for a few hours today, due to some refactoring of the offer creation page. My apologies! (I'm preparing to add non-wishlisted items, in case you're wondering. Still needs a bit of work..)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: chaosfrost on March 29th, 2017, 08:13 PM
Now search and notifications working for me. Thanks.

Aslo dont know if this is issue or not, game Drudes Sandstorm not appearing in search results. And replacing steamstore with lestrades also giving an empty page:
https://lestrades.com/app/606750/
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 29th, 2017, 11:52 PM
If it's empty, it's not in the database. I've checked and currently LT is up to /i/33509 when it comes to Barter game imports. Drudes in like 33677 or something, so it'll be in the next batch of additions. Just keep looking..?
I could rewrite the scraper right now to scrape exclusively from Steam, but it would mean spending a couple weeks on that, rather than, I don't know, finishing the offer system... :^^;:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 31st, 2017, 01:31 PM
In the last couple of days I added plenty of very minor features, mostly fixes, and didn't bother to mention them.
I also forgot to mention that game pages now mention all offers involving you that contain the game. Completed offers are still shown separately, but technically it'd be simpler to show them alongside the rest. Dunno what you think. If you do a lot of offers for a specific game, their page will be filled with those every time you visit it, so I'll have to devise some extra HTML/JS to allow you to hide & show all declined/expired offers. Someone will just need to remind me because right now I'm gone to other areas.

I also started work on tagging games. The thing that's slowing me down is the ability to tag multiple copies of the same game differently. Well, when you see how it turns out (I think it'll be... nice?), you'll understand why I had trouble.
After that, it'll be easier to allow tagging from list pages.

I'm also trying to tweak the offer notifications, more precisely by e-mail. I noticed yesterday that e-mails weren't sent immediately. I looked into the code (which I only partially wrote), and didn't see anything peculiar, except from one variable being unset right before testing for its existence. Looks like debugging code to me but it was like that when first committed, ahah.[1] So I moved that to later in the code and I'm waiting to see if it helps. Well, I'm not receiving a lot of offers, so... You know what to do :P

What else..?

Oh yes, I'm working on importing the most recent bundles. I figured I'd do it in reverse, latest first and oldest last. It'll be more useful. Once I'm done importing (which requires rewriting my scraper, which was really built for a 'one and done' task), I'll work on the ability to add bundle items directly to your lists. I'd like to know, though, if you guys think it'd be useful to add a flag to those games indicating the exact bundle where they're from (rather than just the store they're from). I'm wary of that, as it does mean adding more data to the database. Plus I'd start wondering "should I allow for wishlists to have that flag as well...?", and then I'll go mad. Bwuhuhahahuhhahuhuhahahauhuhu.
Tell my car I love her. Blue daffodil over & out.
 1. Seriously, that piece of code initially seems brilliant, but then you realize it's the perfect example of object-oriented programming gone mad.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on March 31st, 2017, 01:43 PM
Any thoughts on enabling a "sync Lestrades lists with barter lists"-feature?
The numbers in the URL's still match, don't they?

Keeping both lists up to date separately by hand really seems like unneccesary trouble.
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on March 31st, 2017, 01:31 PM
I'd like to know, though, if you guys think it'd be useful to add a flag to those games indicating the exact bundle where they're from (rather than just the store they're from).
Personally, i don't see me using that feature.
Is ee the value it adds, but it's nothing i personally would deem necessary.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: joaoarena on March 31st, 2017, 01:53 PM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on March 31st, 2017, 01:31 PM
I also forgot to mention that game pages now mention all offers involving you that contain the game. Completed offers are still shown separately, but technically it'd be simpler to show them alongside the rest. Dunno what you think.
It is a great idea. Very useful!
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on March 31st, 2017, 01:31 PM
I'd like to know, though, if you guys think it'd be useful to add a flag to those games indicating the exact bundle where they're from (rather than just the store they're from).
The more info the merrier, for me at least! It is hard to find a game inside tons of bundles. The way it is now, I have to check elsewhere where the game was bundled, and the name of the bundle.
Great work you are doing!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 31st, 2017, 11:54 PM
FIX: The search engine was a bit broken, as you all know. It would narrow results down too much when typing more letters. I finally found the reason for the problem-- the code to narrow the search down was written with member search in mind, and only kept a result if the exact beginning was your search string. I've modified it to instead behave the same way as the alternate path does: take each word you typed in the search box, and make sure each of them is part of a game's name. It's slower than the previous bit of code, by a few milliseconds. I'm really sorry about that. (No I'm not. I'm sorry for the half-broken search, though.)
Quote from /u/humpaaa on March 31st, 2017, 01:43 PM
Any thoughts on enabling a "sync Lestrades lists with barter lists"-feature?
Again: it's technically impossible.
What I *could* do is load your Barter tradables, compare each of them with LT's, then offer to add games it couldn't find at LT's, and remove games that are at LT's but not on Barter. But again, it wouldn't be able to take multiple entries of a game into account. Well, it could, but that would make it even harder to sort out list modifications. Also, a single game's quantity can be set to different values. And even if the value is x1, it's pretty compicated. Let's say I have Firewatch on both LT's and Barter. Now I'm trading my copy of my game at LT's. I no longer have a copy. Let's sync with Barter. It says Fiewatch. Okay. So the question is now, is that a NEW copy that was recently added to Barter, in which case I should import it, or is that the copy I traded on LT, therefore needing to be ignored? So, Lestrade's now has several possible actions: ignore the game (which is silly), add it anyway (which is also silly), or the realistic one: load LT offer history, see how many copies of that game I possibly traded. Then check the last time LT imported Barter data. Then LT can determine the number of copies you had before your last sync. At this point, it has two choices: if you traded your copy at LT's after the last sync, then Barter's copy is likely (but not 'certain') to be the copy you traded, in which case we'll ignore it (and it's up to Barter to sync with LT and remove that copy), or you traded your copy before the last sync, in which case it's very likely the game should be added to the database again.

I'll let you imagine the complexity of adding this code, having to ask users for their opinion on all games that different in quantity (that would be a relatively complex UI and writing good UI isn't my strong suit), and having to keep track of the last time you synced with Barter, once for each different list. Not only that (!), but in order to make things realistic, Barter would have to do the exact same thing for its tradables, in the opposite direction. There's another alternative, sending each other completed offer data, but that wouldn't take care of items you added manually... So, we'd have to send each other, in real time, every single addition or removal we do (either manually or automatically) to our lists. And because networks are what they are, it can't be guaranteed that all data will be transmitted properly. For instance if one of the sites is down for an hour. So in that situation we need to create an update queue where additions and removals are temporarily stored, and sent regularly to the other site until it acknowledges it received the data. But we'd also have to enable an acknowledgement queue, just in case a network issue prevented sending confirmation to the other site. And finally, if we receive the data but there's a bug on the local website, we could get corrupted data that's seen as 'correctly transmitted', or even funnier, site crashes while attempting to add data, then all games being added in that moment get lost, probably without your knowledge of it.

So, in our realistic situation (i.e. all lists are perfectly synced in realtime), we find ourselves with a *monstruous* codebase just to implement the basic feature of syncing our lists. I know I won't write that, because I have more important things to write first, and I doubt the Barter admin would write that, because I'm not sure he'd think himself capable of building a network-fool-proof syncing mechanism.

Let's think about it again in a year's time, okay...?

There's also the possibility that someone would want to write user scripts to accommodate for these problems, but they'd have to keep all syncing dates in storage, and account for all situations I listed above from the top of my head (a word which here means "I'm sure there are plenty more ways to break sync.")
What you wanna do is maintain one list thoroughly and then update the other one from time to time. My Steamtrades list is far from complete, I try to put most of my unbundled (or rarely bundled) games there, because that's what gets traded the most at ST, and my bundle games can stay on LT.

I wouldn't have been able to automatically sync forever between Barter and LT like I did in February and most of March, because the moment you become able to edit your LT lists (and send offers), then it's no longer a simple game of scraping Barter for list data. You can't have your cake and eat it, if I may say.
Quote from /u/humpaaa on March 31st, 2017, 01:43 PM
The numbers in the URL's still match, don't they?
No, game IDs match, not tradable IDs. That's where it counts. But even if I did sync only by game ID (thereby destroying all metadata regarding quantities and stores), I'd still have the problem of having to determine whether the non-matching quantities for your games are due to the addition or removal of one game on one side... But which one, eh?
Quote from /u/humpaaa on March 31st, 2017, 01:43 PM
Personally, i don't see me using that feature.
Yeah it was useless anyway-- you'll understand when you start using the bundle game importer.

Which reminds me I still haven't finished writing the new bundle update script, AH AH...
That's always my problem with forums: either I answer thoroughly and hope it'll help, or I work on the code itself. I just spent half an hour explaining why I can't do syncing, but maybe someone will figure out a way to do perfect sync in less than half an hour. :P
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Quantum on April 1st, 2017, 12:59 AM
I would be perfectly fine with an option to delete all my tradeables and import them afresh (i.e. from Barter or even the export format Barter generates). I'd just do that once in a while.
(:edit: Removed useless giant quote of long post.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 1st, 2017, 01:09 AM
I can do it manually but not automatically. It would be a real mess. It would also automatically cancel all your offers, and even your previous offers could end up being unreadable because of changed tradable IDs.

Note: I just remembered that Barter never deletes its tradable entries. Maybe the admin (I still hate not even having a nickname to address him... -_-) could do an API that returns tradable IDs. That way I might be able (not sure) to keep track of tradable IDs from Barter (but that does imply an extra column to my tables >_<) and it'd be easier to sync. There would still be a problem with quantities, of course. And that I don't want to have too many columns. Eventually slows everything down.

Bed time.

(And I hate that this Barter sync thing is getting asked so much. I know we share most of our userbases, but why doesn't anyone ask SteamTrades to sync with Barter as well? And why shouldn't it be Barter that bothers syncing with LT? :P)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 1st, 2017, 03:44 PM
UPDATE:
- Search engine will now sort results in a slightly less dumb way. It's not perfect (type "one pi" and it'll show you "Half Life 2 Episode One before One Piece), but it's probably better than before, where I sorted by most recent Steam additions first.
- Added a thumbnail next to game titles. Your mileage may vary. I like it, but it loses the 'fast query' aspect of it, because it has to load the thumbnails from Steam. Then again, not having to always read the text can make up for it. I don't know. Opinions welcome.

Yeah, I know, none of you want me to focus on the search engine... I'm still working on the rest, it's just that I use that damn search engine a lot to test my other features, and it always hurts my eyes a bit. :^^;:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 1st, 2017, 04:47 PM
Quote from ☺☺☺ on April 1st, 2017, 04:04 AM
Like you said yourself several messages ago:

-Scrape/export the Tradables list (or whichever other list) from Barter, but don't even attempt to code any automatic item add/removal logic. instead:
-just compare the list against the equivalent list here AND print a list of items that are different using this simple criteria: "items that are listed at Barter but not here" AND of course there should be "Add to Tradables" button next to them.
Hmm, yeah, that may be a thing I can do.
I'd still have to bother with quantities, though...
Quote from ☺☺☺ on April 1st, 2017, 04:04 AM
This way, it's super simple task of just comparing the itemIDs between the 2 lists, and some fairly simple filtering of the results. The complexity goes away when leave the adding/removal part to be the users' responsibility.
I suppose so. But it won't be realistic until I add the mass-edit feature to lists. Which won't happen until I have a single-edit feature for game pages (to tag, modify quantities, etc.)

One thing I didn't realize when I opened the trading system to the public was that I couldn't 'play' with game lists anymore. Previously, if I broke something, I could just reset it from a backup or just wait until the sync was done automatically again. Now it's likely to eliminate offers sent between a potential backup and the moment I screwed up... Ah well, I can always backup the table right before I run a test, right? Well, I for one wouldn't like that. :P

It's one of the reasons it's not going as fast as I'd like right now. Just look at the notification system. It works fine, except it doesn't frigging send e-mails all the time. But now that there are thousands of trade offers flying around, any change can have a drastic effect.
I didn't write the initial code (which was quite messy, although I do appreciate and respect its author Dragooon), and I've had to rewrite it several times. At one point it was deleting a user entry from memory, then immediately testing that user entry (!!) to see if it was empty or not.[1]
From what I'm seeing right now (even after that fix which I hoped would fix e-mail notifications), it looks like notifications don't get sent if you still have an unread notification in your popup. Except that in this code, an "unread notification" is a notification for which you haven't read the preview. So, if you receive a "like" on a post, you open the popup, you see someone liked it, cool, you close the popup... That's it, you won't get any further e-mail notifications until you come back and click 'Mark as read' (which is my convenient addition for those who got too many notifications recently.) Worse, e-mail notifications are all disabled by default. I wouldn't enable like notifications by default of course, but it's not particularly easy to find these settings, and having to find it and enable it separately is daunting, for a noob-friendly website.
I'm thinking I'll just modify my code to check if it's an offer-related notification, and if yes, and an e-mail address was entered, forcibly send a notification.[2] And yes, I'm going to meet another problem: "Okay man, I don't want your notifications!!!"... But why did you enter your address then :P So I'll probably do it. If too many users complain, then I'll restore it to disabled by default, and I'll try to make it clearer where to set this up.
Quote from ☺☺☺ on April 1st, 2017, 04:04 AM
I think the priority should be to make the list syncing possible in the first place, and then improve it at later time as a separate project if feel like.
The priority should be to help Lestrade's stand on its own. , not reference Barter for everything. Personally, I have no plans to trade over there anymore, and I don't get why Barter wouldn't offer the ability to import its lists from LT's. :P
I don't know about you, but regardless of the Barter admin's good will, I have no plans to trade over there anymore. (The last offer I sent was 5 days ago, and even then it was at best a way to compare something between our two offer systems.)
I want to find a good balance between helping out users and wanting to put LT first.
Quote from ☺☺☺ on April 1st, 2017, 04:04 AM
This would be totally doable with userscript also, in case Nao isn't too interested to implement this on-site. Anybody out there who wants to do it? If not, I guess I could do it sometime in the near future...
Well, this would allows me to focus on more important parts of LT (according to me at least).
Quote from ☺☺☺ on April 1st, 2017, 04:04 AM
(edit: actually I have already made very primitive script for my own use that does the job for Steam items, but there is no proper GUI (yet because of course I don't need such myself), so I'm hesitant to release such version some might find too technical to use)
You know what, you should do it. Know why? Because anyone who's used a user script to fix Barter before *is* already a frigging nerd. :P
 1. For the curious: https://github.com/Wedge/wedge/blob/master/core/app/Class-Notification.php#L220
 2. Unfortunately, there are only 178 users who bothered to enter one... So, it's like 700 users don't care. :P) (And no, I can't get their e-mail address automatically, Steam doesn't provide it, thankfully. It *should* be on a voluntary basis.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on April 1st, 2017, 05:21 PM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on April 1st, 2017, 04:47 PM
I'd still have to bother with quantities, though...
I think having to fix quantities manually after syncing is a far less annoying thing then having to keep the lists up do date manually completely.
Tbh, to me the lack of a syncing function is a huge concern at the moment, and should be top of the priority list.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 1st, 2017, 07:20 PM
Again, what's next, asking me to sync with your steamtrades lists..? Because that's not impossible :-P

In fact there's another site I'd want to sync with in priority. You guys will understand when it's done. ;)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: joaoarena on April 1st, 2017, 09:17 PM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on April 1st, 2017, 07:20 PM
In fact there's another site I'd want to sync with in priority. You guys will understand when it's done. ;)
:hmm: are there any clues for us? :angel:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 1st, 2017, 10:43 PM
FIX: E-mail notifications for offers (accepted, declined) will now always be triggered immediately. That's a change from Barter where you had to wait for another site to parse its RSS :)

NEW: E-mail notifications now include a short text summary of the bundle offer. It's not perfect, I know. I'd rather send HTML, too, but I've noticed that sending in HTML tends to have Google flag my e-mails as Notifications (which, yeah, I *know* they are, but Google doesn't bother to give me a notification (sigh) on my phone when it's not a 'General tab' e-mail. Which defeats the purpose of these notifications entirely.)

@joaoarena, no, but you can ask me in private, I won't bite. :P
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 2nd, 2017, 05:14 PM
IMPROVED: The search engine is as close as possible to what I wanted. It features thumbnails (that load and show up in a fade-in effect), it gives you extra information to help you find your game (tells you if it's decommissioned, a Steam package, or an Origin or Uplay key...), mobile version takes up more space, I've fixed many of the bugs it used to have, and the sorting is now pretty, PRETTY accurate. I'm not going to reveal my algorithm but I found it was cool (and a quick trick, too.)
Oh, and if you can't find the game you're looking for after typing 5-6 characters, press Space then Backspace. It's sort of a cheat mode , not a bug. I could have fixed it but it helps compensate for issues that could come up with game names that are very common, such as typing 'the'... I may try to improve that in the future to avoid having to do that trick, though.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on April 2nd, 2017, 06:05 PM
Idea: Add to lists directly in the search field.
Is that possible? I got no idea, but it would be neat :D
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: PolyHertz on April 2nd, 2017, 06:07 PM
Search still doesn't show "D: The Game", and also the drop down seems to stretch as far to the right side of the browser as screen resolution will allow even though the games names are nowhere near long enough for it to be necessary.

Other then that, looks good so far.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 2nd, 2017, 06:19 PM
I tested in chrome and firefox and didn't have width issues.
The space + backspace trick isn't working, sorry. What I meant is backspace first, then another letter. In this case you can see D show up in first position. ;)

Adding from search box is actually a thing I looked into, but... it's a bit complicated. Js doesn't cooperate well. I'll try again later but right now I'll focus on using the new search engine to mass-add games in tradables. Eheh that was the plan all along.

Also, it doesn't really matter but my rewritten JavaScript code is several kilobytes shorter, saving a total of ~1000 bytes when loading the page without cache.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on April 2nd, 2017, 06:38 PM
The new search engine with the thumbnails is spot on!

I'd wish I could disable email notifications though.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 2nd, 2017, 10:45 PM
The problem with e-mail notifications is that I don't have e-mail addresses by default, so you have to enter them.
I respect e-mail notification settings for all other notification types (mentions, likes.. stuff that doesn't really matter!), but for offers, they have a direct influence on the sender of the notification. I found that Barter was more engaging once I went through the very convoluted system of adding my RSS feed to that external website and started getting notifications, so I feel like if you enter your e-mail address, it would be a shame not to use that. If you really change your mind, I can simply reset your e-mail address in the database, but it'll make you unable to receive any notifications until you re-enter it.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Quantum on April 3rd, 2017, 11:10 AM
Hmmm, I didn't have a default e-mail adress entered so when I tried to disable the checkbox for other users to send me e-mails I could not because the form wanted an e-mail address. So I ended up filling in a bogus e-mail address. That should also solve the issue of getting e-mails when you don't want to.

@Nao: I'm also posting this as this no doubt wasn't your intended solution, so might be useful for you as input to think of something better heh (I'd just allow users to not receive e-mails even for offers honestly, their responsibility and such).
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Silyus on April 3rd, 2017, 01:48 PM
I'm sorry for the slight OT, but is there any ETA for the export feature for wishlist and tradables?
Also I can't find a way to point to my tradables list with an unique url (useful to directly show my list to random internet guys and also indirectly promote letstrade).

Apologies if either or both these features are already present and I'm just too dumb to see them.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: PolyHertz on April 3rd, 2017, 02:28 PM
Search drop down width issue seems to be fixed, and even "D: The Game" shows up now.
Thanks for the speedy fixes!

btw, Castle of Illusion went back up on the Steam store a few days ago, still says Decommissioned here.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 3rd, 2017, 04:35 PM
Quote from Quantum on April 3rd, 2017, 11:10 AM
Hmmm, I didn't have a default e-mail adress entered so when I tried to disable the checkbox for other users to send me e-mails I could not because the form wanted an e-mail address. So I ended up filling in a bogus e-mail address.
So, you want the LT server to waste time receiving undelivered error messages every time you get an offer..? ^^
Default e-mail address? There's none, it's just empty to begin with... (?)

Okay, I added a quick hack to my code.
Now if you want to disable offer notifications, enter a dummy name (like your nickname), as long as it contains "disable" (so in your case, "quantum-disable" or "disable.quantum"), and as the domain name, use lestrades.com... LT will understand that you don't want to be bothered :P

Please change it to that, so the server doesn't waste time thanks ;)
Quote
@Nao: I'm also posting this as this no doubt wasn't your intended solution, so might be useful for you as input to think of something better heh (I'd just allow users to not receive e-mails even for offers honestly, their responsibility and such).
Nobody receives offer notifications by default. You have to enter your e-mail address. If you enter it, it's likely you're willing to receive offer notifications... No?
Quote from Silyus on April 3rd, 2017, 01:48 PM
I'm sorry for the slight OT, but is there any ETA for the export feature for wishlist and tradables?
Export feature? I have no plans for this in the near future. I'm sure @theemu- will write a user script if he feels like it, though ;)
Quote from Silyus on April 3rd, 2017, 01:48 PM
Also I can't find a way to point to my tradables list with an unique url (useful to directly show my list to random internet guys and also indirectly promote letstrade).
Should I add a 'permalink'..? Just go to your profile, and in the lower left, you'll see a Wishlist link, just use that, it's your permalink. (Same for all list types.)
Quote from PolyHertz on April 3rd, 2017, 02:28 PM
Search drop down width issue seems to be fixed, and even "D: The Game" shows up now.
Thanks for the speedy fixes!

btw, Castle of Illusion went back up on the Steam store a few days ago, still says Decommissioned here.
Yeah, I noticed the thumbnail came back in my inventory. ;) Ah well, it disappeared for 6 months, much 'adieu' about nothing :)
I talked last week with someone who wanted it in exchange for a $2.5 game, I nearly did the trade. As you can see, even while it was decommissioned, I didn't plan to make a huge profit off it (from $2!), so it doesn't matter to me. But still, I don't think the game is worth all that mess...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 3rd, 2017, 04:43 PM
FIX: Search engine should now work much better for very common or very short names. 'io' will show up first, 'D: The Game' will show up first as soon as you type 'd: the g', for instance. Common names are now ranked by length, and you no longer need to use the Backspace trick to make them show up.

Also fixed CoI to be un-decommissioned, this kind of thing needs to be done manually. Thankfully, it doesn't happen often. ;)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on April 3rd, 2017, 07:11 PM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on April 3rd, 2017, 04:35 PM
Quote from Silyus on April 3rd, 2017, 01:48 PM
Also I can't find a way to point to my tradables list with an unique url (useful to directly show my list to random internet guys and also indirectly promote letstrade).
Should I add a 'permalink'..? Just go to your profile, and in the lower left, you'll see a Wishlist link, just use that, it's your permalink. (Same for all list types.)
When I click on my profile there are no links on the left side, only when visiting other profiles.
I understand I just need to append /tradables, /wishlist, etc to the end of the URL. It is not straight-forward at first.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on April 3rd, 2017, 07:12 PM
I now realised there are more options on the profile page.
Got the options for the notifications in Modify Profile -> Notifications -> General.
Completely missed this. Shouldn't this also be on the profile menu on the top?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 3rd, 2017, 07:55 PM
The profile area is taken straight from my forum platform Wedge, which inherited the SMF platform. Forum users are at easy navigating these pages, but I'm aware that for those coming from barter, these features are overwhelming.

It's not a priority but I'll eventually out everything related to trading together into the main page.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: devotee on April 3rd, 2017, 09:17 PM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on April 1st, 2017, 10:43 PM
I know. I'd rather send HTML, too, but I've noticed that sending in HTML tends to have Google flag my e-mails as Notifications
The mail domain lestrades.com should be configured, too. SPF and DKIM records must be added, and a few administration e-mails too (noreply@ as the sender of the notifications and to collect bounces -instead of bouncing them back again-, and an admin e-mail if you want). Otherwise, the server could end in a few spam lists... Let me know if you want me to set up those.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Silyus on April 3rd, 2017, 09:19 PM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on April 3rd, 2017, 04:35 PM
Quote from Silyus on April 3rd, 2017, 01:48 PM
I'm sorry for the slight OT, but is there any ETA for the export feature for wishlist and tradables?
Export feature? I have no plans for this in the near future. I'm sure @theemu- will write a user script if he feels like it, though ;)
Yes, it's basically just a parser and it should be very useful (I used that a lot with barter)
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on April 3rd, 2017, 04:35 PM
Quote from Silyus on April 3rd, 2017, 01:48 PM
Also I can't find a way to point to my tradables list with an unique url (useful to directly show my list to random internet guys and also indirectly promote letstrade).
Should I add a 'permalink'..? Just go to your profile, and in the lower left, you'll see a Wishlist link, just use that, it's your permalink. (Same for all list types.)
Was unable to find it, however I noticed that my profile is accessible via https://lestrades.com/@silyus so I figured out my links by guessing:
https://lestrades.com/@silyus/wishlist
https://lestrades.com/@silyus/tradables

Seems to work, but please add a permalink notice on every list so it's more visible.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 3rd, 2017, 09:37 PM
(Edited your post to remove the domain... Obviously don't want e-mail harvesters to add that to their list of spammable e-mails!!)

Yeah, I don't know, I never really bothered about what e-mails sent to that address would do. It's customary to just ignore them anyway, or bounce them back... I don't know.
As for spam lists, obviously I'll do all it takes not to end up in those. ;)

Except it's just so complicated-- if I add an Unsubscribe link to e-mails, they'll be sorted as Promotion items by Gmail, making them less visible (unless you manually move one mail to your main inbox, and then set it up to always do that. But... Who knows their e-mail software well enough?)
I read on a website that you can add that link as a 'signature' to your e-mail, which sounds strange to me. I figured Gmail would immediately see an Unsubscribe link as what it is, rather than say "okay, it's after the -- signature mark, so who cares if it says buy vi@agr@ for $0.01 right now and get a free pen1s enl@arger? It's just a signature..."
Quote from Silyus on April 3rd, 2017, 09:19 PM
Seems to work, but please add a permalink notice on every list so it's more visible.
UPDATE: Added permalinks on all list pages.
UPDATE: Your own profile now shows your lists at the same place as other profiles do. It's mostly so as not to disrupt your experience, I'm not sure that box is necessary, especially after adding permalinks.

FIX: Users who have a Barter account and created it after March 23 should now be able to import their lists from Barter. If you can't see the button in your list pages, log out then log in again, should fix itself.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on April 3rd, 2017, 10:37 PM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on April 3rd, 2017, 09:37 PM
FIX: Users who have a Barter account and created it after March 23 should now be able to import their lists from Barter. If you can't see the button in your list pages, log out then log in again, should fix itself.
Still a one-time import?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 3rd, 2017, 11:41 PM
Ahhhhhh....
Why does everybody keep asking for me to sync lists with a website that was dead a week ago... -_-
Each minute I spend answering these requests is a minute not spent on getting to feature parity with it.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on April 4th, 2017, 12:08 AM
Because it is an important feature, at least at the moment.
Barter has a far easier system to manage tradables / wishlist / blacklist. I recognize thats something you may be working on, but at the moment that is a fact.

I believe Lestrades is probably the more futureproof site. But at the moment, barter is bigger.
And i won't manage my lists on both sides. I added ~2000 titles to my blacklist recently. I sure as hell won't do that again here.

Same for managing tradables. Im active at multiple platforms (Barter, lestrades, reddit, Steamtrades etc).
If i trade 10 games away at another site, i need to do 10 game searches here to update my list. I wont do that. That's bad user experience.
Maybe it does not need a barter sync, but mass adding / deleting titles, list matching etc is an absolute MUST to keep the userbase here active.

Again, i absolutely mean no disrespect. I'm pretty active here because i recognize and honor the hard work you do.
But the lack of easy ways to update my lists keeps me from using this site efficiently.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: chaosfrost on April 4th, 2017, 08:34 AM
Seeing you working with search engine i came here to thank you for good work and write about one issue i found.

I prefer to copy-paste game names to search field rather than typing it. And if game name includes (') apostrophe, search not showing anything.  Grand Pigeon's Duty for example. I must delete parts of game name to get it to work.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 4th, 2017, 01:13 PM
I'll look into it. Game is properly set in the database, must be an anti-injection measure, but it should at least have sanitized it...

BTW, has anyone ever looked into the state of their wishlist after they completed trades..?
My issue is that none of my trades removed things from my wishlist after hitting Completed. I triple-checked my code and it *should* work. I've even done tests on a secondary table and it works there... But I don't get a lot of offers or accepts, so it's hard to test on a real-life trading situation I guess. (Plus, last time I traded, I forgot to check that. >_<)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 4th, 2017, 01:20 PM
FIX: games with a single quote in their title couldn't be found directly.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Pika! Pika! on April 4th, 2017, 05:24 PM
Quote from chaosfrost on April 4th, 2017, 08:34 AM
Seeing you working with search engine i came here to thank you for good work and write about one issue i found.

I prefer to copy-paste game names to search field rather than typing it. And if game name includes (') apostrophe, search not showing anything.  Grand Pigeon's Duty for example. I must delete parts of game name to get it to work.
The items on the Wishlist currently are never removed after completing a trade. Only a copy of the traded item is removed from Tradables.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 4th, 2017, 10:46 PM
Yeah that's so weird.
I really need to fix that. :-/

Send me your fair offers so I can test while trading :niark:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 5th, 2017, 12:08 AM
NEW: Steam library syncing :)

https://lestrades.com/general/51/about-steam-syncing/
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 5th, 2017, 10:16 AM
NEW: Game pages now show who owns the game, and sorts users by playtime. So now you can find fellow fans of your favorite games! :)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 5th, 2017, 04:33 PM
NEW: Can now add multiple games directly from your Tradables, Wishlist or Blacklist. :)

Short guide: go to your list, click the 'Bulk Add' link next to the sort box at the top, then enter your list of games, like you'd do at Barter.
As indicated, I chose not to remove duplicates. I'll add a quick change to tell you if a game is already in that list, should avoid accidents.

I hope you'll like the feature. And now you'll probably understand why I was so adamant to improve the real-time search engine. As shown it, it can be used everywhere, for good measure!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: joaoarena on April 5th, 2017, 05:49 PM
Nice, the bulk function is a relief :^^;:

And it is nice to find out who also plays our most played games ;)
In my case, clicker games, lol, the most time consuming games.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 5th, 2017, 06:25 PM
I don't understand people's interest in clickers... I mean, they have no goals. Once you see all their content (which is usually crappy), you're done.
Just do like me-- fire up CheatEngine, search for your money data, then set it to high amounts. The more variables you manage to hack, the faster you can go. I finished most of my clickers (Adventure Capitalist among them) in just a few hours. And I can assure you, they have nothing to show. ^^
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on April 5th, 2017, 06:38 PM
Works like a charm!
Maybe highliggt the "Ignore this"-Button for duplicate entries a bit, or add an "ignore all"-button for duplicates.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: PolyHertz on April 5th, 2017, 07:07 PM
Would it be possible to create a feature to sync lestrades blacklist with SteamGifts manually filtered/hidden giveaways? That is, for once lestrade allows for non-wishlist trades (as far as I know its still wishlist only?)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: joaoarena on April 5th, 2017, 09:24 PM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on April 5th, 2017, 06:25 PM
I don't understand people's interest in clickers... I mean, they have no goals. Once you see all their content (which is usually crappy), you're done.
Just do like me-- fire up CheatEngine, search for your money data, then set it to high amounts. The more variables you manage to hack, the faster you can go. I finished most of my clickers (Adventure Capitalist among them) in just a few hours. And I can assure you, they have nothing to show. ^^
Cheating would take all of the fun out of it. The goal is to figure out the best possible way to gain more in the less time possible.
I mean, some are dull, but others are really engaging.
There is one that is almost completely GUI-less that is really really mathematically great: Idling to Rule the Gods  go figure out why people like to play it. I do.

Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on April 5th, 2017, 09:25 PM
Some statistics:

Adding 4000 games at once crashed on me.
Adding 500 at once was smooth like butter.
Adding 1000 at once took a second to load, but afterwards worked fine. 
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 5th, 2017, 09:56 PM
Does it crash after entering the text list, or after confirming the additions on the following page?
I'm not going to even try & fix something like that anyway. The feature is there for adding 10 or 20 entries at a time, while it's manageable (which is the reason why you're seeing nice little dropdown with banners and everything -- it looks great, doesn't it? It makes adding games funnier.)
You could go to a few hundreds at a time of course, but above that it's just trying to mess things up. Why would you add 5000 entries to your blacklist anyway? When I'll eventually be adding a feature to auto-blacklist anything that has certain tags or rating or whatever? (Which I really think is smarter than actually storing the game IDs in the database...)

If everyone added 5000 games to their blacklist, I for sure would find it good enough of a reason to remove that feature entirely, even before I start using it in the offer system...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on April 5th, 2017, 10:22 PM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on April 5th, 2017, 09:56 PM
Does it crash after entering the text list, or after confirming the additions on the following page?
After entering the text list. Didn't respond for some minutes, the i just closed it.
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on April 5th, 2017, 09:56 PM
I'm not going to even try & fix something like that anyway. The feature is there for adding 10 or 20 entries at a time, while it's manageable (which is the reason why you're seeing nice little dropdown with banners and everything -- it looks great, doesn't it? It makes adding games funnier.)
I don't think it needs fixing. I was just providing some data =)
After i made this "basic blacklist", standard use case will probably be only to add a few titles at a time.

And yes, the system looks really good.
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on April 5th, 2017, 09:56 PM
You could go to a few hundreds at a time of course, but above that it's just trying to mess things up.
1000 at a time seemed to be the sweet spot.
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on April 5th, 2017, 09:56 PM
Why would you add 5000 entries to your blacklist anyway?
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on April 5th, 2017, 09:56 PM
If everyone added 5000 games to their blacklist, I for sure would find it good enough of a reason to remove that feature entirely, even before I start using it in the offer system...
I use it to blacklist the games i own, because my main account is not public (and will never be, and never will login on a browser).
So i can't import my library from there. Furthermore, of course, i use it to block the really bad bundle trash i just don't want to see anymore.

The account i use for trading only has a small number of games (because steamtrades has a "account worth"-limit).
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 5th, 2017, 10:24 PM
Quote from joaoarena on April 5th, 2017, 09:24 PM
Cheating would take all of the fun out of it. The goal is to figure out the best possible way to gain more in the less time possible.
CheatEngine allows me to figure out the best possible way to cheat the system without having to pay a cent for the empty feeling of being able to, uh, see their meager content. Don't get me wrong, game authors need to make a living too, but I don't consider clickers 'games'... Most of them are just shovelware, like all those $0.05 games that bring you back $0.06 worth of cards. "Oh, what a bargain, I have to buy this and farm it for 5 hours, I'll make a cent out of it!" :P (Yeah, I fell into that trap once...)
I remember I liked 'Crush Crush' because it played on the tropes of dating sims, but even that game wasn't very good. There was another clicker that sort of had multiple gameplay screens in a medieval setting, I liked it as well but I can't even remember its name, that goes to show... Oh, recently I played Tapocalypse, what a turd. It has like 5 or 6 very similar environments, and is so basic, it completely wastes its wasteland setting. Pun intended.
To each their own vices, I guess :P But I find clickers to be way more enjoyable when I manage to break them. That's where the game lies, for me. Some clickers even protect their memory, and I found other ways to make them bend.
Just good old fun. :lol:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 5th, 2017, 10:30 PM
Quote from /u/humpaaa on April 5th, 2017, 10:22 PM
After entering the text list. Didn't respond for some minutes, the i just closed it.
Well, it does do one search per item...
I could limit the server load by only taking the first result in the list (I did that this morning then figured it'd be more helpful if I offered more choices. Because I could?!)
Even that... That's too much.
Quote from /u/humpaaa on April 5th, 2017, 10:22 PM
So i can't import my library from there. Furthermore, of course, i use it to block the really bad bundle trash i just don't want to see anymore.

The account i use for trading only has a small number of games (because steamtrades has a "account worth"-limit).
Ah, so you're a professional trader ::)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 5th, 2017, 10:31 PM
Quote from PolyHertz on April 5th, 2017, 07:07 PM
Would it be possible to create a feature to sync lestrades blacklist with SteamGifts manually filtered/hidden giveaways? That is, for once lestrade allows for non-wishlist trades (as far as I know its still wishlist only?)
I don't use SteamGifts. At all. I don't understand a thing about it. I'm basically the last person to be able to help you here.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 5th, 2017, 10:32 PM
Quote from /u/humpaaa on April 5th, 2017, 06:38 PM
Works like a charm!
Maybe highliggt the "Ignore this"-Button for duplicate entries a bit, or add an "ignore all"-button for duplicates.
I think the red text below dupe entries should be enough... No?

I'm also going to stop duplicate entries from showing up in wishlists. There's no reason to wishlist the same item (from the same store) twice... At best you could set quantity to x2 (when I get to implement that.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on April 5th, 2017, 11:34 PM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on April 5th, 2017, 10:32 PM
I think the red text below dupe entries should be enough... No?
When selecting it to click on "ignore this", it is a white box on white background, which is a bit hard to see.
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on April 5th, 2017, 10:30 PM
Ah, so you're a professional trader ::)
I wouldn't call me a professional trader (as in: For profit trader). I just value my main accounts privacy.
Im an active trader at multiple platforms (reddit, steamtrades, barter, lestrades, but not at G2A, fuck these guys), but only trade my own keys / my own bundle leftovers. I don't trade for profit, i just try to  keep a professional look. :P
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 5th, 2017, 11:36 PM
NEW: Offer creation page adds a small 'x' button next to previewed items. Guess what it does..? Yes, it removes those items in a proper way, rather than force you uncheck it from the list (I hated that too, mind you.) In fact it's just a shortcut-- it does the uncheck for you, as well as update the preview immediately, and reposition the page to the same area. I give myself a B+.

FIX: Previously, if you had for instance a 4 out of 4 side in an offer, removing an item and clicking Preview would show '4 out of 3'. I don't believe the offer would have been created as a 4 of 3, rather fixed to 3 of 3 automatically, but at least it's better that Preview pages now show the correct number.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 5th, 2017, 11:37 PM
Quote from /u/humpaaa on April 5th, 2017, 11:34 PM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on April 5th, 2017, 10:32 PM
I think the red text below dupe entries should be enough... No?
When selecting it to click on "ignore this", it is a white box on white background, which is a bit hard to see.
Err... Really? I'm seeing the text in black..?
Dunno what you mean. The fact that there isn't a banner next to it?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on April 5th, 2017, 11:46 PM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on April 5th, 2017, 11:37 PM
Err... Really? I'm seeing the text in black..?
Dunno what you mean. The fact that there isn't a banner next to it?
It's really just a minor annoyance.
It's black text on a white background, and the surrounding window (like, the main canvas, unused space) is white aswell.
It's not about the text, but the clickable space vs the background of the lestrades homepage.
Maybe an empty banner would help, in my opinion it would look better.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 6th, 2017, 12:59 AM
I'd need opinions on that.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 6th, 2017, 07:05 PM
FIX: since last night, the website had performance issues when matching, or doing anything with wishlists.
I was at a loss and thought it was a server-side issue. It was, but it was caused by a change I did to the wishlist table indexes yesterday. There's a little known oddity to multi-column indexes that I wasn't aware of, and it was the cause of the mess. Everything should be back to normal now.

I apologize for the time it took; devotee had to be available to reboot servers to allow me some time to fix the index. (I propose a poll to convince devotee to give me the ability to reboot servers if they freeze everything :P)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 7th, 2017, 12:13 AM
FIX: You may remember this dreaded problem where completed offers removed your tradables properly, but not your wishlisted items...?
Okay, that's fixed. That was a terrible oversight from me, a delicate detail of the offer system that I didn't notice at first.
Ironically, that very problem could only be fixed by what I did yesterday (preventing duplicates in wishlists, i.e. same game & same platform), although it was totally unrelated.
It should work from now on. Sadly, there is no easy way for me to fix previous completed trades, so I'm counting on you guys to go through your previously completed trades, and delete items from your wishlist if you have them now and don't want them anymore.

Also, regarding Steam inventory items (tf2/csgo keys, ToD's, etc.), they won't be removed from wishlist & tradables when a trade is completed. They'll just see their quantity decrease. If they reach 0, then they'll stay that way. I think it's more in line with what we're used to doing.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: chaosfrost on April 7th, 2017, 11:27 AM
Today every time i want to manually delete a game from my wishlist i get database error. Game removes from wishlist though.

Please try again. If you come back to this error screen, report the error to an administrator.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 7th, 2017, 01:12 PM
Thanks, didn't notice that error. Was something I introduced by mistake earlier today.

Also:

FIX (if it can be called a fix because it was already good enough...): sorting on your lists should now be up to twice faster. Especially noticeable on large lists, e.g. your library.
Also, can now sort libraries by Recent/Older. Although currently you probably won't notice a difference, since everything is imported by batches... ^^
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 8th, 2017, 12:00 AM
NEW: Offer history with a specific user now shows up at the bottom of their profile.

As a reminder, while there are still features missing but planned (counter-offer, fail, agreed to cancel, comments...), offers at LT's are (willingly) more permissive than on Barter: you can send several offers in parallel (e.g. you wanna offer bundle items for bundle items, but you're also interested in bigger items so you just send another offer with unbundled for unbundled items), and canceled offers are visible as well. (I'm planning to eventually add a clean-up job to delete canceled offers after a week or two, to avoid cluttering your history.) Ultimately, remember that you can start sending an offer and keep it online for a while, it'll never be auto-sent or auto-canceled, and the other trader will never know there's an offer being created. I wasn't particularly fond of that Barter feature, so... Just being more permissive is the word here.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on April 8th, 2017, 12:49 AM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on April 8th, 2017, 12:00 AM
As a reminder, while there are still features missing but planned (counter-offer, fail, agreed to cancel, comments...), offers at LT's are (willingly) more permissive than on Barter: you can send several offers in parallel (e.g. you wanna offer bundle items for bundle items, but you're also interested in bigger items so you just send another offer with unbundled for unbundled items), and canceled offers are visible as well. (I'm planning to eventually add a clean-up job to delete canceled offers after a week or two, to avoid cluttering your history.) Ultimately, remember that you can start sending an offer and keep it online for a while, it'll never be auto-sent or auto-canceled, and the other trader will never know there's an offer being created. I wasn't particularly fond of that Barter feature, so... Just being more permissive is the word here.
On that note... if the tab gets closed, how can I get to the offer again?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 8th, 2017, 01:13 AM
Depending on the browser you can undo that....
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 8th, 2017, 03:39 PM
NEW: once an offer is accepted, the call to action includes clickable links to sending a PM or adding on Steam. ;)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 8th, 2017, 05:51 PM
FIX: unique trades were improperly calculated for the first trader to hit 'complete'. This should either fix itself when you next complete a trade, or can be fixed manually by going to your profile page, and then adding ?unique at the end of the URL. If it doesn't get recalculated and you're sure you did more unique trades, post here. (I insist on 'unique', not 'total'.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 8th, 2017, 08:02 PM
FIX: offer histories on game pages were giving erroneous dates on the 'Ends' column, implying all of the existing offers had just expired. Oops.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 8th, 2017, 09:49 PM
As I said on another topic, new: you can now view game trading tags from both sides of an offer. Unfortunately it's... pretty complicated. I tried to adopt color codes (blue = your tags, yellow = theirs), but even those are inverted in a folder places. Yeah really, it's a bit messy. As I call them, works in progress...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 9th, 2017, 01:12 PM
NEW: mobile view now shows the clickable LT logo at the top, having made more room by hiding the Notifications and My Messages labels. There are now icons for those. Not happy with them (PM icon is the same as the Offer icon... And default icons on mobile suck, I need to replace them with SVG icons.) But that'll do for now.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 9th, 2017, 06:34 PM
NEW: Semi-automatic clean-up of your wishlist.

Go to your Library page, click Sync with Steam.
Go to your Wishlist. If you have anything on your wishlist that's already in your library, LT will list them for you, and give you 3 possible choices for each entry:
- (not always there) If item was actually removed from library (revoked), you can click to tell LT to remove it from your library, not from your wishlist.
- If you traded for the item elsewhere, you can click to Remove from wishlist. (This is good for those of you who completed offers before I fixed the wishlist bug.)
- If you have the game but want extra copies, you can click to automatically add an Extra tag. You won't be bothered anymore by the message :)

Notes:
- This makes it easier to manually sync with Barter, for those inclined to do it.
- This is the first 'visible' implementation of tag editing. Just to show that it's implemented; only the UI is missing for it. (Plus it was buggy, I fixed it in time for this feature.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 9th, 2017, 07:10 PM
PS: I may have forgotten to upload the public version of the wishlist clean tool. In case you went and didn't find anything, feel free to try again. ;)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 10th, 2017, 12:41 AM
Note: the notification buttons are currently broken on some desktop browsers (they work on mobile browsers).
This is due to a problem with the click event's propagation from child elements to the parent element. I'll fix that tomorrow.
In the meantime, you can open your notifications by clicking a couple of pixels to the left of the number in orange -- you need to click outside of the orange background, but your cursor needs to remain a hand pointer. Also works by clicking to the right of the notification icon, or above and below the notification label. Yeah, I should simply say, "click the border of the gray background that shows up when you hover the notification area."
Sorry, I'm just too tired. Off to bed!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 10th, 2017, 03:02 PM
FIX: in game pages, you will no longer see a list of 'accepted offers' for that game when it was in a multiple choice offer and it didn't get selected in the final trade. (That's a problem I noticed at Barter for all the time I used it, thought I'd fix it on my side...)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 10th, 2017, 03:19 PM
FIX: notification button not clickable on desktop browsers. Was due to being forced to put the labels into a span, and thus the event.target variable no longer referred to the button, but to the span. Ah, well...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 10th, 2017, 03:35 PM
NEW: Matches now show you the number of offers you sent or received to/from users shown.
The query is fast enough to consider listing all offers as done on Barter, but I find it to be cumbersome. Maybe something like only showing pending offers only..? Or a link to the latest offer, whether it's pending or not? I don't know. Number of offers seems good enough to me, saves you from having to check user profiles just to see if you sent them an offer for a particular game before.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 11th, 2017, 10:15 PM
NEW: the Offers tab at the top of every page now indicates the number of active trade offers, excluding canceled, declined and fully completed trades.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 12th, 2017, 02:59 PM
NEW: added, per an older request, a 'back to top' link on all pages, left of the 'Powered by Wedge' mention at the bottom. Yes it's a mustache. Maybe it's Lestrade's mustache. You can click it or stroke it, it's your life.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on April 12th, 2017, 03:02 PM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on April 12th, 2017, 02:59 PM
Maybe it's Lestrade's mustache. You can click it or stroke it, it's your life.
*strokes vigorously
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 12th, 2017, 03:12 PM
* it seems to like it.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 12th, 2017, 03:48 PM
FIX: tradables and wishlists now show store icons again. I didn't even notice that bug before now. It was due to an unrelated fix in library lists where sorting by date added was broken. Ahhh, the joys of fixing bugs on a production website... :)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 13th, 2017, 09:53 PM
FIX: broken header in mobile mode when hitting the Search input. Also used the opportunity to use the LT logo gracefully (animated) and remove that ugly outline.
Also other minor fixes and improvements in the CSS.
Posted: April 13th, 2017, 02:19 PM

FIX: fixed checkbox and X button positioning next to banners in offer pages. Fixed Steam items (keys, tod..) not having a banner, made a nice basic banner for them. (Didn't like Barter's own :P)

Currently working on offer comments...
Posted: April 13th, 2017, 06:26 PM

FIX: the 'back to top' button wasn't working on mobile. (Also changed the { moustache to a proper moustache. That'd be a good favicon for the site if I could fit it in 16x16 without sacrificing detail... I like the symbolism of having two opposite sides of the same thing. ;))
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on April 13th, 2017, 10:16 PM
It even moves!
*stroking intensifies
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 13th, 2017, 10:46 PM
I made it move yesterday after your post, I thought you'd noticed lol.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 14th, 2017, 02:59 PM
FIX: Crashes when accepting an offer. Finding out the source of this problem was brutal, but basically, it happened every time someone sent an offer then later removed one of the future accepted items from their tradables. LT was unable to find an entry for it, and would return an empty number, which would crash the page. I've fixed the crash situation (it'll now simply ignore empty entries), as well as added a notice to users if the tradable can't be found, before they accept the offer. (Untested, but it should work.)

And 300 posts :)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: joaoarena on April 14th, 2017, 03:00 PM
Quote from /u/humpaaa on April 13th, 2017, 10:16 PM
It even moves!
*stroking intensifies
Yeah! I can't resist passing the mouse over it again and again, every time I get near the bottom. Adictive!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 17th, 2017, 04:40 PM
NEW: Game comments! You can now add a comment on any game page. Your comments will show up in threaded mode. Please remember: if you want to reply to someone's comment, click on 'Reply' in the Actions sub-menu, so that your answer will show up below their comment. I need to work on my UI for this. :)

NEW: Offer comments! You can now add a comment on any offer of yours. Your comments will show up flat (à la BVG, recent first).

NEW: Offer comment notifications! Well, it may seem obvious, but I know of some sites that don't do it. ;) You get a notification if the other party in the offer: (1) posted a comment in an empty offer or a reply to a comment of yours, (2) posted a follow-up comment to their own comment at least 24 hours after the previous one (I don't want to encourage a 'bump!' situation.)

I ended up spending a good portion of the week on this feature, and it's still likely to have bugs. Please give it an extra 24 to 48 hours for the feature to be considered solid enough! But I haven't seen bugs in a while, so it should be ready for immediate use.
Posted: April 17th, 2017, 04:30 PM

PS: as I realize none of you ever used Wedge before, I should specify a few things:
- Comments are limited to 255 characters (the infamous byte limit) -- I could increase that limit, but don't really see a point. It's long enough for most situations, and you can always post follow-ups. Opinions welcome.
- You can edit your comments as much as you want. The 'sent' date is only modified if someone posted in that thread after you sent your comment, IIRC. You can also delete your comments. If someone already replied to your comment, the parent will be shown as '(Deleted)'.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 18th, 2017, 12:03 AM
NEW: Added clear links for threaded & chronological (flat) sort order for comments. You can now switch between the two at any time, and get called a dickhead twice for the price of one. :niark:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 18th, 2017, 12:35 AM
NEW: (Forgot to mention) Offers are now sorted in a more readable way, i.e. status first, then date second. Completed offers are at the very end, preceded by Canceled, then Declined, then at the top you should find the Unread offers first, then the Pending (active) ones.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 19th, 2017, 12:44 AM
FIX: E-mail notifications were handling non-ASCII characters (™, 尚, àéôüì, whatever you want...) incorrectly, turning them into &# entities. I finally fixed(https://github.com/Wedge/wedge/commit/5973daccdc177d9b51867e205c9e83fd73b84702) that awful bug that plagued Wedge for over 3 years, and it was due to... a PHP comment that ended with a ":-\" smiley. Emphasis on the backslash and the fact that it was at the end of the line. Because of that, the following line of code was never executed (yeah, it's silly!), and thus the characters were always converted to entities.

FIX?: H:W ratios weren't being properly calculated (they used to, but I introduced a bug after I added the Bulk Add feature, due to my function being a jack of all trades and overly complicated.) I fixed it by making it... even more complicated. Okay, so it means I'm not 100% sure it'll work in every situation. I've also added a scheduled task that properly recalculates all ratios for all games every 10 minutes, and adds an entry to my error log if any inconsistencies were found, it hasn't found any discrepancies in the last hour so it's looking good. Gosh, I hate caching that data...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 19th, 2017, 03:23 PM
NEW: Game comments are now shown on the homepage... I was thinking of showing comments, and then I figured it'd be cleaner to show the game links.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 19th, 2017, 04:29 PM
FIX: Game ratios should be 100% fixed now. I'd fixed most of them yesterday but still had rarer issues. I ended up adding a trace and contacted one of the users who triggered an error, turned out they'd used bulk add (duh, I didn't bother to test with these...), and it was due to a security measure that would prevent updating ratios if a string was == 0. Except in PHP, == 0 on a non-numerical string always return true... The irony is, up until yesterday I was using === 0 instead of == 0, lol.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on April 19th, 2017, 11:39 PM
Have been away for the easter holiday. Just came back home, and there's so much new stuff to discover!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 20th, 2017, 01:18 AM
And more to come! Yes, and I'm pretty happy that LT is really starting to take shape. It does plenty of things differently from Barter, and hopefully in the 'right' direction.

I'm aiming to have list editing ready in time for the first month's anniversary of the trading system. I can't honestly see myself asking for more time to get it done. ;)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 20th, 2017, 04:20 PM
FIX: Search engine will now properly find games like 'M.A.C.E.' if you type 'm.a' for instance.

Note: if you find other games that are difficult to find because of how they're spelled out, feel free to contact me and I'll try to accomodate for them and future games like them!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 20th, 2017, 04:45 PM
FIX: Incorrect ratios after an offer was marked Completed. Yeah, it's never ending is it..? Hopefully it is. It was another problem on my side, a wrong copy & paste from another part of my code, where I forgot to search an array by value instead of key. Who cares. I didn't notice any other ratio discrepancies outside of those caused by offers completed today on Lestrade's, so it should be good this time.

Now I can focus on... Something else :D
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 20th, 2017, 06:58 PM
NEW AND MUCH AWAITED: Change your tradable quantities & stores from within the game page. (At last!)

Tested: well, changing quantities and stores :P
Untested: doing that for multiple (existing) entries (should work! I need to allow adding multiple entries now.)
To do: add & remove tags from that area
To do: same thing but on list pages ;)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on April 20th, 2017, 07:40 PM
Amazing work, Tested quantities, works really well.
For stores: Where exactly is shown what store something is from?
For example: i changed store and quantity of my Poly Bridge. Then went to my tradables --> Quantity was updated, but i saw no store icon.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 20th, 2017, 09:07 PM
I remember making a few changes to stores last minute and only did my final check on quantities. It did work at one point though so if it's a small bug I'll take care of it when I'm back on my pc.
I should also add the rest of the editable fields tomorrow at the worst. Now that the ui is up and running (and dead simple which is important to me because I keep writing complicated uis), it should be easy to add the rest.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 20th, 2017, 10:45 PM
Okay, fixed :)

I also fixed 'gift' items to show a proper icon. Contrary to Barter, I wanted to have a clear icon showing both the store and the 'gift' status. These are temporary icons, just wouldn't bother too much. Also, the Indiegala icon was changed recently, so I updated it yesterday, too.

Tested on a few items, both quantity and store, both worked fine. Can even tell you the store bug was introduced 7 minutes before I posted the news, ah ah. It was due to a simplification of my code that went too far. (As I said, I need my code to be as clear as possible, otherwise it creates problems like the ratio calculator. And yes, the ratio calculator is still buggy somewhere. This is getting funny. It's fine because it's auto-fixed every 10 minutes, but I'm gonna get you little bug!)

I have about an hour's worth of free time to try & implement more tags and possibly even do it on list pages... (Because, well, for mass updates it's not ideal for now...)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 20th, 2017, 11:02 PM
FIX: Ratios :lol: for the 3rd time, ahah. This one was triggered by the recent added feature of offering to remove items from your wishlist when they were already in your library. Turns out the ratio calculator needed a game ID and I was only sending it a wishlist ID. So, yeah, that would fail.

I'm crossing my fingers and severely hoping this was the last of the ratio bugs! :geek: :ph34r:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on April 20th, 2017, 11:13 PM
Yep, works fine now.

One more thing: If a user has multiple copies, he shows up multiple time on the games page, instead of "Username x5" or something like that.

https://imgur.com/a/cFJUd
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 21st, 2017, 12:56 AM
(It's as designed, in case the trader is quite anal about tagging both copies differently. Remember, I show all tags in the game pages.)

NEW: You can set a game's quantity to ∞ (infinity), in case you have an endless supply of copies (e.g. you wrote the game) or simply don't want to remove the item from your tradables after you traded it.
NOTE: Steam items (tf2 key, cs:go key, ToD, ref, etc.) are NOT removed from your tradables/wishlist once they reach zero quantity. It's the only exception to the rule, in order to make it simpler to re-add more copies.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: joaoarena on April 21st, 2017, 08:43 AM
I like that latest improvements :)  Now I don't feel lost, and no more need to check elsewhere where the tradable is hidden :)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 21st, 2017, 11:52 AM
Yeah, making progress :)

NEW: Added the bundle stores that BVG added in the last month. I'm not really sure it's worth it, though... For instance, "Bread Box Bundle" was around for a bundle or two in the Summer of 2016, I never heard of them before, and their website doesn't even work anymore. I don't see much of a point in saying "This key is from Bread Box" rather than just "It's a generic key"... Added an icon for 99 Cent Bundle (which BVG doesn't have), although it sucks. Well, all in all that 99 Cent website is really, really so amateurish... Doesn't really inspire me.

NEW: Added GOG.com to your store choices, too. Why? Because they *do* have a key system. You can see it this week on HumbleBundle, but I also have a key for Witcher 1 and one for Neverwinter Nights 1 (which isn't listed in the database, I really should work on this...), so yes it's very much possible. The simplest way to get a 'key' is to buy a game as a gift. You'll get a key for it. If you buy several games as a single gift, however, you'll get a single key that gives you the ability to redeem any of the games. You can then re-share the key with someone else, who can redeem one or more of the remaining games and then pass it on, etc. Not a big fan of that system, but it's there at least.

FIX: Private comments on games 'bumped' said games to the homepage without any way to know what they're about. I'd forgotten to take privacy into account when listing the games, it's now fixed. (Fear not, it was the first time in a while I was writing a query using comments, shouldn't happen again.) (And yes, you can set privacy settings in your comments. But I wouldn't recommend that. Think of it mostly... As a way to write a comment draft, or maybe cancel a comment while keeping it online for you to read/rewrite.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 21st, 2017, 04:23 PM
NEW: Wishlisted items are now taggable as well. I guess this'll be mostly of interest to 'business' traders who will be able to specify which type of key they want, and select '∞' to indicate they want as many copies as possible.

FIX: 'Infinite' now actually means infinite, not just '999 copies'. I need to test this further but it should be good. Infinite quantities are also indicated as ∞ in lists.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 22nd, 2017, 12:40 AM
NEW: At last, the user tag editor is here :)

I hope you'll like it. As for quantities and store, any tag you select is immediately added (or removed from) your tradable copy. You don't even have to close the dropdown for that (if the 'Updated!' message fades in, then you're good), meaning you can simply click the dropdown, scroll, select a couple of tags you want to use (just click them!), and you can simply go back one page to select another game to tag.
I believe it's way simpler and more 'natural' than BVG's method of reloading the page for every tag you add or remove.

I think all of BVG's tags are in there (dunno if any were added in the last month...), they're sorted by usage; I simply removed the cs:go, tf2, ref etc. keys, because they're going to be irrelevant soon enough. (Plus, err... yes, I suppose I can add an input area inside the dropdown to allow you to select a quantity for these items, but... I can see this taking another day of work, no thank you for now.)

I put a lot of effort into that one, I hope you'll appreciate the fine usability. Please tell me if you find any bugs. Please tell me if you like it or hate it.

Coming soon (hopefully this weekend if I find some time to code): editing entries from within list pages.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: joaoarena on April 22nd, 2017, 06:50 PM
Like it :) hope we can cumulate tags. I'll try it as soon as I get home.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 22nd, 2017, 06:52 PM
Of course you can cumulate them. Otherwise there wouldn't be check boxes next to tag names ;)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: joaoarena on April 23rd, 2017, 07:57 PM
:whistle: did not saw checkboxes lol
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 23rd, 2017, 09:33 PM
Even if you didn't see checkboxes, you probably noticed that clicking a tag wouldn't automatically close the dropdown, unlike all other dropdowns on the site... ;) That's a 'hint' that the site invites you to add more tags. ;)

BVG does it this way: checkbox on a game in your list, then click on the tag dropdown, scroll, find the tag you want, click to add it. Confirm. Wait for page to reload. Find another tag the same way... Add it. Oops, made a mistake, didn't want to add that tag? 'Just' click on the tag dropdown, and find the 'Erase trading tags' option (or something like that), and start over.

I've tagged many a game on BVG, and it was always very slow and annoying. With Lestrade's, game tagging is really fast and easy to do.
The only thing that's missing is editing right from list pages (because I'm not sure yet what method I'll use, but I'm leaning towards a JavaScript implementation), but once it's done, nobody will be able to say it's easier to tag games on BVG. Up until now, everyone could say it was 'impossible' to tag games on LT. But the reason I made you guys wait is because I wanted to get tagging right, like it is now. I'll try to have tag editing on list pages up by tomorrow, I just need to recover a bit from today's stress (long trek outside + voting + following voting results).
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on April 23rd, 2017, 10:04 PM
I always hated the list management at barter. List editing and tagging is so sluggish.
The fact that adding a game to a list takes you away from the game page, etc etc.

There is so much stuff done so much better here.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: joaoarena on April 23rd, 2017, 11:19 PM
I agree, love how it is here.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 23rd, 2017, 11:42 PM
Quote from /u/humpaaa on April 23rd, 2017, 10:04 PM
I always hated the list management at barter. List editing and tagging is so sluggish.
The fact that adding a game to a list takes you away from the game page, etc etc.

There is so much stuff done so much better here.
Thanks :thanks:

FIX: Sorting lists by names will now take case into account (lowercase names no longer will show up after Z names), at least on browsers that support localeCompare (modern ones!). As an added bonus, it should also be faster than the old sorting method, even where localeCompare isn't supported. :)

(I'd received a request for that, so I looked into it... I was mostly looking into improving sorting overall for all sorting methods, but it's hard.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 24th, 2017, 12:12 AM
Well, that was hard but... quick..?

FIX: Overall list sorting is now twice faster. ;)

For the technical minded: 1/3 of the time spent on sorting items is finding nodes, iterating them and sorting them in the DOM. I couldn't get it to run faster by using native methods (rather than jQuery) for some reason, so I'm sticking to jQuery for now. However, the remaining 2/3 is spent on the actual mathematical sorting (comparing nodes between them). I tried to find a faster method than .data('id') recently and noticed .getAttribute('data-id') was much faster. Today I experimented with actually caching the data id in the node itself, and... Well, it worked. The first run will cache data at least once so it's about twice faster faster (maybe more), any subsequent runs (less likely to be used but still..) will be nearly instantaneous. You may never notice those, but if you start sorting your library and you have thousands of items on it, it may be welcome.

Also, FIX: sorting by rating was always incorrect before. (Can't believe nobody noticed before. ^^)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 25th, 2017, 11:15 AM
NEW: Ability to send a Steam client chat message from someone's LT profile page. If they're not in your friends, nothing will happen so it's safe. (I basically just reused the link Steam has on their website. ;))

Currently working on several features at the same time. Wish me luck, because it's a bit overwhelming ahah...

PS: I reverted some of the improvements I made 2 days ago on list sorting. It turned out that data caching didn't help with performance at all, my guess is that I made my initial tests on devotee's huge library and then after implementing the cache I tested on my own library instead, which is over twice shorter, so it'd explain the better performance, ahah... I need to make it clearer whose list you're viewing. Anyway, list sorting performance isn't THAT big a deal, it's only a problem for devotee's lists and half a dozen users'. Plus libraries, but sorting libraries is always going to be a problem. Just look at the Steam client... It takes hours to just download the list of games...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 25th, 2017, 12:00 PM
NEW: Another often requested feature-- offering/receiving non-wishlisted items!

This isn't exactly perfect, as the non-wishlisted items aren't currently filtered in any way, and if you don't like them there's currently no way to tell LT's you don't want to be offered this kind of thing. These kinds of options (as well as better notification settings) will be dealt with when I overhaul the profile area in the near future, but for now I felt this would be nice to have.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 25th, 2017, 01:10 PM
NEW: Another VERY requested feature-- counter-offering!!

Gosh this one was complicated in my head. I had many plans for it, was going for something radical but it wouldn't have been great. Sometimes you just need to reuse the old recipe and spice it up.

Here's how you can counter, and the differences with the Barter way:

- Someone sends you an offer. You can either decline or accept it. There is now an additional 'Counter Offer' button.
- Click the button, you'll be taken to a new page with the same items & quantities (as with BVG), modify it as you like.
- When you're ready, you have one of two choices:

1/ You can actually decide you don't want to send the counter-offer. Just do nothing. The original offer is still valid, unlike Barter where it's declined the moment you click the 'Counter' button. Meaning you can actually counter an offer to see if you can add something to make it a bit fairer, and if you can't find anything, you can simply go back to the original offer and accept it.

2/ You can click the Send Offer button to counter-offer. The user will receive a counter-offer notification. The rest is the same as on Barter: the new offer will include a link to the declined original offer. They can in turn counter, decline or accept, indefinitely.

3/ ......OR, uncheck the "Automatically decline" button, and you get the best of both worlds: your counter-offer is now sent, but the original offer is still valid (unless of course it was declined or canceled after you countered), so if the trader doesn't care for your counter and just declines it, you can still accept the original offer, or even re-counter it.

Believe me, this is the kind of thing I envisioned for Lestrade's: a trading system that actually helps you in every way, rather than hinder you.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on April 25th, 2017, 01:18 PM
By the way, i reaaally appreciate how you explain the changes you make here.
It's interesting to see what you thoughts are when you implement something, what the technical details and problems are, etc.
It's like a changelog i actually enjoy to read :D
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 25th, 2017, 02:12 PM
Well, that's what this topic is aiming to be. Thanks ;)

NEW: Steamtrades.com reputation is now cached and shown in profiles[1] -- also, match pages now show the number of completed LT offers next to users. If you have no completed offer, the old, outdated Barter rep will be shown instead (but that's only for a short time. Until enough people start completing offers.) You can still view the old Barter rep stats from profile pages, of course.
 1. I'm fighting against the idea of showing it on match pages. I'm not a big fan of Steamtrades as a centralized reputation manager. I haven't actually asked anyone to rep me over there for at least a year...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: joaoarena on April 25th, 2017, 06:21 PM
Love the last 3 features, was really needing them. The counter offer system is very clever :)  the old way I had to fake a new offer on other page, blah blah.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: joaoarena on April 25th, 2017, 06:32 PM
About steamtrades, i rarely use it as a reference. I use barter's number of trades. If they are new, I visit steam, sreamtrades and steamrep.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 26th, 2017, 12:07 AM
NEW: When visiting a game page, if the game has parents or children that you own, you'll see a Library icon next to them. This is a quick way to determine if a package (e.g. Cvilization V Complete Edition) can safely be added to your Library manually.

NEW: Non-wishlisted items in offers will no longer show games that are in the user's library or blacklist. (Making it the first time I'm actually using the blacklist at all. :P)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 26th, 2017, 06:43 PM
NEW: Bulk add now ignores duplicates by default. Helpful for BVG imports, I guess..?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 27th, 2017, 01:14 AM
FIX (?): Trading tags are now contextual. For instance, "Extra copy" will only show up for wishlist copies, and "May keep" will only show up for tradable copies.
Again, feel free to suggest (1) whether or not some tags are 'needed' in some lists where they're not used, (2) any tags you think should be added (or removed!) from the dropdown. As I said yesterday, I can add any tag in two seconds, and I can remove them in half that time. Might as well use that...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 27th, 2017, 11:46 AM
2 fixes I made a couple days ago & documented, but forgot to post...

FIX: Accepted offers were shown after declined offers instead of at the very top... Also moved 'Half-completed' statuses just below Accepted offers.

NEW: The sorting dropdown in list pages should now show up immediately, rather than after the entire list has finished parsing. This can means several seconds earlier with long libraries. It's just for the aesthetics though because right now it's not clickable until the page is done loading.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: The Embraced One on April 27th, 2017, 04:30 PM
Sorry if this has been posted, I dont actively come to this forum.

Now that Barter is back up, will you keep working on this site? Admin of barter mentioned wanting to "automating the site, distributing control to more users" among others. He also said "I'll also help with other projects that want or are currently using barter data."

More here: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/bartervg/discussions/0/616199736993680912/?ctp=20#c133260909494397118
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 27th, 2017, 04:45 PM
Quote from The Embraced on April 27th, 2017, 04:30 PM
Sorry if this has been posted, I dont actively come to this forum.
Well, there are only half a dozen 'active' users on this forum anyway... (Yep, I'm disappointed too. I guess they all want me to use the Steam group instead...)
Quote from The Embraced on April 27th, 2017, 04:30 PM
Now that Barter is back up, will you keep working on this site?
Look at "What's up at Lestrade's", which I thought was a fitting title for a log of all the changes I've been doing...
Oh, right, you're even posting on it... So why exactly are you asking that..? :-/

Even without reading the forum, if you haven't noticed a single difference between the day I opened LT's and now, then I can't help you.
Quote from The Embraced on April 27th, 2017, 04:30 PM
Admin of barter mentioned wanting to "automating the site, distributing control to more users" among others.
Yes, he's planning for his next one-year departure I suppose.
Quote from The Embraced on April 27th, 2017, 04:30 PM
He also said "I'll also help with other projects that want or are currently using barter data."
I don't need any help, if that's what you're suggesting.

Lestrade's has 90%+ of all Barter features as of now. I'm missing recent bundles (I'll work on that once I've recovered from my current flu), and editing lists directly from within your wishlist (which is proving complicated, not technically but regarding the user interface, which I want to be flawless, like on game pages.) And of course I'll look into providing helper tools to synchronize with Barter-- not automating it, but making it possible to at least compare the pages. I don't know if I'll import tags at this point, but LT's implementation of tags is so much simpler that I don't think it'd be a problem. I'll look into it though.

(And yes, I have the flu even though we're in Spring. Go ahead, laugh at me, 2017 is my lucky year. I should be in bed right now, I can't even think properly.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Pika! Pika! on April 27th, 2017, 05:47 PM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on April 27th, 2017, 11:46 AM
2 fixes I made a couple days ago & documented, but forgot to post...

FIX: Accepted offers were shown after declined offers instead of at the very top... Also moved 'Half-completed' statuses just below Accepted offers.

NEW: The sorting dropdown in list pages should now show up immediately, rather than after the entire list has finished parsing. This can means several seconds earlier with long libraries. It's just for the aesthetics though because right now it's not clickable until the page is done loading.
Lestrades will be a lot better than Barter. Of course this is not intended as disrespect to Barter. Lestrades might not exist if Barter had not existed and Lestrades has the advantage of building on what Barter has provided and using the good elements and improving the less optimal ones. Once Lestrades has synchronization options and its own trading scores, it probably has everything that Barter has, but in a faster, more user friendly and logical setup. The key element is that Barter users start to realise that Lestrades is better than Barter and migrate to this platform.

I have faith that Lestrades will keep improving and will continue to provide direct support for any and all issues. If you have any suggestions as to how to improve Lestrades, they will always be considered, so what you have here is direct input in building a practically perfect trading system. I do not think Lestrades is finished once it has all the functionality of Barter, but will continue to improve far beyond that. The idea behind a successful trading platform is that it provides the greatest chance of completing fair trades with the least amount of effort. There are aspects of this which have not been worked out properly yet at Barter as you will undoubtedly see in the future.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 28th, 2017, 05:56 PM
Yes, that is the goal... Improving beyond what BVG does, then beyond other trading sites as well... Just do things that'd make sense for a trading site. But first it needs a community. The more traders, the likelier you are to get more trades, the likelier you are to come back.

FIX (well, not that it needed fixing...): clicking on the game search box while it already has text in it will automatically reopen the search list (in case you closed it by mistake-- which I do a lot.)
Also, not 'visible' but I've rewritten the internal search data transmission to use JSON and shorter variable names (and avoid transporting as much data as possible), this makes search loading about 30% faster than before. Again-- not visible. But it means it can support 30% more load for the same visible performance, I guess..!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 28th, 2017, 06:12 PM
FIX (from a couple days ago actually): sending an offer through mobile *did* force you to go through the entire list of unwished items from each user. This was due to some overzealous CSS optimization that skipped the 'max-height' setting in mobile mode. Oops.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 28th, 2017, 10:47 PM
FIX: Not that it matters much, but I fixed the broken username font size in PM pages.
Posted: April 28th, 2017, 10:42 PM

FIX: List pages gave the 'broken' name for games with, err, broken names, unlike game pages. It may still happen in other pages, but eventually I'll completely drop the broken alternative names (which I still keep in case I find some that are more interesting than the Steam API names), so it won't be a problem in the long term.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 28th, 2017, 11:14 PM
NEW: Icons for Bulk Add and Permalink options (to make them stand out a little.)

NEW: When bulk adding games, if a line isn't found, instead of being ignored LT will clearly indicate its name, so you no longer need to check the list you entered to make sure everything's in there.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 1st, 2017, 01:39 AM
FIX: Last month I'd disabled the process that automatically retrieved new games while testing my (far from ready!) Steam store scraper. I just remembered to re-enable it. About 800 new games/DLCs/junk were added. Gosh, 800 entries in a month eh..?! When is Valve going to stop?
Posted: April 30th, 2017, 11:21 PM

Note: I noticed that many of the new entries are broken (steam app ID 0). This is because Barter changed the HTML for game pages and it breaks my scraper. Can you see the irony in that? ;) I'll be updating it to match the new code. Hopefully...
Posted: May 1st, 2017, 12:11 AM

I redid the scraping a couple more times. Should be good now...
If you guys notice anything weird in the imported games, feel free to tell me so I can fix it.

Also, err... What the heck is this?! https://barter.vg/i/34511/ I should probably remove that from here :P
Posted: May 1st, 2017, 01:19 AM

PS: removed that one manually.
PPS: *normally*, if you had one of those ~1200 games in your tradables or wishlist at BVG, you should have them as well on LT's.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: joaoarena on May 1st, 2017, 11:10 AM
maybe to make possible a trade for nothing?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 1st, 2017, 11:45 AM
Well, if you want to make a gift (e.g. a shit game that only one person wants, and they don't have anything you want), you can simply contact the user by PM...? Maybe even send them the key directly... ;) Oh, and tell them to remove it from their wishlist, of course.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on May 1st, 2017, 05:07 PM
It could be an easter egg, but it is not funny enough though  ^_^
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 2nd, 2017, 12:24 AM
I've often seen people over at BVG send me half-empty offers, I wouldn't know if they just wanted to give me a game (a couple did), or if they screwed up (the rest did). I just figured I didn't want to bother.
Now that unwished games are allowed in both sides, if you really insist on doing a trade you can always try & see if you have ALL of their shit games (i.e. very poor ratio.) Just sort by ratio when doing your offer. ;)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 2nd, 2017, 01:01 AM
NEW: Steam wishlist sync! YES!
At last.

Just go to your wishlist, and click the new 'Sync with Steam' button.
- It will automatically download new Steam wishlist additions.
- As always, importing is immediate (just give it a few seconds). If it takes more than 10 seconds, it's likely that other users are importing at the same time, so you can either leave the process in a tab or just come back later.
- It will notice when games were removed from your Steam wishlist, and offer you to either remove them from your Lestrade's wishlist, or mark them as protected (i.e. act as if you added those games from within the site, not through a sync.)
- It will also keep track of Steam wishlist ranks (yes, ranks will be updated on each sync request).[1]
- In your wishlist page, you can now see two additional fields: rank and source. Source can be Steam (synced from Steam), Barter (imported from a custom addition on Barter), and Local (added directly from Lestrade's). "#117 STEAM" means the game is ranked #117 in your Steam wishlist. If no rank is shown, then the game isn't in your Steam wishlist, *or* you added it from elsewhere. If you want to keep track of its rank, just remove it from your local wishlist, and sync from Steam again.[2]
- I'm planning to automate the wishlist syncing process (possibly also library) daily for active users. I'll consider it.

I hope you like it!
Next step: Barter comparisons. (NOT syncing. It's just not logically possible. I can only give you the tools to make the importing easier.)
 1. Note: I'll try to add a user setting allowing you to show only the rank for the top X entries in that list, or show no rank at all, to indicate that you don't actually give a damn about ranking games in your wishlist.
 2. Another important point-- I made the deliberate choice to keep a game as a 'local' wishlist even if it's found when importing from Steam. Honestly, I don't know which is best! I think I should turn those local games into Steam imports, but if I do that now, I lose the ability to switch to the alternative later, while if I don't turn those items into Steam wishlists right now, I can still do it later, so it'll give you some time to think about it and tell me what you think you'd prefer.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on May 2nd, 2017, 01:55 AM
Works great, fast (!), and really improves usability!
Great feature
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: beareryet on May 2nd, 2017, 03:37 AM
Finally! \o/

"- It will also keep track of Steam wishlist ranks (yes, ranks will be updated on each sync request)."
Too bad my ranked list has a life of its own. It's nice nonetheless.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: joaoarena on May 2nd, 2017, 08:51 AM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on May 2nd, 2017, 01:01 AM
Just go to your wishlist, and click the new 'Sync with Steam' button.
- It will automatically download new Steam wishlist additions.
- In your wishlist page, you can now see two additional fields: rank and source. Source can be Steam (synced from Steam), Barter (imported from a custom addition on Barter), and Local (added directly from Lestrade's)
Love it so much!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 3rd, 2017, 03:14 PM
I fixed around 800 DLCs that were incorrectly marked as 'games' instead of DLCs, and as such I was able to clear the 'removed' status from 2394 library entries (i.e. DLCs that shouldn't be removed automatically since Steam won't tell anyone they're in your library.)
Of course, there *are* DLCs that are shown in library listings at Steam (IIRC it happens when they have their own dedicated store page, but NOT always, which probably means it's up to the developer's preference), so you'll have to manually remove those if you get the game removed...

Also, I didn't 'link' DLCs with their parents. It's simply not always possible. I did it for SEGA Genesis & Mega Drive Classics (which is a funny one since the parent game doesn't have a store page, and you buy are DLCs for a phantom app), and it took me a good half hour, and I got annoyed, and thought I'll just redo those things when I stop scraping Barter and instead do Steam/SteamSpy scraping entirely.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 4th, 2017, 03:56 PM
NEW: Added support for Barter's 'no offers' tag (which was added today).
As I told the admin, it's funny because I was working on my own version of that[1], but as a database flag (which would also encompass not matching, similar to the zero-quantity trick), not a tag. I figured the 'no offers' tag was decent enough and close to what I had in mind, so let's do it.

Note: it's a bit complicated in my code, so normally the tag should behave as you'd imagine: if you tag a tradable as 'no offers', others shouldn't have it selectable in their offers, and if you tag a wishlist as 'no offers', they shouldn't be able to offer you their game. I'd appreciate if a volunteer came to test that with me, I only tested with one game and a fake offer. ;)
 1. I think I'm working on 5 or 6 features simultaneously... Every time I get stuck on a feature, I just switch to the next, until one of the features gets done and nothing gets in the way of its public implementation. Right now most of my work is on Barter pseudo-syncing.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on May 4th, 2017, 11:37 PM
Curiously I use the blacklist as a 'no offers' thing. If a game on my wishlist shouldn't be offered by other traders I also put it on the blacklist.
I will think about my strategy, see how can it fit.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 5th, 2017, 02:43 PM
NEW: Ratio counter now handles 'infinity' differently: an infinite tradable copy counts for 10 copies (basically the most you can set on LT's, except it'll never drop), and an infinite wishlisted copy counts for just 1 copy.
I can be talked into changing these numbers, feel free to discuss.
As a quick note, it makes recounting twice slower than before, but hey... Gotta do what I gotta do. It's still super fast.

NEW: 'limited-time access' tag wasn't too explicit, I renamed it to 'will expire'. Also introduced a new tag next to it, 'must redeem', which is the other way around: a copy that will last forever, but must be redeemed quickly. (For instance, G2A bundles have these things, I think.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 5th, 2017, 05:32 PM
NEW: When creating offers, both trader lists are now shown side to side, rather than on top of each other. This makes it more natural to choose games on both sides. (And yes, I know I should show you on the right in keeping with how I show /matches/, but I couldn't convince myself to do it.)
Since it takes a lot of horizontal space, there are several levels of degradation depending on the window width. First the font size will be reduced, then the columns will be shown on top of each other (like before), then the font size will be reduced again (on mobile).
Hope you like it... I've been using that for a couple weeks without trouble.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 5th, 2017, 11:58 PM
FIX: Offer creation page wasn't strict enough. From now on, if an item is in the trader's tradables, blacklist or library, there are 3 possibilities: either it's also in their wishlist (action: Lestrade's shows it grayed out, it's still selectable but it's an encouragement not to bother), or it's in their wishlist AND it has an extra (+) tag (action: Lestrade's shows it normally), or it's not in their wishlist (action: game is skipped entirely.)
That's a bit complicated but it's probably closer to what most traders would like. In the future I'll add profile settings to influence that behavior.

Also: I believe tag colors are now fixed in offer creation. Tags you see in blue (on both sides) were added by YOU, tags in gold were added by the other trader. Keep them in mind! Tag colors are still screwed up in /matches/ pages, though.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on May 6th, 2017, 01:08 AM
1) Is it possible to remember the state of the "Show inactive traders in matches" checkbox?
I would love to have it always checked.

2) "The following items weren't found in your wishlist but you may wish to ask for them:" & "The following items weren't found in their wishlist but you may wish to offer them:"
--> Which games are shown here? Every game unowned by the other party? Random selection?

3) Great work on the latest updates :)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 6th, 2017, 01:25 AM
1/ yes but not for now. I'm waiting to implement profile settings.
2/ yes, all unowned, minus games in their tradables and blacklist.
3/ I know! Too bad half the user base left over time... it's like, guys gimme one month okay? They're not even giving me a week...

Ah well.
Btw I'm working on dual tags for match pages but it's hard. It kinda works but it's buggy (color coding sometimes fails) and matching queries are 0.05s slower due to how indexes are handled, and 0.4s slower (ouch!!) on single game matching pages (Matches link on game pages). I've got to a point where I don't know if I'm gonna keep dual tags.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 6th, 2017, 12:36 PM
FIX: as I said above I'm working on dual tags for matches, which made querying slightly to much slower. I've fixed the 'much slower' on single game matching, if (and only if) the game you're looking for is already in your wishlist. If it's not, and you still want to match for it, the query will take over half a second, instead of being near-instantaneous.

I know, it's like saying I've bought a Ferrari because it saves me half a second on my way to the bakery, but speed is part of Lestrade's DNA. If I can improve a query, I'll do it.
Posted: May 6th, 2017, 12:23 PM

PS: the slowdown is only for using the 'Matches' link on game pages for games not in your wishlist. The 'Takers' link is as fast as ever.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 6th, 2017, 08:41 PM
Just saw we reached 1000 members! :)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 7th, 2017, 12:09 AM
NEW: Another filter for premium users... List pages (wishlist, tradables, blacklist, library) now have a 'filter' dropdown where you can choose to filter out anything that's found (or NOT found) in another list. e.g., you can check your tradables, filter for 'Games in library', and see if there's any tradable you redeemed to yourself and forgot to remove.

I hope you enjoy it :)

(Well, I know, there are only 4 premium users at Lestrade's besides me, but in case you're wondering, my offer still holds, I still trade beta premium access for $2+ games. 'Not like I'm asking for too much :P)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 7th, 2017, 12:11 AM
Oh, and.... This is my 400th post... and the 1000th post overall on the forum! On the same day we get to 1000 members! Just a few minutes after I got to 10 unique trades[1]! This is the day of rounded numbers, right?
 1. Okay, I have a lot of work and not much time to trade. :P
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 7th, 2017, 01:43 AM
FIX: Dual tags are now working properly on match pages.

What do I mean by dual tag..?

For instance, you can see this in a wished pane:

• Fallout 4 ▲, may keep ▼, +

This will mean, "the trader (who has it as a tradable) thinks it's a valuable game and he might keep his copy, while yourself (the one looking for it) considers it worth little to him, and only wants an extra copy, so this particular trade is very unlikely to ever happen.

In general:
- this is the color of a tradable or the trader looking to trade this item, In most situations, that's going to be you.
- and this is the color of a wished item, or the trader who's offering this copy.

If you have better color code suggestions, feel free to share!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 7th, 2017, 07:40 PM
NEW: https://lestrades.com/general/74/library-playtimes-now-100p-accurate/
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 8th, 2017, 02:22 PM
NEW: Matching is even faster. (You won't notice the difference.)

Remember when I said, a few posts above, that adding support for dual tags made matching 10% slower and about twice slower in special cases?
- Full match (600 wishlist, 300 tradables): 0.2s
- Match for a game not in my wishlist: 0.7s

So, this morning I decided to test alternative variations of my matching query... Here are the results:
- Memory usage: halved during query execution!
- Full match: 0.05s -- 4 times faster!
- Match for a game not in my wishlist: 0.04s -- 20 times faster!

Given that even the slowest matches are already lightning-fast, this is only going to be of interest to @devotee because he hosts the website, but at least it gives me assurance that the website will scale at least 3 times better when we get tons of users. :) In fact, it will probably scale better than 4 times better, because the second main reason[1] the query is faster is because I eliminated the filesort from the query, meaning LT doesn't have to create a temporary table to hold matching results before sorting them.

I'm pretty happy with the query as it is right now. I'm still using the 'old' version on the offer creation page, but I can always rewrite it later as well, in case it causes problems. (Which I doubt. We're talking about a 1:1 match here. Scalability issues are limited.)

PS: I rock!
 1. The first main reason it's faster is that I split the query in half, one for wished items and one for tradables, also the reason why memory usage is halved.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on May 8th, 2017, 02:33 PM
As someone who filled a database via a script once, you're a wizard.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 8th, 2017, 03:55 PM
I just like optimizing!
I have to amend one of my numbers though-- matching for a non-wishlist item took around 0.4s when I tested, not 0.04s -- I didn't read the number correctly. So that's "only" twice faster than what it used to take. Since I posted my message, I've optimized that particular situation some more, and managed to get it to execute in less than 0.2s in average, so that's nearly 4 times faster now, similar to the full match speed gain (albeit not using the same optimization path at all).

Still, compared to my average 150 seconds on a certain other website, whether it's 0.1s or 0.2s doesn't really matter. ;)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 12th, 2017, 09:56 AM
NEW: Manual syncing with Barter.vg!

Walkthrough:
- Go to any list page (wishlist, tradables, blacklist, library)
- Hit the 'Import from Barter.vg' button if your list is empty (you can move on to the next list and skip this guide...)
- Hit the 'Compare with Barter.vg' button if your list isn't empty.
- Lestrade's will retrieve your equivalent list on Barter, and show you two lists:

1/ Items found on Lestrade's but not on Barter.
2/ Items found on Barter but not on Lestrade's.

For each item, you have the ability to remove from Lestrade's (if applicable), add item & store & quantity & tags to Lestrade's (if applicable), or ignore (if it's a library item-- I'll add the Ignore flag to other lists if there's enough demand for it.) You can also, alternatively, view the item on Barter.vg to apply any changes over there manually (good luck...)
Unfortunately, I can't export items to Barter directly; I think I can export games but without any tags (I'd need to do some testing), so maybe you'd rather export them manually either way.

Oh, and there are also buttons that will allow you to add, remove or ignore all items at once. But I'd recommend using the individual links instead-- this would prevent any errors, and item manipulation is immediate.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 12th, 2017, 01:07 PM
NEW: Dual tags are now shown in order pages, too. (Previously, they were only shown when creating an offer... It was an oversight.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on May 12th, 2017, 03:07 PM
Much appreciated. =)
I manage my game list on 4 different sites. It's really hard to keep them all up to date all the time.
Every platform that makes it easier for me as a trader, is a good thing in my opinion.

Plus, this will make transition for new traders much easier. It improves usability, which can lead to a bigger userbase.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on May 12th, 2017, 07:35 PM
Excellent progress  :D

There is an issue after comparing the list with barter, when I click on the remove or ignore button, the list then disappears and I have to compare again to continue with the choices.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 12th, 2017, 11:23 PM
But... 'Remove all' removes all entries so it makes sense that they disappear, no..? Same for Ignore... I don't know?

Anyway-- I've had a few errors in my log, I've fixed a problem with the library, there are more bugs that I don't know why they're popping up so I'll just let them happen again to see if I can fix them.

Please guys, if you're finding problems when importing/removing/etc, make sure to mention it. Given that I've been sick these last couple of days it's hard for me to focus.

I however managed to cook up a basic 'multiple edit' for list pages, it's not enabled for users yet, but I managed to change quantity and store for multiple items, so it's a good beginning. I'm hoping to be able to make it public tomorrow.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on May 12th, 2017, 11:38 PM
The 'Remove all' is a one action only, the others are a select (take action and continue the review). Probably checkboxes would make more sense.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 13th, 2017, 12:20 AM
I don't get the difference, even semantically. :P
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 13th, 2017, 01:26 PM
FIX: More crashes when importing from Steam wishlist or library, due to major changes done yesterday and not throughly tested. (Sorry!)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 13th, 2017, 03:29 PM
Progress report: working on multi-editing in list pages...
- Multi-item removal is now supported. Tested on wishlist with 3 items. Items disappear immediately from list.
- Multi-item store selection and quantity selection are working as expected, since we're sure we only want one of those, and want to apply them to all items. ;)
- Multi-item tagging is supported, but incomplete. Tagging multiple items will add the requested tag(s) but not remove them. Items aren't automatically updated to show new tags. This is the only reason I'm not unveiling the feature for now. :(

I'm still sick so I'm a slow worker. (Although I'm pretty proud of how quickly I implemented multi-removal since I was expecting more problems... I guess I'm really at ease with JavaScript these days.)

Will release today; if I can't fix tagging, I'll just release the rest, and postpone tagging to later. :)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 14th, 2017, 12:28 AM
Progress report #2: Game tagging is currently very likely to be broken, sorry about that. This is because I've mixed up code that's targeted to multi-edit, with code that's for single item edit, and I haven't properly split them up (things were getting REAL complicated, no need to go further into madness... I'm still sick.)
Everything's working, except for a few bugs that I'm not sure I'll be able to fix before going to sleep, so it's likely to remain that way until next morning.

When it's not buggy, let's just say it's... just plain fantastic. You'll see when it's live! You'll never want to tag again at a certain other site... :^^;:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 14th, 2017, 12:41 AM
Okay, the bugs are fixed, it's just wonderful stuff. I'm in love with multi-edit.
I'm still too tired to publish now and since I think I'll probably get some bug reports, I'll just postpone the launch until next morning (Paris time).
Join the hype!!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 14th, 2017, 10:07 AM
Well, so much for the hype... :P

The feature is up.

NEW: edit multiple items directly from lists!

HOW TO:
1/ Go to a list page (tradables, wishlist only supported, because you don't need multi-tagging the rest I think..?)
2/ Hover the items you want to modify. Click them. (Don't click their title, just click elsewhere that isn't clickable, or directly on the checkbox that shows up.)
3/ Once at least one item is selected, an item tagger will pop up at the bottom.
4/ Modify the store or quantity simply.
5/ Changes are reflected immediately, in real time. You don't have to reload the page, and your items still remain checked.
6/ Modifying the tags is even simpler... Lestrade's shows you a list of all tags that are currently shown for any of the items. Deselecting a checked tag will remove the tag from all items (whether they already had it or not). Selecting (or re-selecting) a tag will add the tag to all items.
7/ Again, changes are reflected immediately, in real time.

So, I've now implemented everything that was missing from list editing compared to BVG, as far as I know. And as is customary with me, I did it with usability in mind.

I don't know what else to say... Start using Lestrade's, maybe..?! Invite all your friends..?! Let's, I don't know, get the game on?
:P
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 14th, 2017, 02:09 PM
FIX: Some games weren't reporting they had trading cards.

FIX: Well, that thing with quantity & store defaults in multi-edit.

FIX: Who cares?

Press Like on new features you approve of! Skedaddle if you don't!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 14th, 2017, 11:49 PM
FIX: 'Offer history with...' in user profiles was always considering the other was sent by you.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 15th, 2017, 02:37 PM
Well, since yesterday I added the last big feature inspired by BVG and requested by the community, today I'll start with my latest big feature inspired by myself and that I'm sure everyone will start requesting at BVG's now. ;)

NEW: Custom notes for tradables!

The ultimate way to tag your games. Just enter anything you like in that white box. That's it. So beautiful... You can add information to your tradables or your wishlist, perhaps a warning on what your copy contains or where it was acquired etc., or a request for a wishlisted item ("Only want a gift link", although you can also use a Humble Bundle Link store icon for these items; or maybe you could tag "Dirt 3" as "Not the Complete Edition, please!", like I did for a user recently.)

NEW: Custom values for tradables!

The ultimate way to tag how you value a wishlist or tradable. Just enter a dollar value on any game in your tradables (to tell people how much you value a game, not how much you paid for it), or in your wishlist (to basically tell people the maximum 'price' you'd be willing to pay for a copy of that game.) There is currently nothing tired to these numbers, but in the future, when enough copies have been tagged, I'll probably add some code to verify fair trades if all games on both sides have a custom value. Also maybe some custom code to set aside any games where the tradable & wishlist values are too different to ensure a happy trade.

Note: as with other tags, when matching/offering, you should be able to view notes & values from both users, always with the same color code (blue for tags you entered, gold for tags entered by the other trader.)
Feel free to tag as many items as you can. The more tags, the more likely you are to make successful trades. You can use the multi-edit feature to enter prices & custom notes on all your items, of course. There's currently a limit of 30 characters per custom note to avoid cluttering match screens, premium early access ups this to 50 chars for now. These numbers may or may not change depending on future user feedback.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: joaoarena on May 16th, 2017, 11:08 AM
Custom notes are sooooo needed! Thanks for that!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 16th, 2017, 11:16 AM
I know, the sky's the limit. ;)

Announcement about the site (making it 'official' that Barter feature porting is completed, as well as a call to help-- start using the site! Share with friends!
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/lestrades#announcements/detail/2470633236770235928

A quick changelog of the last 3 weeks (possibly easier to digest than reading the last 10 pages of this topic... Also, gives you a good idea of the amount of crazy work I put into this.)
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/lestrades#announcements/detail/2470633236770366428
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 16th, 2017, 10:27 PM
FIX: When having multiple different copies of a game, you could only offer people the latest copy instead of the copy of your choice.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 17th, 2017, 11:08 AM
NEW: Search engine now adds library/wishlist/tradable icons if the game in question is found in your lists. Makes it easier to find/ignore them!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 17th, 2017, 09:00 PM
FIX: Couldn't sync wishlist with Steam if said wishlist contained a game not in Lestrade's database yet (e.g. a game added within the last few days to Steam.)

FIX: Match pages now show multiple 1-quantity copies, too. Performance is on par with before, of course.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 18th, 2017, 03:17 PM
NEW: Bundles should now be up to date (well, latest one is the Humble Indie Bundle 18...)
Later bundles will still need to be added semi-manually. I'm working on automating it. Currently I'm populating older bundles (already expired ones, so it doesn't really matter much.)

(I'm having a feeling of déjà vu, as if I already typed exactly the same sentence in my changelog....)

NEW: Bundle editor. Currently can only add single games to existing tiers. Of course, I will build on that... I tested by adding the Goat Simulator games to aforementioned bundle. Funny thing is, even if I'm the only one with access right now, I couldn't stop myself from making it Ajax with auto-refresh & all... lol.

Looking for volunteers to update & add bundles as soon as the features will be available!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 18th, 2017, 11:28 PM
Note: all bundles are now fully imported (I had to redo them all after I discovered that all games above ID 26000 in the database were ignored when importing bundles, because of a tiny change in the BVG HTML. And yes I'm gonna switch to a new scraping system for games because right now it's far from ideal...)

Still stopped at HB 18, so no Bundlestars today.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 19th, 2017, 04:14 PM
FIX: Redid bundle scraping locally; games not found on Lestrade's are now logged and shown in bundle pages with a link to their ITAD pages. For instance, in the latest Humble, Goat Sim isn't found here because it's the 'GOATY' edition. So at least you can see that, 'uhoh, there's a problem here', and point it out. Just in case some bundles need to be fixed manually :)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on May 19th, 2017, 04:41 PM
Maybe add a more prominent link to the bundles page somewhere, and enable adding selected games from a bundle to lists. =)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 19th, 2017, 06:33 PM
Yes, I'm actually working on that (I think you can already see the checkboxes in bundle pages... Or are they only for me right now?), but I've been busy trying to fix other things like the scraper.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on May 19th, 2017, 07:05 PM
I can see the checkboxes, but theres no functionality to them, if i see correctly
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 19th, 2017, 08:09 PM
Yes, because it's not written yet ;)
And as always I like doing things right, so I'm not hurrying up.
This is basically the last feature I need to implement before I go into my long term plans (I'll finish bundle handling before that though, notably adding and removing them manually), so I'll do it right. ;)

Or just because I'm currently giving his soup to my kid. But it's too down to earth :-P
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 20th, 2017, 08:11 PM
NEW: Bundle items are now clickable, and you can 'Add to tradables' and 'Add to wishlist'[1]. I'm not doing 'Add to blacklist' for now, unless someone really needs it.

In addition to adding the games to your lists, Lestrade's will also add the bundle's icon, as well as a tier (tier 1 => low tier, tier 2 => mid tier, tier 3 or above => high tier). Of course some bundles will have different 'values' (e.g. indiegala tier 2? With happy hour, who cares that it's a tier 2 when it's barely worth a tier 1 in the end? I'll need to add an exception for those), and finally, if there's a custom note next to the bundle item (happens often on ITAD bundles), it'll be imported as well, in case there's important information about the item's nature.
I'm also planning to allow bundles to get tagged, so when I do that, I'll also allow importing tags from bundle items.

Have fun! (Especially @devotee, who really, really wanted the feature. :P)

And now I only need to synchronize bundles hourly or whatever, and we'll really be at feature parity. (As in, 'features I felt were important to have in a modern trading site,' since there are already many features that are exclusive to LT's.)
 1. I thought 'Add to wishlist' was a LT exclusive but apparently Barter added it recently. However if you click 'switch to wishlist', it'll uncheck all currently checked games. He still knows best about usability. :P
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 21st, 2017, 12:49 AM
NEW: Bundle items show a list of their most prominent Steam tags. This can save you time if you don't know the games involved and you're not interested in badly rated platformers but you collect hidden object games of any rating. ;)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 21st, 2017, 01:00 AM
NEW: Bundles are now automatically synced from ITAD every hour. YES! :)

Limitations:
- I'm no longer scraping Chrono.gg 'bundles'... Seriously, that's just a glorified daily promo sale. Nothing 'bundly' in those.
- There may be errors when matching games. For instance in a recent bundle, one of the games wasn't recognized because its identification on ITAD wasn't the same as what it gives me through its API (the API version was somehow missing a letter.) I'll keep an eye on that.
- Pending bundles are also imported. This means you may see duplicates or erroneous bundles from time to time. I'll add support for bundle comments later on, so you can point out any mistakes you find, and I'll fix them manually. I'll also improve my editor so that other volunteers can fix the bundles themselves.[1]

I think that's all for now... Have fun now ;)
 1. Yeah, "other volunteers"... I know right? ::)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on May 21st, 2017, 01:11 AM
The bundle page functionality is really helpful, and the implementation seems to work great from a user standpoint.
Pretty much exactly what i imagined, and the tag are a great additional idea, too.

Time to present the bundle page more promintent.
Maybe right in the top bar, next to the matches page?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 21st, 2017, 01:17 AM
Quote from /u/humpaaa on May 21st, 2017, 01:11 AM
The bundle page functionality is really helpful, and the implementation seems to work great from a user standpoint.
Pretty much exactly what i imagined, and the tag are a great additional idea, too.
Well, you know me by now... I always try to think beyond what the 'competition' offers. :P
Quote
Time to present the bundle page more promintent.
Yes I will, tomorrow because I'm off to bed. I'm planning to improve the /bundles/ page, as well as add a list of the latest 5/10 bundles on the homepage.
Quote
Maybe right in the top bar, next to the matches page?
Oh... Well, it's already a bit crowded, isn't it..? (?)

BTW, I can also update bundles manually. If you find a bundle on ITAD that you want imported immediately, feel free to message me. If I'm there I'll trigger the update. I can also give this ability to 'other volunteers' (see above.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on May 21st, 2017, 01:48 AM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on May 21st, 2017, 01:17 AM
Quote
Maybe right in the top bar, next to the matches page?
Oh... Well, it's already a bit crowded, isn't it..? (?)
It is indeed, but its the main navigation element, isnt it?
Other free space would be top navigation abr, next to the Lestrades Logo. But i don't know, im sure you'll come up with a great idea :P

But first, have some sleep =)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 21st, 2017, 10:37 AM
That bar's purpose is to mostly hold notifications, things worthy of attention that should be visible when you come back to a tab and you're at the bottom of the page... Unless I do some kind of 'New bundle notification' button, I don't see it happening. :^^;:

I'm already hiding library & blacklist links on mobile because there's less real estate available... I originally wanted to have something that felt like Barter's, since the purpose of the site was taking over, but now that we're over that, I could always re-do the top of the page. It's not like I'm happy with it anyway (Top header, then menu, then wishlist etc.: these three headers are styled differently, that needs to go!)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 21st, 2017, 03:19 PM
NEW: Bundle comments!

https://lestrades.com/bundle/5105/ will be your first example. :)

Also, added a 'Latest commented bundles' on homepage, at least so I can catch them more easily for now. ;)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on May 21st, 2017, 03:42 PM
View all bundles button is much appreciated :p
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 21st, 2017, 04:07 PM
Well, there was already a 'bundles' link on the homepage so I didn't think this one would change anything, but glad to be of use!

 :hmm: ......

 :hmm: ......

I just realized it's the first time in MONTHS that I'm feeling free. Free to do whatever I want on the site, rather than implement something that was asked of me. Free to take a week off and not obsess with Lestrade's constantly. :ph34r:

So...

What am I going to do next?

<gets back to work> :geek:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on May 21st, 2017, 04:53 PM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on May 21st, 2017, 04:07 PM
Well, there was already a 'bundles' link on the homepage so I didn't think this one would change anything, but glad to be of use
Umm, where?
Have i missed it all the time? ô.O
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 21st, 2017, 05:22 PM
Well there's a block of text with a lost of active features... all linked to the relevant pages. Including bundles and tags. ;)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on May 21st, 2017, 05:42 PM
Oh :D
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 22nd, 2017, 12:33 AM
NEW: Bundle list now shows you the number of wishlisted items in the current active bundles. (I'll eventually show the names, too...)

NEW: Bundle list now list the rarest game for each bundle, as well as its ratio. It sounds simple but I just spent an hour trying to do that in a single query with row grouping... In the end I had to settle for a single query + some PHP parsing. Meh. Fast enough, move on. I still like that feature...

NEW: Bundle list can be sorted by expiry date (bundles expiring soon are shown first.)

NEW: Bundle pages now show a $ price for each tier, courtesy of ITAD.

Note: bundle list will probably soon be shown over several lines per bundle... Just sayin'. I'm trying to keep it compact, but a simple raw list isn't very enticing either.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on May 22nd, 2017, 12:51 AM
Maybe you can unclutter it a bit by sorting the entries in a table.

Instead of:
Mumbo Jumbo Pick & Mix (Bundle Stars), expires in 11 days. Rarest: Gardens Inc. – From Rakes to Riches (0 : 30)

Do:
Bundle Name                       | Bundle          | Expires in               | Rarest game                   |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mumbo Jumbo Pick & Mix   | Bundle Stars | 11 days                  | Gardens Inc.  (0 : 30)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 22nd, 2017, 03:48 PM
Done this morning ;)
Forgot about bundle stores though.

Apart from that, you likey..?
I mean, for lack of donations I can accept likes on my posts... You got one for your suggestion, I didn't get any for my 4 additions :(
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 23rd, 2017, 12:17 AM
NEW/FIX: Did some extra work on offer sorting...

- Inactive offers (canceled, declined, completed) are now omitted if they were last updated over a week ago. Added a 'View full history' link to see all offers, including old ones.
- Offers are now sorted this way: first you'll see offers requiring your input, then active offers you sent, then inactive offers. Each of those 'blocks' are sorted this way: first by member (so that multiple offers to a single member will clearly show next to each other), then by last update. I used to sort by status but in the end it wasn't too natural. Please share if you preferred the old way.
- Got rid of 'expires' entirely. Yay! Death to expires! Also got rid of the 'started' column, it'll only be shown in offer pages (not in the offer list). You'll now be shown only the last update (i.e. last status change on the offer, as well as offer edits.)

I think it's a good compromise between readability, usability and efficiency.
If you want me to 'bump' an offer if it got a new comment, feel free to ask! For now I think it's enough that you get a notification for new comments, but you may want to see bumps because you don't get notifications for additional comments sent less than 24 hours after the last one from the same author.

Okay, time for bed...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 23rd, 2017, 11:12 PM
NEW: In match pages, users that can be notified by e-mail (i.e. they entered a proper address) are no longer hidden even if inactive. This is because they'll receive a preview of the offer and there's no reason to think they wouldn't log back in if they're interested in the offer.

Also plenty of other little fixes or improvements, as every day. I just don't bother to document them because... Well, you guys don't even read the big announcements, so why bother. :P

Off to bed early, have a big day IRL tomorrow...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 25th, 2017, 12:20 PM
NEW: Bundles now import pending bundles as well. I've added more tools for me to edit bundles manually-- either deleting duplicates (rejected pending bundles...) or erroneous games, or add games that weren't found by the importer, etc.

As usual, I keep adding features or making small changes that aren't worth posting here because nobody really bothers to read this topic. (I got proof by the simple fact that even users who have done several trades here are unaware of some great basic options that were announced here... Gosh, I really need help with promoting the site to new and existing users alike...)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on May 26th, 2017, 01:00 AM
The changelog is possibly not the best way to learn about new features. Keep a read-only sequential changelog and update the FAQ/Tutorial. The FAQ should have its own link somewhere as opposed to a topic, so it can be consulted at any time.


Think this is one of the most enduring situations, where you need to keep advertising new features, but without being too invasive. With that said, include the changelog in the notifications (with an option to turn it off?).
Would be impossible to miss  :eheheh:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 26th, 2017, 04:19 PM
Actually, that's pretty much what I do... :^^;: I keep a changelog of most things of interest here, then I compile them into a proper announcement on a regular basis on the Steam group (of which you can be notified, per Steam's system). So you only need to check the announcements if you want to see what's really new.

FIX: New users should now be able to import their Barter lists (if they have one.) Also, new scraped games are now properly inserted into the game database. Those two aspects were unfortunately not fixed by the ban lift earlier this week, due to problems with CloudFlare and the BVG firewall.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on May 26th, 2017, 07:13 PM
At the moment, the most useful wishlist sorting function is the ratio.
Could you maybe add an option to sort by number of traders who HAVE the game, independent of the number of people who want it?
I think that's the most useful sorting method.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 27th, 2017, 01:33 AM
It's actually in my to-do list but I haven't done it for the following reason: it would add 4 possible entries to the list... (have, want, and reversed versions.) It's a bit overwhelming at that point. I may be able to get away with it by splitting entries into groups, though...
It'd be longer to scroll, but easier to navigate. What do you think? Like the tag dropdown in copy tagging...

Note: I fixed a bug in the scraper that prevented it from seeing $0 status on games-- this was due to BVG changing the HTML for pointing out given away games. Unfortunately, this means all previous $0 games got their status erased. I'll fix it ASAP. (And I guess my bug fix is pointless since that scraper was retired anyway, except for new games... Which never have that tag to begin with :P)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 27th, 2017, 12:48 PM
FIX: Many expired bundles (from around 6 months ago) were marked as 'expiry unknown'. Fixed! Around half of the 'unknown' bundles from the bundle homepage are now gone. I had to do manually for all of them, so you better care! :whip:

FIX: Bundle homepage is now more mobile-friendly. Rarest games are shown below the bundle name (previously they'd just be hidden.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 27th, 2017, 05:56 PM
NEW/FIX: When editing multiple items in your lists at the same time, adding or removing a tag will no longer clear up your other existing tags.
It's now behaving like I *thought* it behaved. For some reason, my code was messed up and it failed to register with me when I tested the feature. (Granted, there was a lot of work involved in multi-editing, but it still feels bitter to me that I missed that one bug.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 27th, 2017, 07:03 PM
NEW: The infamous '$0' is back on LT. Just like the multi-item bug, it's a feature I'm positive was there to begin with (when the site was still a BVG companion), but disappeared since then for some unknown reason. It's now visible in list pages, game pages, bundle pages, offer pages, and... err, nowhere else I think. If you want to see it in match pages and offer creation, feel free to ask.

NEW: $0 tag will be updated (if needed) once a day from BVG's new giveaway list. Shouldn't be disrupting to BVG :)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 28th, 2017, 12:30 AM
FIX: The window width was customized towards a 1000px wide window, as that's what I'm using to develop the site. It was brought to my attention that beyond 1280px widths, the sidebar shows up (obviously), but because there's also a hard-wired width limit to the main window, the result is actually narrower than on my smaller window. Fixed maximum width to be on par with what I'm experiencing!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 28th, 2017, 11:59 PM
NEW: Steam list auto-syncing :)
Every day, active users will see both their library & wishlist updated from Steam.

Note 1: Any further manual updates you do will count as an automatic sync, so obviously if you tend to update your library every few hours manually, you should also update your wishlist manually from time to time because LT won't do it for you.

Note 2: The scrapers behave like when you manually sync: nothing will be deleted, instead missing items are marked as 'removed', and LT will ask you what you want to do with them the next time you visit your list pages. Still, at least users who send you offers should then quickly spot that a game you wished for is in your library, as it'll be grayed out, discouraging them from offering it. (Or preventing them entirely... I don't remember.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 29th, 2017, 02:11 PM
FIX: In multi-edit, the 'Remove' button in the floating bar wasn't showing up for users with a very wide screen. (Long live 4/3! Long live 5/4!)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 29th, 2017, 06:27 PM
NEW: Can now sort bundle items (in a bundle page) by ratio or even number of wishlisters. The links are just below the bundle name, after the external links. I made it simple & short. Didn't want to bother too much... Figured this would still be a useful tool to determine what games are worth your interest in a bundle.

FIX: Comments didn't send proper notifications this afternoon (possibly even this morning) because of a messed up rewrite in my notification code. This is due to adding support for moderators to comment on offers they're not part of. (By 'moderator', I mean just me for now... No one has offered their services yet.)

Plenty of other things, too, but I don't remember them right now...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on May 29th, 2017, 08:47 PM
Two suggestions for the matches page:

1) Make it possible to have the checkbox "Unfold all inactive user matches" checked permanently
2) Make it possible to exclude currency (ToD, Sack of Gems, Keys) from matches

--> I have these items on my wishlist, because im fine with being offered them.
But when i look at the matches, i usually only care for game matches.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 29th, 2017, 11:08 PM
1/ I guess I can also record that in the profile area... When I get around to overhauling it. Please remind me ;)
2/ Can't you just set them to x0 quantity..? I thought of adding a 'no matches' tag but internally it would have to double up as a database flag and I want to keep my table size as slim as possible for wishlists & tradables. Still, not MANY people have these items up for trade (or document them at all), so it shouldn't be that much of an issue..?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on May 29th, 2017, 11:14 PM
Setting it to 0 quantity works, but i thought that might discourage others to offer them.
It's not a big deal, i guess. If it's messing with your table size, it's probably not worth the work
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 30th, 2017, 12:19 AM
NOTE: I'm no longer setting low tier & mid tier for games added from a bundle. It's just too complicated to determine -- some single tiers are expensive (e.g. Humble Monthly), some tier 2's are super cheap (Indiegala...)
I'll still set a high tier on games from a tier 3 or above, though.

@humpaaa, yes, it'll discourage them from offering them... It'll even prevent them from doing so. But I thought you wanted to only see quick matches without those..? You can always set them all to x0, do your match(es), then reset them. I don't know.
The only thing I can do with your thing is adding a custom setting saying 'don't match for items'... But meh. I don't know.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 30th, 2017, 12:33 AM
I KNEW IT: Barter now likes my ideas(http://steamcommunity.com/groups/bartervg/discussions/0/616199736993680912/?tscn=1496096838), apparently. :lol: I don't mind[1], I just wouldn't have minded a small nod. :P

I should probably open a topic about Barter but it'll only end in a flame war so... Nah. :^^;:

FIX: More seriously, I had more issues with multi-user notifications. This time it was a problem in Wedge, the software I wrote. The notification system was built by a friend but the multi-user stuff had bugs, notably it would rewrite a variable (from an array into a simple integer), which would later be tested with the assumption that its value was unchanged... (i.e. "is it an array?" -- no dummy, it can't be, it was rewritten.)
Anyway, it's hard to test notifications without bothering users with useless comments, so... I'll wait & see if I get more errors in my log. Bed time anyway.
 1. Many of Lestrade's concepts are taken straight from Barter, which was necessary since it *was* a replacement site to begin with...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on May 30th, 2017, 12:37 AM
Feel free to notify when you need to :p
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 30th, 2017, 03:07 PM
I'm really into notifications... :^^;:
There are only about 1/3 of LT users who have set up an e-mail address for notifications, so I'd really like for that ratio to increase.

Oh, about Barter, a small note... While the vast majority of LT users are also (or were also) on BVG, it's interesting to note that there are about 70 users who are not on BVG for a total of about 1400 tradables copies. So, here's a good reason for BVG users to start using LT. :P
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on May 30th, 2017, 03:15 PM
Is there an RSS-feed for notifications / messages only, by the way?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 30th, 2017, 06:42 PM
Nope... I just feel it's inefficient compared to email.

Plus I only ever got *one* request for it...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 30th, 2017, 06:54 PM
NEW: Nothing! I took a day off... Just felt it needed to be said, as it's become so uncommon. :P

Okay I know, day's not over... Plus I added stuff to the to-do list... (Now that I'm do,e with the crucial boring features, my imaginaton goes wild...)

I need to find volunteers to help with promotion. There's no reason it should be up to the developer to do everything not related to development; is there..?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 30th, 2017, 11:16 PM
NEW: in bundle pages, I'm now showing prominently if a game is bundled for the first time, or has been bundled at least twice before (I consider 2 bundlings to be fair game and not worth a mention.)
Please tell me if you think it's nice or could use some work.

IMPROVED:
- H:W data in bundle & offer pages is now colored, similarly to list pages.
- color codes for H:W are similar to before (green for rare games, red for common games), but I'm now lerping between those colors, meaning it won't exactly go from green to black to red. I think it looks nicer. Again, feel free to disagree: I still have the old (faster) code commented out, I can revert to it just in case.

NOT IMPROVED: my ability to take a break for a frigging day... :P
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 30th, 2017, 11:42 PM
Note: I reworked the lerping code to go back to the green -> black -> red cycle. Wasn't too happy with the poop-colored intermediates... :^^;: Internally, it's still better than before. The red & green colors are much nicer to the eye IMHO. And for the last time: if you preferred the more 'in your face' older colors (way uglier but a bit easier to decode), feel free to say it. Otherwise, just like this post. :P
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: nhex on May 31st, 2017, 09:04 AM
Thanks for the various new features lately (bundles, compare with Barter, etc). Good work, Lestrade.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 31st, 2017, 01:15 PM
You're welcome. 'Compare with Barter' is not new though, it's been there for weeks... :^^;:

As I said yesterday, I need help if I want to do more in the future. Really, the equation is simple : more users = more trades = more useful features.
What can I say... Invite your trader friends to the site or the Steam group ;)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 31st, 2017, 04:40 PM
FIX: Previewing an offer in the notification popup wasn't properly removing its 'unread' status... I finally found out why.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 1st, 2017, 02:56 PM
FIX: New comment notifications were using the previous comment's text message if said previous comment wasn't marked as read. There is no 'best' solution in this case unfortunately. Wedge (my forum software) assumes that if you didn't read the previous comment in the same offer, you'll want to be notified of it again. But since the comment appears in its entirety in the notification (because it's always short), there's a good chance you just won't click it to 'mark it read', so you'll constantly get the same comment notification if you don't click it.
From now on, you should be receiving separate comment notifications, even if you didn't bother to mark the earlier ones as read.

Please note that there's a 'Mark as read' link in the notification popup that allows you to mark all currently unread notifications as read. If you miss one notification by mistake, and you don't have an e-mail address set up, click the 'Latest' link. Click 'Unread' when you're done.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 1st, 2017, 03:26 PM
FIX: Steam wishlist sync would fail if, ahem... If your Steam wishlist was empty. Yeah, I know, right..? Apparently there's at least one here who has no wishlist at all on Steam. I envy them...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 1st, 2017, 03:50 PM
NEW: Multiple type search :) You can now search games (as before), members and posts directly from the search box in the header.

A quick guide to quick searching™:

- Click on the usual 'Game' search box at the top right.
- You should see a small popup show up at the same time as the search box is widening.
- You can simply type your game name as usual, nothing changes.
- Alternatively, you can click "Member" to search for a member here, or "Forum" to be taken to the forum search page.
- I spent most of my day on this, lol... Wanted it to be perfect as usual (Lestrade's trademark?): for instance, let's just type "lestr" in the box. "Celestrion" will show up. Type "a" and LT will notice that there's no game called "Lestra", so it'll empty the search list. "Oh, but... That wasn't a member search! I forgot to click Member..." So, you click Member, and... voilà, Lestrade immediately shows up in the list.
- Try typing "hi mom". Now, click on the 'Forum' button. Instead of being taken to the Search page (where you can select which boards you want to search, etc.), you'll be taken to the results page for "hi mom", with the search engine using the defaults, except for "show as messages" which I chose to use in these quick searches, even though it's not selected by default.
- If you're wondering why forum posts don't get shown directly in the usual box, err... Really? Would you rather have just the post titles without a preview of the contents..? Personally, I don't. So I took this approach.

I also removed the "Member search" link from the menu (you can find it in the "Member list" page if you absolutely need it), and moved the "Member list" link out of the menu, and into the homepage statistics in the sidebar ("xxx messages by yyy members"). As such, there is now no sub-menu for the 'Home' link, and I could even consider just removing that link, since we have the 'Lestrade's' logo in the top bar that does the same job. I don't know yet.

Hope you like it! Feel free to suggest any improvements I couldn't think of.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: joaoarena on June 1st, 2017, 04:49 PM
Not working for me in chrome. In fact, now searchig the games doesn't not work either.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 1st, 2017, 05:36 PM
Fixed-- this was due to another unrelated bug fix (see below), where I botched a parenthesis and then left to grab a bite to eat.

FIX: When multi-selecting items in your lists, items marked as x0 are now properly marked as x0 in the tag editor.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 1st, 2017, 05:58 PM
FIX: Multi-edit button to 'Remove' selected items was disabled after one use. You had to reload the page to start removing stuff again... Can't believe no one reported that bug (such an easy fix)...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on June 1st, 2017, 08:38 PM
If you search for a user, it only works if you know the correct beginning of the username.
For example, if i only remember that there is an overworked admin called something with "trade" at the end of the name, i don't find "Lestrade".

Otherwise, it seems to work pretty good on a few test searches.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 1st, 2017, 09:33 PM
NEW: Can now search a portion of a user name, it doesn't have to have the correct start. :P

NEW: Can now search by profile URL (e.g. search for 'nao' and you'll get me.)

FIX: For some reason the search list of items wasn't properly fixed on the screen (when you scrolled down it wouldn't stay stuck.) Apparently been that way for a while...

FIX: Mobile users were still getting a dropdown link for no reason in the 'Home' menu... Removed that.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on June 1st, 2017, 10:27 PM
Everything seems to work on some test searches, well done.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 1st, 2017, 11:36 PM
Thanks :) I'm pretty happy with the system, too.
One of the rare things I'm not happy with is that you can't change the search type while there's something in the search results, because it's overlaid on top of the type selector.. A solution could be to put it on the left but that precludes mobile from using it (and it looks ugly), or show the result list below the search type banner, but it'd require getting rid of the nice little animation for the type selector...

Should I add a bundle search engine, too..? I don't know if it's that interesting. Maybe I can just put it in the bundle page and not bother with the top bar.. I don't know.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on June 2nd, 2017, 02:07 AM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on June 1st, 2017, 11:36 PM
Thanks :) I'm pretty happy with the system, too.
One of the rare things I'm not happy with is that you can't change the search type while there's something in the search results, because it's overlaid on top of the type selector.. A solution could be to put it on the left but that precludes mobile from using it (and it looks ugly), or show the result list below the search type banner, but it'd require getting rid of the nice little animation for the type selector...

Should I add a bundle search engine, too..? I don't know if it's that interesting. Maybe I can just put it in the bundle page and not bother with the top bar.. I don't know.
The search bar can detect a simple "game: " or "member: " and point to the right search category. This is how Duckduckgo and Google implements advanced stuff to their search engine.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 2nd, 2017, 11:10 AM
Quote from Akylen on June 2nd, 2017, 02:07 AM
The search bar can detect a simple "game: " or "member: " and point to the right search category.
What search bar? (?)
Quote from Akylen on June 2nd, 2017, 02:07 AM
This is how Duckduckgo and Google implements advanced stuff to their search engine.
Is this relevant..?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 2nd, 2017, 02:17 PM
NEW: (Did that last night but was too tired to document it...)

The active offer section in the offer list is now more throughly sorted:
- Previously (well, last week), it would sort by user and then by date.
- Now it sorts by date, which is certainly more useful, but whenever it catches a 'duplicate' trader in the list, it shows them right after the most recent offer involving them.

For instance:

Offer from user A - 5 hours ago
Offer to user B - 6 hours ago
Offer from user C - 7 hours ago
Offer └— to user C - 3 days ago
Offer from user D - 8 hours ago
Offer └— from user D - 1 month ago
Offer └— from user D - 2 months ago (yeah, you probably should cancel their offers, you lazy ass!)
Offer to user E - 12 hours ago

See the idea..?
Best possible sorting method I could figure out for this particular situation, at least.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: joaoarena on June 2nd, 2017, 04:19 PM
Love the new sorting method, just what is needed.
But why inactive members keep being in there, mixed with the others? Obviously, they were not around last 5 hours, and do on...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 2nd, 2017, 06:11 PM
Inactive members..? What do you mean?
If someone is inactive, they may still get notified of new comments (maybe I should change the active status to include being able to be notified...), why should I hide their offers from the active offer list?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on June 2nd, 2017, 07:10 PM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on June 2nd, 2017, 11:10 AM
Quote from Akylen on June 2nd, 2017, 02:07 AM
The search bar can detect a simple "game: " or "member: " and point to the right search category.
What search bar? (?)
Quote from Akylen on June 2nd, 2017, 02:07 AM
This is how Duckduckgo and Google implements advanced stuff to their search engine.
Is this relevant..?
The main search bar.


Here is an example:
https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Alestrades.com%20I%20am%20doing%20a%20search
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: joaoarena on June 2nd, 2017, 09:01 PM
I meant some inactive users still are on the top of the matches. Didn't you say that lasts users active now are on the top of matches page?
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on June 2nd, 2017, 06:11 PM
Inactive members..? What do you mean?
If someone is inactive, they may still get notified of new comments (maybe I should change the active status to include being able to be notified...), why should I hide their offers from the active offer list?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 3rd, 2017, 01:49 AM
Akylen, I see what you mean but... Can you tell me the point? You don't want to do an extra click....?

joaoarena, I don't remember saying it would be the case. I may have discussed that possibility but I can assure you I never implemented it...

FIX: if for some reason your Steam wishlist was seen as empty by LT (e.g. network issue), all items would be marked as 'removed' (this just happened to me.) This is now fixed. The counterpart here is that if you move a Steam wishlisted item to your local (LT) wishlist (i.e. remove from wishlist on Steam, then sync wishlist with LT, then add game to your LT wishlist), then adding it again to your Steam wishlist will mark is as a Steam wishlist again (previously, it would keep the local status). This is actually probably for the best...
If you have such a problem: (1) why didn't you mention it before? (2) just use the 'sync with steam' button and your problem will be fixed.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on June 3rd, 2017, 02:59 AM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on June 3rd, 2017, 01:49 AM
Akylen, I see what you mean but... Can you tell me the point? You don't want to do an extra click....?
Not that I mind, it is simply a suggestion for this (I am not much of a click guy. I like to use the keyboard all the time  :niark: ):
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on June 1st, 2017, 11:36 PM
One of the rare things I'm not happy with is that you can't change the search type while there's something in the search results, because it's overlaid on top of the type selector.. A solution could be to put it on the left but that precludes mobile from using it (and it looks ugly), or show the result list below the search type banner, but it'd require getting rid of the nice little animation for the type selector...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 3rd, 2017, 09:47 AM
There could be more intuitive solutions that don't require reading a faq. No one reads reads those...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 3rd, 2017, 12:09 PM
FIX: Updated some bundle store icons (Lazy guys, Cubic Bundle, Greenman Gaming) to be more pleasing to the eye or to make them up to date.

FIX: Bundles with 'unknown' expiry shouldn't be moved to the end of the list if we sort by latest bundles added, rather than by expiry date. (Because of that, I'd missed a couple of duplicate bundles that were imported by mistake...)
Also force-expired the GMG indie bundle for May.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 3rd, 2017, 04:03 PM
Looks like notifications by email aren't working right now. Anyone knows when this started..? Maybe it's related to my fix for comment notifications but I don't really see how...
Posted: June 3rd, 2017, 01:50 PM

No, it's not related to my fix, since I did said fix 2 days ago and I received offer notifications yesterday... Hmm.
Anyone? Please look into your mailbox, tell me if you got e-mail notifications for new, accepted or declined offers, and post about it..?
Maybe it's a problem with the website's smtp server... I don't know.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on June 3rd, 2017, 04:58 PM
Cant help you with that, since i dont have them enabled. :/
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 3rd, 2017, 08:04 PM
NEW: Added a 'no library' filter for list pages (except for your library). It's taken directly from the list of Premium Filters (which I have yet to make public), and it will filter out anything that's already in your library. Can be useful, especially when browsing other users' tradables. (Note: reportedly not working, I'll look into it later tonight.)

NEW: Game page list buttons now show their icons in color, like everywhere else. I'm not too confident that it'll work across all browsers though, so I may end up using a button tag (instead of input tag + CSS trick) to show them. Tell me if it doesn't work well for you...

FIX: I'm currently working on fixing a couple hundred bundle items that are declared as being from Desura even though they're for Steam.

FIX: Fixed a few dozens Steam packages that were linking to an app's ITAD page instead of their own. (This is because my code was foolishly resetting both the app and the packages that contained the app to use the new ITAD URL when I updated them.) (Don't worry, it's not important. This fix was related to the one before it.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 4th, 2017, 01:35 AM
FIX: The 'no library' filter is now working. (Previously workaround was to simply add ?lim=something to the URL.)

FIX: ~185 Desura games are now marked as Steam games in the bundle database, if buyers were subsequently provided a complimentary Steam key.

(Poll: what do you guys think of completely getting rid of Desura games in the bundle list, as long as there's an equivalent Steam store page? I know these are all 2+ year-old bundles so who cares, so I'm not going to care myself... But if you do, now's your time to talk.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 4th, 2017, 02:04 PM
NEW: Added a link called "🎨 Images" at the top of list pages. You can now show banners for all games. Banners are clickable so they're not completely worthless, it actually makes game selection easier (because you don't have to make sure your cursor doesn't end up on a linked anchor...)
Opinions welcome. I'll later make sure that Lestrade's remembers your preference.

Also a question: what should be the limit for presenting banners..? 1000 items? 2000? 3000? More? Nothing? Should I use lazy loading to load them..? (Why not? It'd save you guys bandwidth!)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 4th, 2017, 02:37 PM
FIX: Fixed (public) comments showing in the comment area for a second when removing a personal comment. :^^;: (If it's not fixed for you, please tell me.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 4th, 2017, 02:40 PM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on June 3rd, 2017, 04:03 PM
Looks like notifications by email aren't working right now. Anyone knows when this started..? Maybe it's related to my fix for comment notifications but I don't really see how...
Notifications never stopped working.
For some reason however, Google started moving them to my 'Notifications' tab...
I've removed the user link from notif e-mails, hoping that'll save them from that horrible fate. (You can still move a notification manually into the General tab, at which point Gmail will offer to keep your LT notifications in there, allowing you to get notifications on your mobile phone, but still... That sucks!! How about I choose myself eh?)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 4th, 2017, 07:25 PM
NEW: (And this is in beta... Probably forever :P)

I added a dark theme, as requested by a couple users.

Since I'm currently testing it, I'm not going to bother making it selectable, so those of you who want to use it can add ?night at the end of any URL. (If there's no slash at the end, use /?night of course.)
This will turn your current page white on a black background.

I'll make it selectable once it's stable enough. But for now, dinner time! :P
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 5th, 2017, 12:27 AM
FIX: Game ratios were calculated improperly (in an attempt to save some processing time), I've refreshed all games with a more accurate ratio. (Only used when sorting by ratio in bundles.)

FIX: Well, sorting by ratio was actually sorting by number of wishlists, because of a missing parenthesis in nested ternary operators, oops. I guess no one uses that feature. :P
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on June 5th, 2017, 01:06 AM
Not a huge fan of the dark theme, the color palette is not very easy on the eyes, in my opinion.
I use a dark theme on some sites (Youtube, espacially, very well done there), but i like the light theme of Lestrades, probably won't use dark.
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on June 5th, 2017, 12:27 AM
FIX: Well, sorting by ratio was actually sorting by number of wishlists, because of a missing parenthesis in nested ternary operators, oops. I guess no one uses that feature. :P
Really? :D
I always sort by ratio, never noticed it :D
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 5th, 2017, 01:11 AM
Quote from /u/humpaaa on June 5th, 2017, 01:06 AM
Not a huge fan of the dark theme, the color palette is not very easy on the eyes, in my opinion.
I'm not a huge fan either but believe me, the first version was way worse. :P
I'm counting on user feedback to fix it, just not simply 'not very easy on the eyes'. ;)
Quote from /u/humpaaa on June 5th, 2017, 01:06 AM
I use a dark theme on some sites (Youtube, espacially, very well done there), but i like the light theme of Lestrades, probably won't use dark.
I developed the site with a light theme in mind, so obviously all colors fit perfectly. The night version is more of an acquired taste, I guess. And it has issues here and there. I did put a lot of work into it (I redid the Groupees icon to get rid of the white background, I made custom versions of the button icons so they could be shown properly...), it's just hard to do it right.

A good question would be: did you try Barter's dark theme..? What did you think of it? And about when compared with LT's?
Quote from /u/humpaaa on June 5th, 2017, 01:06 AM
Really? :D
I always sort by ratio, never noticed it :D
A recent bundle has a 6:3 game in it, it was considered internally (and thus sorted) as having the same ratio as a 15:9 game... Silly, I know!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on June 5th, 2017, 01:01 PM
Didn't even know barter had a dark theme.^^

I'll be more specific with the feedback:
1) Misaligned icons: http://imgur.com/a/XviaZ
2) Everything (especially: Bundle icons, and fonts, you can see it at "inactive") seems to have a hint of white, look washed out: http://imgur.com/a/CnMHn
3) Also, not a huge fan of the blue link color on black background
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 5th, 2017, 01:08 PM
Err, just so we're clear: I've been working on the dark theme for about 20 minutes now and didn't bother to make my changes invisible to the public because the whole theme is hidden behind a URL variable anyway... ^^ So what's buggy is due to my changes. The dark theme stayed the same between last night and a few hours ago, everything after that is just me reworking the thing because of bugs. (Most notably, I found out my CSS handling code was adding the night skin code before the lestrades code, which is why I had some bugs before. I fixed that but now I don't have time left to do the rest.)

1/ today's bug fix in progress
2/ it was worse before. I'm working on it... This isn't a bug on my side but rather a limitation with font hinting in Segoe UI, which is the default font here. This is fixed by decreasing contrast, so I'm working on that. (See this topic? Try the night theme on it... Now look at your post just above. It's perfectly readable because contrast is decreased.)
3/ i'm trying Steam's background color in headers, but not a big fan either... I think I may settle on a grayish background like in your post above.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on June 5th, 2017, 01:16 PM
Yeah, i know it's early dev stage / WIP, but hoped every feedbacl would help.
Concerning "look at this topic in night mode": I don't think this works. No night mode on the forum possible for me, only on list pages
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 5th, 2017, 02:26 PM
Are you sure you added the ?night after the slash..?
Adding it after #new, for instance, will yield nothing.
It's only a preview anyway... I'll add a setting for this as soon as I tackle the profile redesign. (Or I'll just add settings at the bottom while waiting for the redesign to be tackled, I don't know...)

Currently doing some tests with Arial as the main font in the dark theme, just to see if I can get a Steam-like vibe, and because I can.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on June 5th, 2017, 02:43 PM
Ah, i tried to add it behind #new. (msg1291/#new/?night).
Works now
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 6th, 2017, 08:09 AM
Note: matching reported to be broken since last night. I'll look into it when I can.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 6th, 2017, 01:37 PM
FIX: Game page matches now show all proper offerable items if game wasn't in your wishlist.

For the past month, it looks like the 'Matches' link in game pages was a bit broken... By broken, I mean that it did find the games you wanted at other traders', but it didn't show you other games in their tradables that you'd like to get as well, making it harder to do anything else than a 1:1 offer starting from the match page. This was due to a tiny bug in the match query rewrite I did to improve performance... Now the funny thing is, the 'matches' link in game pages was always one of the slowest queries at Lestrade's, which actually forced me to use a FORCE INDEX because MySQL was unabel to figure out the best index for that query to use. Did I say it's funny? Yes, because fixing that tiny bug started slowing down the query so I looked into my FORCE, removed it to test how LT would fare by itself, and it's now twice faster than the speed I used to get when the query was buggy... :^^;: So I went from 0.04s down to 0.02s on my latest tests. That may not be representative of the usual performance we'll get in the future, but it's still better than the 0.2s I got after fixing the bug. :P
So, good news, eh?

Also of interest: I'm working on two more things for the match system! Stay tuned.

PS: Why am I the only only commenting bundles and games..? Are any of you unable to do it..?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 6th, 2017, 02:01 PM
FIX: In game pages, inactive users were not grayed out if you'd ever visited their profile. (CSS precedence issue... Hate those.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 6th, 2017, 08:27 PM
I got a couple likes on the post where I ask whether anyone can post a comment on a game or a bundle (you can remove it later if you don't want to 'bump' it), but I actually got no replies... :P

Got *plenty* done today. Not always visible, but still cool. For instance I keep working on the game page. I replaced Barter's usual "More..." clickable with a complete list + good looking scrollbars. I was hoping that it would be enough to keep the names in view when clicking them and going back to the page, but alas it was not to be. Still, I prefer scrolling to clicking, so...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on June 6th, 2017, 08:37 PM
I can comment on games and bundles. Both tested
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 6th, 2017, 11:58 PM
Thanks ;)
So it's just that everyone's lazy, not a problem on my side.
 :whip:

NEW: Users can cancel an offer in 'Editing' mode. (That is, when you press the 'Edit Offer' button after you sent it.)
Previously you were forced to send the offer again to get access to the Cancel button. I probably shouldn't have bothered with this, it forced me to refactor more code and I'm crossing my fingers that it won't create more bugs... :^^;:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 7th, 2017, 12:29 AM
Since it's related to a new feature, I'm gonna discuss this here...
Today I turned the user lists in game pages into scrollable boxes. I thought it looked better.
However I just realized that this means when you're scrolling to the bottom of the page (e.g. to read/write comments), once your cursor is over those user lists, they'll start scrolling through the lists, obviously... Forcing you to move the mouse outside of the user list area to keep scrolling to the bottom.

I don't really know how I can 'fix' that... Making lists narrower so that you get more space to freely scroll out of them? Forcing users to click the user list area to start scrolling in it?
I think I'm gonna give up on that one... But if you have a technical solution for me, make sure to tell me!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on June 7th, 2017, 12:55 AM
I like the idea, but i would like the scroll bars to be wider.
Sure, it looks fancy, but its hard to click them.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 7th, 2017, 02:39 PM
(I've reset to what it used to be... I like the scrollbars, but I can always use & refine them in another, less prominent place first.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on June 7th, 2017, 02:42 PM
It looked good, and in theory was much easier to navigate then having to click the "more"-buttons there are now.
But the srcoll bars were so tiny, it was hard to click them (im more of a click&drag guy, not a ascrollwheel guy, bc its more precise).
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 7th, 2017, 07:01 PM
The scrollbar was unstyled yesterday but it didn't look great...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 8th, 2017, 12:46 AM
NEW: List pages now show smaller banners in Images mode (same size as in the search box), and the HTML is laid out differently. As a result, hovering the banners will now properly show the corresponding checkboxes (acting as a 'hint' that they're clickable), there is about 30% less bandwidth usage on your side, and the text is just more readable (I think.) Main drawback: mobile mode is problematic (especially on long game names and games with a few tags). I'll try to rework it more tomorrow... Maybe I can find a perfect solution.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 8th, 2017, 12:03 PM
FIX: Game page buttons now show their colored icons before the list name. For instance, "Add to ★ Wishlist". Just like before I added colored icons, except the icons are still colored now. :)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on June 8th, 2017, 12:04 PM
Attention to detail =)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 8th, 2017, 12:11 PM
Well, I was really pissed by that one... :^^;:
In fact I should have gone for an all-HTML solution a while ago for that one, rather than the clever CSS trick I used. HTML is more widely compatible.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 8th, 2017, 02:31 PM
FIX: Your list pages now have a smooth hover transition from checkbox to checkbox between items. By that, I mean that previously, while moving the mouse over game titles, you'd end up with the current checkbox disappearing while transitioning between two games, then reappearing. It forced you to be more precise when 'targeting' a game for selection.
I've found and abused some weird bug in Chrome and Firefox (if it's in both it's probably also in the HTML specs), but I managed to make it work. Let's not talk about that again.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 10th, 2017, 01:23 PM
NEW: On your Offer page, problematic offers will now be shown along with a list of tradables missing from the offer (as well as whose side they're missing from.)

I have about 30 pending offers and I had half a dozen offers I needed to fix to remove items I'd already traded, or that the other trader no longer had... So-- pretty useful to me.

PS: this is the kind of feature you wish were on Barter as well, just like 127 other features at LT's, and again another reason to wonder why so many traders stick to BVG or SteamTrades exclusively.

PPS: invite your friends. Every time you do a trade on Barter-- tell the trader they should sync their BVG tradables at LT's. It's just two clicks!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 10th, 2017, 01:37 PM
NEW: Finally added a Bundles tab to the tab list... Why? Because I end up spending a lot of time checking those anyway. And because the section is also user-specific (it indicates whether or not a bundle has games you want, and in the future I'll work on more features similar to that), it made sense to have it next to Offers.
(I'm open to a different color/icon for the tab, of course.)
Also fixed a bug where narrower windows could see 'Blacklist' but not 'Offers'... Offers takes priority, obviously.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 11th, 2017, 12:52 AM
NEW: Added option at the top of the Offers page to show quick previews below all active offers.
They're similar to the e-mail previews you get, but even more compact. Hope you like them...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 11th, 2017, 01:27 AM
NEW: When creating an offer, grayed out items will now explain themselves. While x0 quantity items are self-explained, other items only said they were found in the trader's library, tradables or wishlist. Now LT will explicitly specify which list it was found in.

NEW: Add ?clean to the URL to create offers without showing those grayed out items at all (except for x0 quantity because you should be able to offer your own x0 items if you want.)
Can be useful when sending offers to a user who isn't too careful about updating their wishlists... (Hi devotee :P)

PS: these are both works in progress. UI-wise, I'm not happy with them.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on June 12th, 2017, 06:11 PM
That's one sexy bundles link <3
Seriously, i really like the bundle implementation. Really easy to get a quick overview.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 12th, 2017, 06:24 PM
It's not perfect in my opinion, but it's enough to make me stop checking out the Specials section of ITAD. (I still check out their Waitlist section, of course. I'm not gonna scrape game prices :P)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 12th, 2017, 06:43 PM
NEW: You can now switch between 'Game' and 'Member' search types in the quick search box (top right corner) by pressing the 'Tab' key (game -> member) or Shift + Tab (member -> game). I wanted to use the Tab key because it's the most 'natural' way of doing it, but this is causing problems when navigating the entire screen with the keyboard (tip: only navigate with Shift + Tab for now, as the script successfully goes outside the search box when you do that.) This is only going to be a problem for disabled users, so if you need keyboard access ASAP please tell me that I should focus on that semi-bug right now. ;)
In the meantime I've run out of time and I figured it was good enough for mass consumption-- by mass consumption I mean the half-dozen geeks who like being able to search for a member without moving their mouse.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 12th, 2017, 11:46 PM
FIX: The bug mentioned in the previous post is now fixed... (Because I just can't let a bug unfixed!!)
(Fixed about an hour ago, was too busy to post about it.)
So, basically, you can now search for members or posts entirely with your keyboard:
- type lestrades.com into your url box
- type 'hello' or anything you like.
- press Tab to switch to a member search (then use up/down arrow keys to navigate and Enter to select), or press Tab again to switch to forum search, and Enter to confirm your search term. Use Shift+Tab to come back from Forum to Member, and from Member to Game. Extra tab presses (in both directions) will resume normal behavior, i.e. accessibility-oriented spatial keyboard navigation.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 13th, 2017, 11:31 PM
NEW: This is totally invisible to regular users, but moderators (well, just me for now, for lack of volunteers...) are now able to edit bundle notes and item notes (still in bundles) directly from a bundle page. This should make it easier to give more information on games (version included in the bundle...), if I ever need to...

(I'm struggling to find something else I did today, but I think that's all... Sometimes, I gotta focus on back-end-only features :P)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on June 14th, 2017, 12:18 AM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on June 13th, 2017, 11:31 PM
Sometimes, I gotta focus on back-end-only features :P)
That's a strange spelling of "Real life, enjoying the sun". :p
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 14th, 2017, 12:23 AM
Sunlight is bad for my vampiresque skin...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 14th, 2017, 11:29 PM
NEW: Offer previews (on main offer page) will now be: (1) shown immediately (without a page load, but with a --hopefully smooth-- animation), (2) your setting will be remembered across page loads.

And yes, I wrote 'that' darn piece of code, meaning I'll soon be able to also remember other settings like showing/hiding inactive members on match page... ;)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 15th, 2017, 11:47 AM
NEW: Lestrade's now remembers your preferred setting for "Unfold inactive users" in Match pages. As a reminder, an inactive user will always be unfolded (and thus visible) if they entered an e-mail address for offer notifications.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 15th, 2017, 11:56 AM
FIX: The 'no offer' tag was only disabling the other trader's 'no-offer' side for yourself... When it should have been for themselves, of course. (Your own side should have been working fine since day one though, i.e. 'no offer' is selectable when you tagged items that way, and non-selectable if the other user tagged their wishlist that way.)
(Okay, I know it's complicated... Just trust me that it works now.)

:edit: NEW: The Sort dropdown now sports icons on each entry, hopefully making it easier to differentiate between each 'category'. These are temporary icons, I didn't want to spend my day choosing icons when I had some stuff already available (although they don't really blend well together). I only really added the shamrock icon to represent ratios-- because a rare ratio is green, just like a clover. There's a 4-leaf clover emoji out there but it looks bad, so I settled on the 3-leaf icon... You know what it means anyway.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 17th, 2017, 06:25 PM
FIX: the Barter importer didn't show item quantities when presenting items to import. Don't get me wrong, they WERE imported with the correct quantity, it just wasn't shown in the preview.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 19th, 2017, 12:52 AM
NEW: Your Offer list will now show you whether some items are missing from someone's wishlist[1]. I'm not showing them in red because, unlike missing tradables, you can hardly fail an offer because of that, and maybe you chose a non-wishlisted game in the trader's tradables to make an offer more balanced.
 1. Previously, it would only show that for tradables. The SQL for that is also different, I'm afraid. But it's still optimized so it's like an extra millisecond...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 19th, 2017, 12:54 AM
NEW: When you're on a game page, the list of bundles containing that game will now show any bundles that featured a package that contained them. For instance, if a bundle included a 'game of the year' Steam package of a specific app ID, Lestrade's will say "Packaged in...", instead of just listing the bundle. (Tested here(https://lestrades.com/app/290790), please tell me if you find any problems with other games.)

:edit: This actually broke some other game pages, fixed. ;)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 19th, 2017, 12:02 PM
NEW: Added a tentative documentation page for item tagging. Just click the green ? icon (yes, I've recolored it from pink to green... I may even go full grey in the future), and you'll see a popup with a description of each item (the description slightly differs depending on whether you're tagging a tradable or wishlist). The intention is to make it easier for me to hide dropdown descriptions to give me more space to add some stuff in the tagger box.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 19th, 2017, 09:20 PM
FIX: DLCs were seen as 'packaged' in bundles containing their master game, even if they weren't packaged within that game to begin with. (It's a complicated thing... the database doesn't really 'store' that data so now I'm relying on Steam package status -- basically, if the parent is a package, then it was packaged in the parent's bundle as well, otherwise nope.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 19th, 2017, 09:34 PM
NEW: Game pages will be a bit more specific about related items... DLCs will be marked as DLCs, packages as 'Packaged in' (as for bundles).

NEW: The top header will now auto-hide if you scroll down (it's a fad, I know!) -- I'm not a big fan, but it could be useful on mobile devices. I've made sure not to auto-hide when you're searching for something.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 19th, 2017, 09:38 PM
FIX: I manually updated all packages added in the last couple of months that had broken relationships with games included in them.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on June 20th, 2017, 08:04 PM
I find the theme switcher pretty cool. The icon on the light theme is a bit faded though.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 20th, 2017, 08:27 PM
Well it's a work in progress. Just found out it's broken on mobile for instance.
I don't really know where else to put it actually...

I've added plenty of stuff these last few days but no more than a couple people read this topic so I don't bother documenting everything. not great for motivation but hey.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on June 20th, 2017, 08:42 PM
Noticed the theme switcher aswell, and was confused there was no update post here :D
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 20th, 2017, 10:18 PM
Okay, I've fixed the post editor which was showing in black on black (not very practical when you want to, err... Post?).

I've also moved the Night Mode switch to the sidebar (well, the sidebar never shows by default for me because my screen is too narrow, so I didn't think of it in the first place.)
It also allowed me to actually print out the setting's name, of course.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 20th, 2017, 11:37 PM
NEW: Night Mode (instant switch without page reload :)), can be enabled in the sidebar. It replaces the earlier "?night" trick and is out of alpha. I consider it still in beta because there are many hardcoded colors I need to fix in the HTML. I'm starting to be satisfied with the overall color scheme, which is why I decided to make it usable (e.g. by remembering the setting across all pages.)

NEW: Bundle page now shows you the average ratio per bundle. I went for a weird average: average Have then average Want, instead of average (Have / Want). It's not the same thing (1:1 + 1:2 + 1:3 = 0.61 average, 1-1-1 : 1-2-3 = 1:2 average = 0.5...) I was aware of that, I just didn't really care, because I think the average number of Haves & Wants is more important than the average ratio.

(And other things that I didn't bother to document.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 21st, 2017, 04:33 PM
2 features implemented earlier this week that I didn't bother to log, but since I remembered them, let's do it:

NEW: When bulk-adding items, they should be all selected after adding them, to help you tag them all together. (Untested.)

NEW: Moved game description to the right of the banner. Should behave as before on mobile, because there's not enough space of course.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 24th, 2017, 11:05 PM
NEW: My new replacement monitor has a great color gamut so it's making my designer's life hell because strong colors have become surreal. Well, at least I can now better accommodate for wider screens... I hate 16/9 though. I'm currently on a custom 15/10 ratio, ahah. Best I can do... Anyway, that's mostly the reason I was inactive yesterday (had no monitor at all). I also did other changes that I didn't think of documenting, there are a couple below.

FIX: For the last few hours, it was impossible to send a new offer on Lestrade's. Apologies about that -- I was trying to fix another rare bug that involved creating offers to yourself... And I forgot to test for the 'legitimate' creation process.

FIX: Most colors should now be fixed in Night mode. All colors that were set in a forced style are now set in a class. Most notably, the red alert box shown when a library item was found in your wishlist without an extra tag. The text was unreadable prior to that.

NEW: I don't think I documented it before, but when listing games by tag (click any tag for a list), I'm now showing more data (ratio, cards, rating), instead of just the game titles.

FIX: When multi-editing items, once you applied a change, the items were deselected by mistake due to a recent fix (from 3 days ago). I fixed it the next day I think.

FIX: An error was shown in the bundle list if the average number of wishlisters was zero. This could only happen if only one crappy shovelware was added as its own bundle (which ITAD tends to do these days, not that I'd usually complain about that.)

FIX: In list pages, if a game was titled like a HTML tag, it wouldn't be shown. (e.g. </reality>, yes that's a real game on Steam.)

FIX: Not sure I documented this either: previously when creating an offer, the system could get confused by quantities set on tradables & wishlists (e.g. if you want something but don't want for it to match, you'd set the wishlisted item's quantity to 0, and LT would sometimes consider it as the other trader setting the matching tradable's quantity to 0, making it impossible to select.)

FIX: Moved the (?) help icon in tag box to the legend ('My tradable/wishlisted copy'), rather than the left of the tag list, so it saves me a bit more space for later purposes. (Yes, there are later purposes...)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 25th, 2017, 10:39 AM
NEW: Widescreen users (well, even desktop users in general) will now see the Night mode icon in the header bar, rather than the sidebar.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 28th, 2017, 12:05 AM
NEW: in Chrome & derived, Night mode now has a better looking scrollbar. (e.g. when sending an offer.)
I tried doing a custom scrollbar on Firefox but it's not ready for public use and possibly will never be because I don't know if it's worth bothering about a detail like this, especially given my current lack of motivation... -_-
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 28th, 2017, 09:48 PM
NEW: Forced choices in offers. When creating an offer, you can opt to 'force' the trader to choose one of the games you want when there are multiple choices, by clicking the 'Forced' checkbox next to the item you want the most. The trader will see the item pre-checked and non-clickable (i.e. forced). Don't bother attempting to disable the choice, Lestrade's will know it and return an error.

This one calls for an explanation. You can skip it if you like.

(click to show/hide)
Among my plans for Lestrade's, I always had the ability to improve offers beyond a "x items for y items" system by catering to people (whom I won't name :P) who like doing trades for "this game and any other one in that list"... They probably got a lot of replies that didn't include the game they wanted, and I often find myself in the same situation because I have mostly rarer games and a lot of common games in my wishlist.
My first intention was to store offers as an equation of sorts, something like "(1+2) or (3+4+5) = (6+7) or 8". But it would have forced me to show the equation below each offer, and only those at ease with this kind of wording would be able to change it. Instead, last month I thought of simply limiting the equation to "(1+2) + (3 or 4 or 5) = 6 + (7 or 8)', which was simpler to manage because it only required storing a 'forced' column in the database, and I already had a similar column that I used to store items in accepted trades. Because the column was unused before the trade came to be accepted, I could simply re-use it (I'm very restrictive about the number of columns I can store in a table, that's part of the reason why Lestrade's is so fast and so well optimized.)
So I started implementing the feature for testing, but it didn't work well, I wasn't happy with the UI (I still am not), and I found no one to test it at the time (because you need to be two to make fake offers :P), with me so I just left it aside until I got around to building fake offers to myself in the database. Then I focused on other things, like the Night mode.
Today, BVG introduced the exact same system (well, from what I understand, because I haven't tested it), so my pride got hurt a little but I figured I should congratulate him for implementing a working version (I suppose?) first. I fixed the bug, found another bug, fixed it, and voilà. Just a couple hours of work. I still need to fix the UI though... I'm thinking of showing an icon below the red "X" (I still have room for one icon after all), instead of a checkbox, but still have it be a checkbox internally, but it may be less natural so I'm leaving it this way for now. Suggestions welcome.
PS: again, I haven't tested the BVG version so it may be better, not as good, or exactly the same. I'm not sure I wanna know... :^^;:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on June 28th, 2017, 10:51 PM
That's a really good feature, could've used that a couple of times
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 29th, 2017, 06:11 PM
Thanks!

NEW: The 'Forced' checkbox is now a padlock icon below the 'X' icon, as I'd planned originally. This works better although I may tweak it again.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on June 30th, 2017, 12:16 AM
Excellent feature. Many times I just put my preferences in the comments, so this is very welcome. Thanks for making this one  :thanks:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 30th, 2017, 12:39 AM
I should have made it available a couple weeks ago when it was nearly ready... But then I really got sucked into making the Night theme.
I also have some improvements to matching that are in closed beta, and again I really should get them out. ;)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 2nd, 2017, 11:49 PM
NEW: Bundle pages now show how many items are in each tier. This can be useful when there are a lot of items in a tier.

(Made more improvements to the site, which I didn't bother to document. This one I simply just finished and thought of mentioning here...)

:edit: NEW: Night mode no longer uses the Arial font by default. It's now the same font as Day mode. The reason I used Arial was because I used to have terrible font rendering in the notification area in Night mode, but that was due to bad handling of color contrast. This was fixed long ago, I just didn't remember to check whether it worked properly now. It does, and it looks better so...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on July 3rd, 2017, 02:21 AM
The night mode theme is really great now. Thanks for the effort :)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 3rd, 2017, 10:11 AM
Yes, it's the first time I've been happy with a dark theme since my very first website in 1996 lol... (Back then, CSS pretty much didn't exist and changing the background was the closest thing you had to making a design statement!)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 3rd, 2017, 10:45 AM
NEW: Also added a 'Select all' checkbox next to tier numbers, allowing you to quickly select all games in a tier. (If you want to select all tiers, you'll have to click all of those checkboxes. And if you're planning to complain about this, you have no life :))
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 3rd, 2017, 10:36 PM
FIX: Some colors were off when using either day or night mode. (Depending on the browser, it'd be in night or in day mode.)
This was due to an old bug in my CSS pre-processor where I was caching some data too aggressively. Fixed by turning night mode into an explicitly set variable, rather than a constant. (Well, you'd have to know Wedge well to understand that, but...)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 7th, 2017, 12:51 AM
Question, very unlikely to ever get answered but... Did any of you guys remove 6 copies of 'ConflictCraft' and 'ControlCraft 3' (or the other way around) from their tradables about 7 hours ago...? I'm trying to find out which method they were removed with.

FIX: I keep working on Night mode these days actually... Adapting icons little by little, fixing colors, etc. I'm mentally preparing to using it as default for guests!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on July 7th, 2017, 02:45 AM
Wasn't me :P
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: David on July 7th, 2017, 04:22 AM
Nor I. 

(6 copies...really?!)

~David.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 7th, 2017, 12:10 PM
Yeah no, it was a long shot to ask here eh... It's just that I'm now getting tradable count errors on a daily basis (once or twice a day, sometimes none), when for several weeks I had zero... I tried to find a reason for the change in my recent code, but couldn't find anything. :-/ It's okay, I still have my recount process running every hour, it's the one that points out to me the discrepancies like this one... But I'd rather have 'clean' code, you see.

FIX: All store icons should now look good on a black background (also fixed some icons that looked good on black, but looked bad on white). The icons I re-did are: bundle kings, orlygift, 99cent bundle, square enix, dlgamer, lazy guys (this one is terrible on their site so i cooked up a new one), greenlight bundle, indie royale, hrk, redacted network, one more bundle, nuuvem, flying bundle, coinplay.
(Also removed 'Breadbox Bundle' from the list of choices... I only added it because bvg added it, but no one so far on LT has used that store tag, and since the site was only around for 2 mediocre shovelware bundle a year ago, I'd rather not waste HTML space by listing them!)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 7th, 2017, 09:37 PM
NEW: Another feature that was written weeks ago and didn't get a proper UI until now: added a checkbox to Match pages, allowing you to sort results by item ratio. That is, it'll be easier for you to spot common or rare games when you're looking to retrade a specific game with a similar ratio.

As always recently at Lestrade's, the feature is immediately applied (albeit with a page reload here I'm afraid), and remembered for further matches. I can't imagine anyone doing without it in the future, so I should probably set it to 'sort by ratio' by default, but maybe the styling won't please everyone so I'm relying on feedback here.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 9th, 2017, 09:23 AM
Wow, I see this sorting by ratio feature is inspiring a lot of passion! Two likes and no comments, that must be a record :P

Maybe I should just stop announcing new features. It's clear that only a handful of people bother reading this topic. I really need someone else to handle communication for me...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 9th, 2017, 10:11 AM
FIX: when doing a wishlist Match on a specific game (or specific games) that is/are set to x0 quantity, the match would happen, but it wouldn't show in the wishlisted side. Need to test if the same happens for tradables ("Takers" link), though...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 9th, 2017, 10:23 AM
FIX: when doing a tradable Match ("Takers"), sorting results by ratio would cause errors in the results page.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 9th, 2017, 10:17 PM
FIX: Fixed a lot of issues with ITAD links, notably when it came to consistency (the default ITAD link was imported from BVG when their links were outdated and I'm not scraping them anymore, now the default is the one directly imported from ITAD.)

Also updated about 1000 games (IIRC) with the most recent ITAD link (those game links were modified since the Barter import days. It happens from time to time, e.g. when a Steam item gets renamed, but doesn't get renamed on other stores, so ITAD starts splitting it into two entries, one for Steam, one for other stores... It's a PITA if you ask me, because bundle data doesn't get updated at the same time.)

(Also, apologies to 2 users who got page crashes in the last 15 minutes because I forgot to upload a modified file with these new internal changes.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 10th, 2017, 01:54 AM
FIX: about 70 games not added to bundles properly in old bundles. There were about 140 total and I did most of the non-shovelware. Too me the whole night so screw the rest at this point... and screw telltale for handling their app IDs like there's no tomorrow...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 10th, 2017, 10:55 AM
FIX: A complete blunder[1] with Steam auto-sync... Users were only auto-synced daily if they actually visited the site daily. If they missed one day, they'd get off the list of auto-synced users forever. Fixed that. Apologies to everyone who suffered from this problem!
 1. Well, that doesn't happen often to me, so I have no problems recognizing when I screw up. I even remember struggling with the SQL query that led me to the bug. I should have triple-checked at the time.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 10th, 2017, 11:53 PM
NEW: Items found both in your wishlist & library will now be automatically deleted from your wishlist, regardless of whether you're active or not. Wishlisted items will not be removed if: they have the Extra (+) tag (which explicitly allows wishlisting anything), AND/OR they're not imported from Steam. (Steam wishlist is likely to be your de facto list of games you want for yourself...)

I made a backup of the wishlist table in case something wrong happens, but it should be good, I triple-checked in various situations.
For the record, this represents less than 1% of the total Wishlisted base, no surprise here. Lady Oberon, you may wanna know that you're the #1 user on LT's with wishlisted + library items. devotee was a close second.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 11th, 2017, 11:39 AM
NEW: There are many (most?) Steam packages with no existing banner. I dealt with them gracefully in the quick search box, but didn't account for them in bundle & offer pages. This is now done, and a step further: instead of just avoiding the ugly 'broken' icon, your browser should now tell you what type of item this is.
e.g. https://lestrades.com/bundle/3298/ -- there are 2 "Steam packages" in there with no banner.
PS: please report any unforeseen consequences!
PPS: not that it's SO useful or practical, but all items can now show what type they are -- just right-click their banner and Inspect Element. Look at the alt="" tag.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 11th, 2017, 09:57 PM
FIX: (as requested) the "Select all" checkbox on bundle pages will now give the same status to all items, instead of inverting their current status. The new status is based on the first checkbox's. So if it's checked already, clicking on Select all will deselect all, even if, say, all the other games are unchecked.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 11th, 2017, 10:08 PM
NEW: I noticed that game pages didn't list the origin of a tradable/wishlisted copy. From now on, LT will say "added x time ago" for items added directly on LT, and "imported from (Steam or Barter) x time ago" for items imported with the import tools. This information isn't new, it's already shown in list pages, it's just new on game pages.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 11th, 2017, 10:14 PM
FIX: Automatic deletion of wishlisted items won't occur anymore if you set a quantity over 1. So, if you set a quantity to infinite, you don't need the 'Extra' tag to protect the item from deletion. Note that there's a minor issue in that if you have x2 on a wishlisted item, once you get a copy in your library, quantity is decreased to 1 and it thus becomes a candidate for removal. So, if you don't use infinite quantities, or don't have a high quantity, make sure to apply the + tag anyway.

FIX: Fixed H:W ratios on games being automatically removed from wishlists. Up until now it was simply recalculating the ratio later in the same hour (i.e. I didn't bother with it.) It's just a line of code for me, so I now do. Not that anyone cares, but I like having accurate H:W ratios around...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 11th, 2017, 10:35 PM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on July 11th, 2017, 10:08 PM
This information isn't new, it's already shown in list pages, it's just new on game pages.
Erratum: this (for lists and game pages) is for wishlists only-- tradables never kept track of that information IIRC (since there's no Steam list for that, it's just a LT or BVG origin, and I didn't bother with an internal flag.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 14th, 2017, 10:47 PM
FIX: Offer pages were a bit screwed up on mobile devices due to a recent refactoring of the HTML to cater to non-existent banners (which, by the way, still show a broken icon on my mobile browser... Grmpf.)
I also reduced the banner width a little more, for tests. Will probably reset to a bigger size later if I can find a good balance.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 15th, 2017, 12:02 AM
NEW: Offer pages (and bundle pages, too) should now be more compact in mobile mode. This is a bit busier, but easier to navigate IMHO. This was achieved through turning the banner into a left-floated div, so that any text that overflows it will be shown below the banner, rather than on the same 'column' as the previous text. Note that because HTML needed to be refactored for this, the feature will not work properly on narrow windows on a desktop computer. Sorry about that... But any windows below 600px of height are... things of the past..?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 16th, 2017, 01:18 AM
Hmm, I'm still getting ratio errors on some games on a daily basis. No biggie really, since ratios are fixed soon after they're broken, but I really don't know where I added an entry point for this recount bug.

NEW: checkboxes are redesigned as flat boxes with animated checks. Hope you'll like them.
A few notes:
- This was done to enhance experience in Night mode, because a browser's default checkbox style really looks ugly on black backgrounds. I decided to use it in Day mode as well, because it looks nice.
- I need to finish Disabled mode.
- I probably should do radio buttons as well...!
- This only works in Webkit[1] derivatives for now-- exploiting a probably intentional bug in their HTML parser. Firefox and IE won't like it. I don't give a damn about IE (even its latest versions, seriously guys, don't use that crap!), but Firefox warrants my attention. I'm doing what I can to implement a similar looking effect on it, but they're not helping-- similar to Webkit scrollbars being stylable... Yeah, Firefox doesn't want that. Makes me wonder why it insists on giving you colored smileys without your approval (i.e. changing them to monochrome smileys requires using a trick), but not colored UI elements....
 1. Chrome, Chromium, Safari, Opera...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on July 16th, 2017, 12:47 PM
The checkboxes look pretty cool
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 16th, 2017, 10:58 PM
Thanks ;)
I've been spending 90% of the time trying to do the same on Firefox... It's just impossible. I use so many custom checkboxes everywhere... I feel like I won't be able to just magically replace them unlike on Chromium. Grmpf.
Still working on it though...

FIX: Barter stats (for your profile) were no longer imported properly on Barter sync, after a change in their HTML.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 18th, 2017, 12:17 AM
FIX: Fixed games bundled in the last ~14 months or so. (I got bored after that. Spent my evening on it..)
e.g., many games were missing because ITAD classified them with faulty names (typos, wrong package names...)
I pretty much associated everything that could be associated with a game in the database.

I also found a weird bug in my search engine... I defy anyone to find the Civ 5 Complete Edition through it. It always find Civ 3 or 4, but not 5. I'll have to look into that...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 18th, 2017, 04:32 PM
A big one, for a change!

NEW: Lestrade's will now remember your sort order individually for: wishlist, tradables, blacklist, library, and offer creation pages.

It doesn't look like it, but this new feature, while it can be summed up in a single line, took half a day to write, because I had to refactor a LOT of my internal code to allow for sorting server-side. Actually, if you're on a slow (e.g. mobile) browser, it might be faster for you to select the new sorting order, then immediately refresh the page, rather than wait for the sorting to be done in JS, lol.
Also, Library now explicitly allows sorting by Playtime (this is still the default, but now you can switch back to it).
Oh, and items won't be sorted exactly the same way whether done server-side or client-side. For instance, games imported at the exact same second won't be shown in the exact same order on blacklist and library pages depending on what method you sort with. It doesn't really matter now does it..?
Another example: server-side, a name in kanji/hanzi/etc. is moved at the end of the list if you sort alphabetically, while client-side, it's moved to the beginning. Also, I'm currently sorting by 'original' name, i.e. store name as found by Barter back when it was broken... Until I'm done with the scraper rewrite, you may (rarely) see some discrepancies in the A-Z order.

There you go... Enough with the technicalities. If you find any bugs, feel free to report it. I've tested many different situations, should work. If it doesn't, it's still fixable so just report it.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 18th, 2017, 05:41 PM
NEW: The shiny new checkbox is now available in Firefox and IE9+.

Note: this is a big hack, so it's very likely you'll see it break in some areas. I haven't tested everywhere, so... Please remember to report bugs you find, however little they are! I'm interested in fixing even stuff where one pixel is off!

NEW: Radio buttons (e.g. single-choice offers) now sport the same look as checkboxes. Available in Chromium, Firefox and IE9+.

These stupid hacks took me a week of work... Guys you'd better +Like that post even if you don't use Firefox or IE! ESPECIALLY if you don't use them, because I made sure not to add any extra HTML for Chromium-based browsers! :P
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on July 18th, 2017, 06:06 PM
Individual sorting preferences are huuuge! Amazing feature =)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 18th, 2017, 08:11 PM
Well that's one of the last few things I hadn't done yet that was on bvg ;) although bvg doesn't remember per list but site wide, and it doesn't do real time refreshing.
My main motivation was that I always send offers based on ratio, so I always had to change the sort order...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 18th, 2017, 08:52 PM
NEW: Lestrade's is now in white-on-black by default for guests. ;)
Since guests can't change to day mode (yet?), I had to make sure the site was as usable as possible in night mode. I consider it is now, so I'm trying this.
Note that once you sign into the site, you'll still be in day mode by default. If as a guest you liked night mode, I'm sure you'll find the prominent button in the header. ;)

Please vote in the relevant poll(https://lestrades.com/ideas/98/poll-are-you-a-night-or-day-person/) if you like or dislike this move!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 19th, 2017, 12:43 AM
FIX: Crash when using "Add to tradables" on a bundle page where the bundle store isn't currently listed in an official capacity in the LT source code. (e.g. Otaku Bundle.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 19th, 2017, 12:11 PM
FIX: Firefox + tradable list = unclickable checkboxes, because of some weird (and still unexplainable) event propagation. I'm considering simplifying my JS and CSS for a safer solution, but it will however make the checkboxes non-accessible, i.e. they won't be reachable by keyboard (e.g. for disabled users); then again the pop-up that shows up when you click those checkboxes has never been accessible, and I never received a complaint about that. Maybe I shouldn't bother... I don't know.

NEW: Profile pages will now indicate whether a user is very dynamic or passive. It simply counts the number of sent & received offers, and if one number is at least 4 times higher than the other (I chose a random ratio really), then one can be considered dynamic/proactive (sends way more offers than receives them), or passive (waits for offers to arrive, basically.)
I thought this could be important in the sense that a proactive user will be more likely to be involved in how the site works, too.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 19th, 2017, 10:26 PM
FIX: Okay, another complicated bit... Steam auto-sync was fixed last week, but I also inadvertently added another bug in that I used incorrect math for time testing, and lists were only auto-synced approximately on a weekly basis, rather than daily... Oops. So, I fixed that. Should work fine now.

NEW: Also used the opportunity to update the "Sync with Steam" button to show on hover the last synchronization date ("Last sync: 3 minutes ago" would mean it's up to date, for instance.) Also, the button will now auto-sync both your Steam Wishlist & Library, meaning you won't have to click the button on both your Wishlist & Library pages. This'll save you some time, as I strongly suspect anyone wanting to import their library would also like to use the opportunity to update their wishlist... (e.g. if they redeemed a new game they'd previously wishlisted.)
Items won't be automatically removed from your wishlist once your library is updated, though. This will have to wait until either you go to your Wishlist tab and select to remove or keep the items, *or* the cron job (scheduled task) for wishlist cleanup fires up (I don't remember how long it is, but it's pretty short, like a few minutes.)

Hope you like the changes.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 20th, 2017, 06:55 PM
NEW: When creating an offer, items that are in a pending offer (i.e. in another accepted, but not completed offer) will be grayed out with the [pending trade] mention. It's not exactly the same as the usual 'pending trade' tag, which is imported from Barter lists. Rather, the [pending trade] (with brackets) mention is based on a real-time check of other accepted offers on both sides.
I should probably improve this feature by not graying out the entry if its quantity is > 1, or indicating whose side the pending trade is on, who's the other trader in the pending trade, etc, but I feel it's good enough for now.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 21st, 2017, 01:09 AM
FIX: On profile pages, the Steam avatar is now the proper size (I forgot to do that earlier. I mean, the proper size is 184px wide and the profile sidebar is 180px wide... And yet I didn't bother to just increase the sidebar size to 184px until now..?!)

FIX: On offer lists, I'm now only showing warnings (e.g. "this isn't in your tradables") on YOUR offer list. It's not a matter of privacy, simply of not being able to do anything about those missing games. It's not your problem, really :P

FIX; Fixed the 'Mark offer as completed' button showing up on all accepted offers-- even if not yours-- even if you're not logged into LT's!! I can't believe I never noticed it...

NEW: I'm currently working on hiding the sidebar by default, regardless of the page width, when you're on a content-heavy page, such as Wishlist/Tradables/Blacklist/Library/Offer-Creation.[1] Why? (1) more space to show those long tag lists! (2) the longer the page, the longer it takes for the sidebar to show up... And since it forces a reflow on your page layout, it means anything you clicked during the loading of the page will be incorrectly targeted, and may bring you to an outcome you didn't expect. (Yes, true story.)

Of course, you can still show the sidebar by clicking on the 'hamburger' icon at the very right end of the header bar.
Posted: July 21st, 2017, 12:57 AM

(Offer creation pages now hide the sidebar, too.)

I forgot to mention that I also reduced the maximum width of the window from 1420px down to 1280px-- and yes, I'm aware this pretty much cancels out the sidebar being hidden... Although not for smaller resolutions. Anyway... I'm still playing around with those width values.
 1. Currently working on all pages except for offer creation. Coming soon.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 21st, 2017, 12:16 PM
NEW: Improved workflow for wishlist/library synergy...

- Press the Sync with Steam button on Wishlist or Library page.
- Once done, whether you're on your Wishlist *or* Library page, the same message will immediately show up, indicating the presence of duplicates.
- It will automatically remove them at this point; you have the ability to immediately re-add them with the + tag, or alternatively infinite quantity.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 21st, 2017, 03:49 PM
NEW: Avatars in match pages.

Also, a detail on yesterday's changelog: when I said the 'Mark offer as completed' button showed up for guests, it doesn't mean clicking it did anything, of course... I always double-check credentials before I change anything to the database. I just don't always do it for the UI.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 21st, 2017, 04:10 PM
NEW: a 'waiting' tag for tradables... This is mostly geared towards Happy Hour bundle buyers. So you can safely send offers using these games, and you have a wait to tell users, "this particular game, I'll send you within a week when I get my group-buy copy."
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 21st, 2017, 07:38 PM
Fixed forum & homepage in mobile mode having a sidebar on all the time... oops. Nobody uses mobile? ^^;
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 25th, 2017, 12:18 PM
FIX: if a bundle had no games in their 1st tier(s), the price for subsequent tiers with games was screwed up. (Hopefully this doesn't screw up older bundles, but it shouldn't.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 25th, 2017, 12:28 PM
NEW: Added 'link only' tag for wishlists. It indicates that you only want a retradable link for that entry (or a Steam gift)[1]. I could have used 'gift only', but I'd rather reserve that for a potential tag where you only want a Steam gift (I'm waiting to see if Steam gifts really take on some actual value in the future...)
 1. It's not enforced at offer creation time, because as with everything on Lestrade's I don't like to enforce stuff, just give strong hints that some stuff shouldn't be done. However, I should probably AT LEAST check whether the game being offered is actually a gift or link when it's got this tag on it... Opinions welcome.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 26th, 2017, 12:24 AM
FIX: "Half-completed" status wasn't shown at the top of your offer list in some situations. Don't ask me, I'm not even sure. I just rewrote the whole code block for more simplicity.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 26th, 2017, 01:17 PM
FIX: Newly registered users shouldn't be seeing Day mode anymore. (i.e., it defaults to Night mode for them; existing users will still be on Day mode if they didn't touch anything.)

FIX: non-Steam packages automatically imported from BVG didn't have a title. (e.g. "Humble Bundle Deep Silver BTA tier2 week1" or something... these aren't proper Steam packages.) I also added a 'generic package' category to put these in manually. (If I find any! I'm not gonna spend my day scanning Steam packages...)
@theemu, you're doing a great job of adding older bundles to BVG, but this screws up Lestrade's database, which already has all of the older bundles. Come to the dark side! Sorry, come to the night side!!

FIX: The search engine was unable to find many non-Steam-game items, like some packages.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 26th, 2017, 01:22 PM
FIX: Removed 'Add to tradables' button on Bundle pages for guests... (Guys, do I have to do all the testing by myself? :P)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 27th, 2017, 11:16 PM
FIX: Live update of tag changes on list pages was broken for a good week I think... Sorry about that, didn't notice before.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 31st, 2017, 06:28 PM
FIX: Lestrade's will now probably remember your preference between Day & Night mode. Previously, there was a silly JavaScript error that got triggered right before saving your setting. Bad luck!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on July 31st, 2017, 07:58 PM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on July 31st, 2017, 06:28 PM
FIX: Lestrade's will now probably remember your preference between Day & Night mode. Previously, there was a silly JavaScript error that got triggered right before saving your setting. Bad luck!
Probably? :P
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 31st, 2017, 09:38 PM
Well... Never say never, as they say! ;)
I mean, fixing a bug usually means one hurdle is gone. But what if there were TWO bugs? ;)
Apparently not the case here, but still! ;)

(Woohoo, 700 posts... Okay, I've nearly posted half of the messages on this forum then... Most of them on this topic. :^^;:)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 31st, 2017, 09:47 PM
FIX: Checkboxes in Day mode were too dim against the background. Added a subtle border around them. (Not needed in Night mode.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 1st, 2017, 01:02 AM
NEW: In match pages, inactivity status now clearly states how long someone has been absent. (If someone's been on vacation for 10 days now, it doesn't mean they have abandoned trading like users who haven't been online in 4 months.)
Note: I'm not showing it on mobile to save space. Although I foolishly decided to stuff the information into title tooltips, which is silly because, err, mobile devices usually don't support those...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 1st, 2017, 10:51 AM
FIX: There was too much difference in colors between a (say) 12:11 ratio and a 11:12 ratio. Also fixed the intermediate colors from a mix between green and red (maroonish?) to gray. Which just makes more sense... This is only valid for Night mode-- I'm not too unhappy with Day mode regarding colors. (Yes, colors aren't the same in both modes; if you switch between day & night, you'll see the ratio colors are screwed up, which is one of the reasons I'm considering forcing a page reload when switching modes. Apart from the fact that it'll make my life easier when updating CSS...)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 2nd, 2017, 01:47 PM
FIX: A long-lived bug that caused trouble when adding games to one of your lists from a bundle page. The internal issue was caused by a variable overwriting itself during early processing.

NEW: Games added from a bundle will now be pre-selected when you're redirected to the corresponding list page. (And yes, if I hadn't planned to implement that, I wouldn't have found out the origin of the bug above.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 2nd, 2017, 02:07 PM
NEW: Also, it sounds silly, but if games are pre-selected, the tagger popup should pop up now. It should also happen when bulk-adding items.

Note: I noticed a strange behavior in wishlist IDs growing exponentially (we're now into the 7-million mark, when it should be in the 300k mark IIRC). I thought it was a problem with my recent code that auto-deletes wishlisted items found in your library, and then re-adds them from BVG, but nope, I've established it started around late May, but couldn't find anything in my changelog that gave me a clue about it. I've added a bunch of trace lines here and there, so I should be able to determine if this is a bug on my side, or some user having fun adding & deleting their entire wishlist on a daily basis.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 2nd, 2017, 09:11 PM
NEW: Selectable games (i.e. with checkboxes) are now clickable anywhere on the row (e.g. including the card number, the ratio area...), which should be much more practical. I implemented that for offer creation lists, but is now available for all relevant list pages (tradables and wishlist).
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 5th, 2017, 12:13 AM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on August 2nd, 2017, 02:07 PM
Note: I noticed a strange behavior in wishlist IDs growing exponentially (we're now into the 7-million mark, when it should be in the 300k mark IIRC).
Was due to Steam autosync... I had to remove a keyword and fix auto_increment on each run. Fixed and renumbered.
Took 2 days to pinpoint though... -_-
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 7th, 2017, 07:39 PM
FIX: PM area was broken in mobile browsers; avatar would use up the entire half left of the screen estate, leaving only a small space for PM contents. For some reason I'd disabled (for testing?) a CSS rule for them, and didn't reply a PM on my smartphone until today, I guess.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 7th, 2017, 08:07 PM
FIX: Lestrade's was reporting missing tradables & wishlists on offers that were marked as Half-Completed by the other party. The absence of these items is as expected, it's the warning that was not.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 8th, 2017, 08:00 PM
NEW: In game pages, if a game was bundled as part of a package, the package's name will be shown alongside the bundle name. For better service, I've also made sure to show the package colored by its ratio (similar to what you can see on Match pages.) This is in case a game's package is more common than the game itself.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 10th, 2017, 02:13 PM
NEW: Bundles that have expired within the last week are now shown on the main bundle list, grayed out, at the end of the page. This is mostly because it's hard to find an expired bundle right now (other than by remembering one of the games that was in it.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 13th, 2017, 06:40 PM
FIX: $0 games weren't updated automatically. They used to be (daily) but I disabled that scheduled task while doing a test a few weeks ago. No biggie, I only 'missed' 47 entries overall that had been given away since the task was disabled.

FIX: Updated 684 games with missing trading card numbers.[1]

I'm also working on automating game card numbers without hitting on BVG's server any longer (back when I was scraping the whole site on a daily basis this wasn't a problem, but now that I'm limited to new games only, I'd never retrieve cards for them because they were added too late in the process over there, after I'd scraped them the first & final time.) The data for all 684 games was gotten from Steam instead of BVG, this includes one game that already had trading card data but the wrong number of cards -- Trigger Happy Shooting, in case the BVG admin is reading and wants to fix it (it's missing one card in the Steam list of items for that app ID for some reason, but the app's badge page has the extra card listed.)
Anyway, automating is more complicated than I expected, but I'm on it. I may miss a few games from time to time and have to fix them once in a while by re-scraping everything like I did. I don't know.
 1. Includes mostly games whose cards were added in the last 3-4 months (including older games like Baldur's Gate I & II), also a few, err, weird things like the movie 'Free to Play' which is on the game database and actually has cards as shown in its app ID's badge page, but they're not obtainable because it's a free movie. But I guess they're craftable through gem purchase, so I'm still going to let this kind of thing go. It's more of an issue with the database, where I don't know if it should hold free-to-play items (not tradable on Steam, but DLCs can be, so I guess I'll keep them around but I'd eventually like to mark them as free-to-play, and prevent them from being added to your Tradables, if only by mistake.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 13th, 2017, 07:10 PM
NEW: Trading card additions should now be automated, a few times per hour. (And, again, I'm no longer relying on BVG for this data, so there may be some discrepancies on recent games in the future.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on August 13th, 2017, 08:46 PM
Is there something left you import from barter, aside from the ability to compare user lists?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 14th, 2017, 12:54 AM
Yes:
- User lists upon import.
- The game database is still imported from it (more precisely, the latest games, since I'm no longer allowed to update the pages for the older games), this was necessary to make it easier to match with user lists, but not really needed now that I'm no longer using the barter ID, rather just using a duplicate ID that can in the long run (or even sooner) become disassociated from the barter ID.
- Also, some older games may get updated from time to time, as I kept an admin-only Update button to retrieve the latest version of a specific game page. I don't use it a lot, but for newly bundled games, I tend to use that to retrieve tags &, previously, trading card data.

What's imported from other sources:
- Bundle database (twice an hour)
- Trading card data (~twice an hour)

What I'm planning to import from other sources:
- User tags (I have some big plans about user tags in the near future),
- The new game database (allowing me to once and for all fix all issues regarding older game pages).
- GOG game database. (As mentioned in another topic.)
- And on the long run, I'm strongly considering building a scraper for the Steam website or simply its API. My goal here being to fix & improve all game relationships, i.e. packages, DLCs, related games (GOG/Origin/itch/Steam versions...), Steam bundles.

Sorry if I'm forgetting anything... I'm tired, bed time for me.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 18th, 2017, 12:12 PM
FIX: When someone marked their offer as completed, the other trader would see warnings below that offer in their offer list, until they clicked on Complete as well. (Please tell me if you find any more bugs related to this!)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 18th, 2017, 12:21 PM
NEW: If a game is pending trade (or acquisition), and you have other offers around that include this game, Lestrade's will now clearly warn you about it in your Offer list. You are invited to 'fix' your other pending offers by removing the game(s) or canceling the offer altogether.

Note: it doesn't account for games with an infinite quantity in your wishlist. Big deal.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 21st, 2017, 11:17 PM
FIX: Users being incorrectly redirected to the home page if accessing the game or profile pages from Barter (which uses a different entry point) if they had no cookies set on LT's (or cookies disabled entirely.) It's the kind of bug that's hard to notice if all of your browsers have already visited LT's at least once...!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 23rd, 2017, 10:10 AM
FIX: the bundle list was missing the HB Starbreeze bundle that only lasted for a few days earlier this year (Payday 2 stuff mostly.) The reason is that it was added to ITAD much later and was outside of my scraping's scope by then. I also missed a couple other bundles but they're obscure bundles with shit games so I'm not re-adding them manually. I only found out about Starbreeze because in the latest HB, there's Dead by Daylight, and it was marked as unbundled, and I remembered it was bundled before. So I made a script to check all missed bundles and found 23, the majority of which were comic-book bundles (I don't deal with stuff that can't be traded), special offers without specific games in them, etc, and as I said, the Starbreeze bundle and a few minor bundles (or even re-bundles) from OtakuBundle and BundleKings. I'm not re-adding the minor ones.

I tried modifying my script to account for that, but that'd automatically require LT to scrape more than it already scrapes at ITAD -- and I don't want to bother ITAD more than I am already, at least until they finally add bundles to their API. One of these days I'll really have to try & stop scraping them and just add bundles manually because it's so much easier to do it at LT's, I'm bound to find a volunteer to help one day, right..? RIGHT?!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 23rd, 2017, 11:52 AM
NEW: In game pages, the related items section now indicates ratios for each entry. This is very useful if you're looking at a rare game and it's included in a package that's been bundled a lot. (Yes, this happens more than you'd think. Just look at https://lestrades.com/game/1716/ for a good example.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 23rd, 2017, 12:13 PM
NEW: Main bundle page lists number of games per bundle (and adapts properly if no games are found, or even just one, because it doesn't have to show average ratios for those), I've also fixed a few bugs that tended to hide some bundles due to my recent addition of the Steamground permanent bundle[1], and overall the processing speed is faster than before (apart from averages, I'm doing the rest of my math through PHP. I wrote both a MySQL optimized version with proper index use and a PHP version, and the PHP version was about 100 times faster. Sometimes you gotta go with what's faster, even if it doesn't look as cool in your source code.
 1. You know, the Russian (?) bundle that has hundreds of games and is making the server waste a lot of time calculating average ratios for the main page, but what's the alternative eh... That bundle doubles up as a shovelware index, in a way. Although I'm gonna have a hard time marking individual items as sold out, not only because I have to look for them manually, but because for some reason session checks on my editing don't work, and that's only for THAT bundle, so I have to disable session checks when working on that stupid bundle.. Lots of fun.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 23rd, 2017, 11:57 PM
NEW: on the homepage, the requested/offered section now shows 5 requested and 5 offers, instead of 3 & 2 (I never made it clear it was 3 & 2, so here we go.)
Also, the games now take the number of different traders into account. This is to avoid having someone send multiple offers for the same game and said game thus showing up as one of the most requested. I'd say popularity should be based on the number of offers from distinct traders.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 27th, 2017, 09:13 PM
FIX: Offer pages will no longer show the same game in multiple issue notices (e.g. 'no longer in your wishlist; already pending acquisition'.) It'll just stick to the first notice it finds, and skip the others for that game (which makes more sense.) This is mostly a problem only when you marked an offer as completed and the other trader has yet to do so, BTW.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 27th, 2017, 09:59 PM
Btw, sorry for not introducing big new features these days -- I have a couple that have been ready for weeks but I'm never sure whether to make them premium or base. In fact after all this time, I still haven't implemented a way to go premium without my intervention. (There's currently only one premium member besides me -- basically I distribute premium memberships when I get rarer games for free without being asked for a counterpart, but shh! It's a secret.)

I'm mostly working on a bigger feature that isn't part of the trading system but will have links to it. It's just hard to find time these days, so I can't devote more than an hour a day on the site. Which is already a lot considering its lack of exposure, of course.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 28th, 2017, 04:12 PM
Note: I noticed that account deletion was disabled (probably because at the time I launched the site, I didn't account for offers & comments when deleting accounts); I've re-enabled it for regular users. However it'll still go through admin approval, which has always been my policy. If you have no offers completed, though, I should be able to delete without issues. Otherwise, it'll be on a per-case basis.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 28th, 2017, 11:15 PM
FIX: Fixed (mostly greenlight-type) bundles that had 'no Steam key' games attached when those games actually got a Steam key after that. I had to do those manually, so I stopped at around 7 months in the past.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 29th, 2017, 11:54 PM
NEW: Offer pages now allow you to sort items by ratio rather than alphabetical order. Good if you get a 1:1 offer with lots of games in it.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 30th, 2017, 11:54 AM
NEW: A popular request[1] -- increased maximum custom note length for tradables to 50 chars (instead of 30) for regular users, and 255 (max length) for premium users. I'm not currently adapting it for proper viewing (i.e. adding a pop-up with full text when it's beyond 30 chars), but it'll come later.
 1. That means I got 2 requests for it. Yes, half a loaf is better than no bread these days.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 30th, 2017, 12:42 PM
NEW: New trading tags for tradables (not wishlists): 'unbundled only'. It's, as expected, the exact opposite of a wishlist-only 'bundled only' tag, i.e. you're not going to trade this game for bundled games (well, maybe you'll take 20 rare bundled games but you see what I mean.) This is obviously for games that are so valuable that even the 'high tier' tag doesn't mean much. I'd recommend setting a custom value on games like these, but if you really want to trade them for other games, this tag should be helpful.

PS: if everyone thinks one of the trading tags is useless and just taking space for nothing, feel free to tell me. There is absolutely no cost to me in adding or removing trading tags, thanks to how I'm handling the stuff internally.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 30th, 2017, 01:46 PM
NEW: the previously useless 'Completed trades' statistic on game pages, which was only put in there because, well, it was at BVG and I was just getting started, will now list all of these completed offers, along with their completion date. This is more interesting, it allows you to determine a game's trading popularity over time, as well as what kind of value it's usually traded against. (I would have given more statistics on this, but because a game can be in a multi-game offer, it's just not possible to properly determine a value like that.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 30th, 2017, 01:48 PM
FIX: Game pages should now be more consistent in layout (list of bundles wasn't using the proper section background.)
I'm aware this makes game backgrounds even harder to view, but I never actually got any feedback regarding the fact that I was now including game backgrounds, so I might as well remove them entirely. I don't know. If you want, I can also remove all section backgrounds, or whatever. :P Just comment. I don't enjoy talking to my hand that much.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on August 30th, 2017, 11:07 PM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on August 30th, 2017, 01:46 PM
NEW: the previously useless 'Completed trades' statistic on game pages, which was only put in there because, well, it was at BVG and I was just getting started, will now list all of these completed offers, along with their completion date. This is more interesting, it allows you to determine a game's trading popularity over time, as well as what kind of value it's usually traded against. (I would have given more statistics on this, but because a game can be in a multi-game offer, it's just not possible to properly determine a value like that.)
Sorry, but I am not actually sure where this feature appears on the website. You mean the offer history in the game page? Statistics is a very nice feature to have. Specially if we can deduct popular games and traders. So far I can only see forum statistics  :hmm:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 31st, 2017, 08:17 AM
That's below the offer history (with you). If it doesn't show up, it's simply that no one has traded that particularly game at LT's, I guess. (Barter stats don't show up, obviously. If you want stats for Barter, ask Barter to do that, not me. :P)
As for general stats, there's actually a strong lack of interest in those, so I kept general trading statistics to myself (because then I don't have to format it in a generally readable way :P)

MOST UNIQUE TRADES
Lestrade 尚 55
StormSonic (inactive) 33
Pika! Pika! 29
Lex 25
joaoarena 21
mac420 (inactive) 20
meix 19
canislupus_an 19
PhantomTa2 17
devotee 12
cam 12
chaosfrost 12

PS: I was behind StormSonic for a long time... Dunno why he slowed down.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 31st, 2017, 07:02 PM
NEW: new tag, wishlist-only 'filler', which is for wishlist fillers; this is something I do all the time, basically stuff I apply a 'low tier' tag on: games that I don't really intend to ever play, but they're 'in my radar' and I wouldn't mind the +1. So if I find a 1:1 trade where I feel like I'm giving away the better value, I can add a wishlist filler to build a more balanced 1:2.

I don't know if you get my point. Again, that's a lot of tags now (even though they're categorized, thankfully), but I wanted to give more freedom to everyone to express themselves... I feel that this gives a better chance to complete a trade.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 4th, 2017, 06:21 PM
FIX: Half a dozen past bundles were missing (Talisman Bundle from HB and Mega Pick & Mix 3 from BundleStars recently); the reason seems to be that for a reason unknown, some bundle IDs may be added *before* the last one added. Lestrade's was never checking for existing bundles with an older ID than the last one scraped. It now will, and thus will be able to 'catch' those weird ones.
Also, made the bundle scraping process much faster while I was at it. It won't change anything for you, but for the server I guess it can. :P
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 4th, 2017, 09:49 PM
NEW: on homepage, latest commented bundles (now 10 instead of 5) will be shown in bold if a comment was posted in the last 48 hours. (Random number I chose.)

NEW: on homepage, added a 'latest copies put up for trade', with the latest tradables added, shown with their ratio color (to quickly find rare games that were added recently.) Note, I'm having a SQL bug that makes the query behave incorrectly if I try to group by game, so you may less get than 20 games listed if a game was added by multiple users recently.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 4th, 2017, 10:13 PM
NEW: on game pages, the list of users who have a tradable or wishlisted copy now show the addition date in a tooltip. This is useful if for instance you're trying to find out who's added a copy recently, e.g. from a new bundle, and are therefore more likely to trade their copies for another bundle game. (Alternatively, you can simply look for site icons next to the user name, but traders don't always tag with a store or add an item from the bundle page, which adds the icon automatically.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 4th, 2017, 10:53 PM
Note: found a small bug in that some tradables were occasionally added with no owner (28 tradables and 8 wishlisted out of hundreds of thousands in the last 6 months, so that's fine with me). I added some debug code, so if someone around added a copy of Nekopara 0 today, please try to re-add it the same way so I can see if it's reproducible or not!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 7th, 2017, 11:21 PM
Note: I'm currently working on tweaking the offer creation page to make it faster to edit with long tradables on both sides; I'm too tired to finish tonight though, so hopefully the proper system isn't broken. If you're sending an offer and it doesn't work for you, please send me a message on Steam chat if you're in my friend list, I'll get out of bed and cancel my changes. Otherwise, it should be invisible to you. Gosh that rewrite is so complex...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 8th, 2017, 10:45 PM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on September 7th, 2017, 11:21 PM
Note: I'm currently working on tweaking the offer creation page to make it faster to edit with long tradables on both sides; I'm too tired to finish tonight though, so hopefully the proper system isn't broken.
It isn't broken, and it works great actually.
I reworked it a bit today instead of making it public, because it had one drawback compared to the public version -- it doesn't remember selected items on page reload. So I decided to 'hack' the form data into the URL rather POST data, and thus it now properly remembers games upon reload, *and* as an added bonus, (1) it no longer asks you to confirm reloading the page (I hate that), (2) it should also save the content across browser sessions (in case you're building an offer, your PC crashes, and you don't remember what you'd selected before the crash.)

I don't think I'll be able to unveil the thing tonight, but it should be ready by tomorrow. Really excited. Just need to make sure I'm not breaking more stuff in the process of simplifying the final codebase for this... (Yes, it's a bit complex right now, not because of the changes, but because the code that calculates the desired quantities of tradables & wishlists needs to take that situation into account and I'm not sure it's working fine for situations where an item is blacklisted. So it's back to the drawing board for that, or maybe it'll work straight out of the box, I don't know... I'm too tired to tell right now.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 9th, 2017, 12:30 PM
NEW: Quick sort now allows you to sort by Wished, i.e. number of wishlists the item can be found in. It's usually similar to the Ratio of course, but there are situations where it can be helpful.
I was also asked for a sort by Tradables as well, but (1) the sort dropdown is starting to get really crowded, (2) I'm not exactly sure if it's got much of a point, (3) I wouldn't know how to call it...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 9th, 2017, 11:09 PM
NEW: Offer creation is now Ajax-powered. Whenever you click the 'Preview offer' button, the page will refresh immediately, without having to load the list of potential tradables again. This was necessited by the fact that Lestrade's now shows you (at the end of the list) all items not in your library, rather than just those in your wishlist. Which, with some users like devotee, could literally take 30 seconds to load on a slow mobile browser. Now it's nearly instantaneous, making it easier to edit your offers. :)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 11th, 2017, 07:20 PM
FIX: New offers (or edited offers) were always 1:1 regardless of what you set for them.

This means that if you sent a new offer in the last 44 hours, you'll need to check it and make sure it matches what you wanted to offer!

Sorry about that-- not that it matters, but the bug was due to the quantity variable being recalculated only when previewing an offer (due to a debug variable I removed too soon), thus implying it to be zero (which then becomes 1) at submission time.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 11th, 2017, 09:36 PM
FIX: 2 glitches on the homepage: width of list of comments & new tradables was wrong on mobile devices, and the list of most requested games was screwed up if a game showed up in both the 'requested' and 'offered' rows (in this case, The Flame in the Flood.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 11th, 2017, 11:15 PM
NEW: On the homepage, the 'latest copies put up for trade' section now shows only unbundled games and games from expired bundles (making it easier to spot games you might want, if like me you have a tendency to buy most bundles that have a game you want.)
You can still include games in currently active bundles by clicking the checkbox in the title. Your preference will be remembered.

Also, I'm now caching the most requested/offered game data every hour. It's not that my queries were particularly slow, but they represented about 30% of the page load time, and for the homepage, I figured this was too much. (The reason they're slow is that these queries now have to calculate the number of different traders who offer those games.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 13th, 2017, 06:00 PM
NEW: Won't be of any interest to you guys, but it's still worth mentioning that I can now edit all bundle data on the fly. Previously I was limited to game notes and bundle notes, now I can edit bundle name, and bundle start & end date. All that's missing is the ability to create a new bundle[1], which I can technically do since yesterday when I disconnected Lestrade's bundle IDs from ITAD bundle IDs (no big deal, I'm just storing an extra bundle ID in the database.) So that'll come at some point.

This is all done 'on the fly', so it's very easy to use for me (no big complicated forms to edit like on ITAD), and I can give editing rights to volunteers, too. (I'm just saying, because Barter has many volunteers that add bundles manually using Barter's terrible interface (well, at least from the screenshots I was given earlier this year... Maybe it's been reworked since.)
Either way, you don't need to be a volunteer to point out any bundle issues... There's a very convenient 'comment' button on bundle pages. ;)
 1. Oh yeah, I'm also missing the ability to edit tiers and tier prices... Well, I'm not in a hurry to do that, ahah. Unless I only give the ability to do that when creating the bundle, in which case, piece of cake. (I can always edit them again through database edition, of course. In fact I've done that a lot... You have no idea how many bundles are screwed up at ITAD. Crowd-sourcing has its limits.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 13th, 2017, 07:08 PM
(And of course I had to make announcements about bundle editing internals right when I'm having trouble importing the latest ITAD bundles, lol...)
(Not sure if it's a network problem or a bug due to my rewrite that accommodates for new bundles being added here rather than always imported.) (No time to look for now. Please bear with me while imported bundles are currently empty. Will look into it tonight.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 13th, 2017, 11:37 PM
Okay, I think I've fixed all of the problems due to the ITAD scraper rewrite... Sorry if you were trying to 'read' the latest 3 bundles, because I did a lot of testing with them and they were pretty broken until now.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 16th, 2017, 03:57 PM
NEW: Long & much requested feature, finally made my peace with it...

Added "Skip" feature to match page. If you get matches with a user that you don't want to trade with, or who seemingly has ALL Steam games in their wishlist and only has a shovelware game in their tradables, you may want to ignore their matches. Just click 'Skip' to the right of their name. You can occasionally still peek at their matches (in case they added something interesting once in a while) by clicking 'Show' or choosing to unfold all inactive users. To stop ignoring them entirely, just click the same Skip button again.

Note: this is NOT an 'ignore user' system. It's more of an 'ignore my matches with this user by default' feature. You can keep receiving offers from this user. If you don't want that, gather up your courage and PM them, asking them to add you to their own skips. I think it's the most decent way of handling user ignoring, which is something I absolutely hated at Barter (e.g. people would add me to their ignore list after an offer they didn't like, not leaving me the opportunity to improve it, or send offers for other games six months later.)

Note 2: I'll probably eventually add a feature to match only against skipped users (i.e. the opposite of regular matches), allowing you to check up on possibly interesting trades from time to time. I'll also add the full list of skipped users in your profile area when I get around to overhauling it.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 18th, 2017, 11:55 AM
NEW: in the homepage list of latest tradables, wishlisted items are now clearly indicated (bold + icon). I'm thinking of doing a 'wishlisted-only' list, but I'm not sure about the UI... Maybe a select box... I don't know. It'd require overhauling a function for that to work. Hmm...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 18th, 2017, 10:52 PM
FIX: All game trailers are now set to the 'video' type internally, ensuring they don't show up in game searches. Also set all demos to the 'demo' type, same thing.

Sounds like a detail, but really I spent my evening checking ALL of the banners for those apps, making sure I wasn't putting aside a game by mistake (like, ahem, some obscure truck simulator DLC with 'trailer' in its name. Damn...)
Also, all future demos should be marked as demos as well.

Wondering if I should clean up tradables & wishlists for all of those... Although the video type is a bit different because it can hold actual buyable movies (I only manually added The Crow to it, though, during my research. Cool old movie BTW.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 20th, 2017, 12:39 AM
NEW: On your offer page, offers in 'Editing' status now show an '!' icon next to them, to encourage you to submit or cancel them. This is because those offers are actually invisible to the third party and if they're being edited for more than 5 minutes, it's likely you simply forgot to submit them.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 25th, 2017, 10:33 AM
NEW: Leveraged new Steam feature to offer a way to automatically redeem Steam keys shown in your Lestrade's PMs (or elsewhere on the site) without using the Steam client.[1]

:) <---- the power of automation
 1. Of course, you still need to be logged into the Steam website on your browser.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 25th, 2017, 05:23 PM
FIX: Unable to cancel an offer while in Editing mode. (The solution was to send the offer and then cancel again, but it still needed to be fixed.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on September 25th, 2017, 11:29 PM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on September 25th, 2017, 10:33 AM
NEW: Leveraged new Steam feature to offer a way to automatically redeem Steam keys shown in your Lestrade's PMs (or elsewhere on the site) without using the Steam client.[1]

:) <---- the power of automation
 1. Of course, you still need to be logged into the Steam website on your browser.
Nothin i'll ever use, because i only use the client, not the browser.
But  like that it works. :D
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 26th, 2017, 12:10 AM
It's something that Steam used to do years ago. They deprecated it then restored it this month. I added it here as soon as I saw it on hb. This'll be quite handy!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 26th, 2017, 12:51 PM
NEW: 'Latest copies put up on trade' now excludes your owned items. (Added a trick to make it as fast as the previous query, otherwise I'd have done it earlier.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 29th, 2017, 03:10 PM
NEW: All PMs are now viewed as a conversation between you and the other user; this is the most 'human' way to read them I think, and the setting was hidden in the complicated interface, so I took it upon myself to simply remove all other options...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 29th, 2017, 04:41 PM
FIX: On offer lists, I've replaced the time limit with a number limit, meaning if you haven't sent or received an offer in weeks, you'll still see the last one in your offer page without having to click that silly 'full history' link.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 3rd, 2017, 12:07 AM
FIX: Game prices were no longer being imported, due to a remote HTML change. (Meh...)

(Ah, if only ITAD had a slightly better API for game prices... Like, 'limit to stores that sell a Steam key' and 'return both the base & lowest price for this game'...)

PS: I made many more fixes/improvements in the last 3 days, just didn't bother to post them, as they were too minor to warrant it IMHO.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 3rd, 2017, 11:10 PM
FIX: 'add to tradables/wishlist' buttons were visible to guests... Buttons didn't do anything, of course, but I still needed to hide 'em.

Note: I'm back from a visit to the ER, my right eye is currently out of order (as well as most of that half of my face, isn't it fun). Having only one eye under the hand (hand?!) makes it difficult to type on a keyboard or watch my monitor altogether, so expect a slowdown for a couple of weeks. The fix above only took a line of code to add, it was shorter to fix than to type this.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on October 3rd, 2017, 11:31 PM
Hope you get well soon!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 4th, 2017, 11:12 AM
I'm doing a bit better this morning but I still have short periods where my vision is too blurry to type.

FIX: Offer previews (on the offer list) were showing all items in an offer even when the offer was in 'accepted' status. It should only have shown the accepted items, of course. (Also used the opportunity to fix warnings that were showing up for unchosen items in these situations.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 8th, 2017, 04:53 PM
NEW: if a game was added to a bundle before it was on Steam, once it gets added to Steam, it should automatically show the old bundle listed in its game page, as an 'unconfirmed' item (i.e. possibly greenlit but no guaranteed keys.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 8th, 2017, 11:18 PM
NEW: Game tags(https://lestrades.com/tags/) now show short descriptions for confusing tags. I wrote them myself[1] and I'm not much of a player, so apologies for any approximations. The description is also shown in individual game pages. I'm also now showing the number of games that fit a tag.[2]
 1. Please feel free to suggest more descriptions and/or fix mine!
 2. Not on the tag list, though... The query takes 10 seconds to execute and I'm neither interested in caching it, nor in adding an index for it. All I can say is that the 'Action' tag is really, really useless, with over 25% of all games carrying it. And the Indie tag is even worse -- a third of the games use it. And probably much more if you dismiss DLCs & non-games.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 10th, 2017, 06:01 PM
NEW: In bundle and offer pages, if a game is found to be a VR exclusive (i.e. won't run without a VR headset), it will now be indicated with a clear little 'VR ONLY' icon.

Please note that due to technology limitations (?), not all VR-only games are tagged as such. Over time, I hope this improves.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: sillythings on October 10th, 2017, 07:53 PM
Had a laugh reading through the descriptions. Why in the world is Lara Croft even a tag? And why is Shadowrun: Dragonfall one of the games tagged with it, but Lara Croft GO isn't?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 10th, 2017, 09:40 PM
Quote from sillythings on October 10th, 2017, 07:53 PM
Had a laugh reading through the descriptions. Why in the world is Lara Croft even a tag? And why is Shadowrun: Dragonfall one of the games tagged with it, but Lara Croft GO isn't?
Most tags are created by Steam users. The more people use a certain tag, the more likely it is to show up in the game description.
That's why the list of tags constantly evolves. There are about 80 new game tags these days that aren't listed at Barter, including the dreaded 'VR Only' which I had to rewrite my scraper for in order to pinpoint these games.
Shadowrun was probably a joke-tag, it was actually removed later (you can't see it on the Steam store), so it'll shortly disappear from LT's too.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 13th, 2017, 10:36 PM
NEW: Many new things actually, I worked like crazy on the site these last couple of days, but mostly on this new feature: developer & publisher data.

The full list is here: https://lestrades.com/studios/ (there are over 10k entries, so I hope to add pagination & sorting at some point. Sorry for the ugly UI, I was more focused on building the feature than making it look great.)

On most games (*they need to be Steam and not DLCs or junk*), you'll now have a 'Studio' link, with clickable developer & publisher names.
Let's imagine you're looking at an anime game, and you'd like to see if there's a chance it'll be bundled soon.
For instance, let's take a look at 'Forget me not', a game currently at a nice discount on Steam.
I click on the publisher link, AGM PLAYISM: https://lestrades.com/studio/995/

What does it say?
"48 games released by this studio. 27% bundled so far.
Last seen bundled: Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight, 2 months ago."

Oh, so that publisher got a game in a Humble Monthly recently. You'll recognize some of their other games as having been bundled at Humble over the last few years (Astebreed, Mitsurugi, Kero Blaster...). Looking at release dates, it becomes quickly obvious that the publisher usually doesn't like bundling games, but will occasionally bundle a recent game (e.g. Mitsurugi was released 2014 and bundled the same year). The 'Momodora' series has been bundled before, so it's not new.
Anyway, considering that only 27% of their catalog got bundled so far, my conclusion is that it's unlikely for 'Forget me not' to be bundled in the near future, despite its top discount (which usually suggests imminent bundling.)

Another example... Emerald City Confidential(https://lestrades.com/game/439/) is in my wishlist. Chances of ever being bundled?
Developed by Wadjet Eye Games, published by PlayFirst.
Let's click Wadjet Eyes (sometimes, developers decide whether they'll be bundled; mostly it's the publisher though.)
Bad luck: no bundling in over a year, but only 2 games unbundled. One of them is Shardlight, their most recent game; indicating that it's very likely to be bundled within a year, unless Wadjet changed their policy. (Probably bundled when their next game is out, as promotional work.)
What about Emerald..? Oh, bugger, it's the only game not published by Wadjet. Directly from the Wadjet page, I can click the publisher name, PlayFirst, and see that it released many games, but bundled 0% of them.
Conclusion: nope, no chance in Hell that this game is getting bundled anytime soon. (Worse, it's basically from the 'back catalog' of that publisher, meaning it's never even on sale. Hasn't been in years.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on October 13th, 2017, 10:52 PM
This is neat!
I often look up devs / publishers on steam, this makes that process alot easier, and provides additional data on an easy to grasp platform!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 13th, 2017, 11:31 PM
Yeah, that was the idea... I wanted to do that from day 1 (but had to implement BVG features that were more urgent)[1], because I keep checking publishers to see if a game I want is likely to be bundled. Because most of this can be automated, I took it upon myself to write a studio scraper (which was hellish because for some reason the database kept populating improperly; the current one seems to work fine but I'm not 100% happy with it), and then write a couple functions to evaluate future bundle chances.
 1. No doubt BVG will also copy my studio database idea within the next few weeks, like it has done for quite a lot of LT features so far... :whistle: The fact that LT originally took its cue from BVG is only because the community asked for a straight-up replacement when BVG was dying; I don't really know BVG's excuse for taking my ideas, ah ah. I mean, I'm not going anywhere!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 14th, 2017, 02:25 PM
FIX: the 'Skip' feature on match lists was broken and could only hold up to 2 different users. (I was using an array_flip() function where I should have used array_keys(). Rookie mistake. Okay, maybe not rookie but...)
Sorry about that-- I only just realized it, and no one ever reported it.

NEW: this was also added last night, but after I announced the feature-- on game pages, if a dev/publisher has more than one games on Steam, the number of games will be shown next to their name. This will save you clicking a name hoping to find another game from a developer whose game you like... ;)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 14th, 2017, 07:25 PM
NEW: Increased maximum comment length to ~1000 characters, instead of ~250. Gotta stay ahead of Twitter, eh! :lol:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 17th, 2017, 08:47 AM
I've changed a tiny detail in offer lists, where ratios used to be done 'à la barter', with the tradable & wishlist icons listed separately along with their numbers. Now I'm showing a 'ratio' logo, basically, then the ratio in the "x : y" format used everywhere else on the site. It looks better, it's cleaner, it's shorter (which is good when you're viewing offers on mobile), and it's more consistent.

Question: which icon do you prefer to represent ratios? I'm going for ♎ right now (libra = google it, it's fun), but I could also go for 📈 (charts icon). The latter is more pleasing to the eye, but probably less relevant.
Posted: October 17th, 2017, 12:44 AM

I forgot there's also the ratio icon in the sorting dropdown... (the shamrock)
Wondering which is best. I need to harmonize this. Opinions?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on October 17th, 2017, 04:41 PM
Vote charts
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 17th, 2017, 06:14 PM
☘ 0:0    📈 1:1    ♎ 0:0

Well, what? I'm just looking at how these all look :P

NEW: Not only do you get to see the normal Steam price for items, but also the current price if it's lower than usual. Would you guys like notifications for those if they're added to your wishlist outside of Steam..? But I can already see people complaining they're getting too many notifications.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 17th, 2017, 08:53 PM
Note: barter added hundreds of gog games recently but they were scraped too soon. I fixed them semi-manually (I.e. I wrote a script to automate it), and they're now properly available here. I'm mentioning it because you can enjoy adding your gog library to Lt now. It doesn't support playtimes unlike steam's (because... no public gog libraries AFAIK), but it's still nice for completionists like me. Although adding games we got through gog connect is boring so I only did some of those and focused on games I actually bought on gog.

As a reminder, gog supports game keys similarly to steam. You just need to choose 'gift' when buying off their store!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 18th, 2017, 02:34 PM
NEW: I'm playing with tags right now; tags aren't as many as you might think they are, so I've manually attributed different types to them: genre (action, indie, generic stuff like that... also genres that aren't usually classified by Steam as proper genres because they didn't think it through, such as 'clicker'), sub-genre (twin stick shooter, turn-based strategy... anything that gives more details on what kind of game it is), user-assigned tags (things like 'great soundtrack' or 'dark'), and others, which encompasses the 'technical' tags such as Singleplayer, Multiplayer, Full controler support, but also some other tags that I felt belonged in that category.

As such, in game pages, tags are now grouped by type first and foremost. User tags are still sorted by the original order in which they came, i.e. the most popularly assigned tags will be first. Some user-assigned tags have been moved to the other categories, where it's harder for me to sort them as they were, so for now they won't be sorted, but I feel it's less important than properly sorting user tags.

I'd welcome any kind of feedback regarding this move. Also, if you think that a tag doesn't belong in a category I put it in, feel free to tell me, I did all of the tags (close to 500) in less than an hour so I'm bound to have improperly set some types.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 20th, 2017, 03:29 PM
Note: I removed the banners from 'latest commented games' on the homepage. Why? Because I liked the games in them, so I didn't want to ruin the homepage by commenting on shit games with terrible banners. Now I'll be more... free to comment, I guess. I know it's unlikely to lead anyone to comment of their own, but... You should, you know!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 20th, 2017, 05:25 PM
NEW: (Actually a feature that was there since the search engine was implemented, but was limited to myself, except for non-Steam store items.)

Search engine results will now indicate the item's ratio, store (Steam/GOG/etc.) and decommissioned status. This should make it easier to choose the 'proper' game when several results come up.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 20th, 2017, 05:46 PM
NEW:

- Added Bulk Add support to Blacklist: CAN NOW ADD 'NOT INTERESTED' GAMES FROM STEAM TO YOUR BLACKLIST.

- I don't know why I'm yelling.

- Added Bulk Add support to Library: CAN NOW, oh sorry, can now add DLCs and STEAM PACKAGES automatically to your library!

- I don't know why I'm doing this in bold.

It requires a little bit of effort on your side (well, just a click and a copy operation), but you can do both lists with the same page contents (just paste it in both Bulk Add textareas, click Add, then click Confirm or remove anything you don't want to add to those lists of course.)

PS: added 750 items to my library and 160 to my blacklist. Just like that.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 22nd, 2017, 09:16 PM
NEW: If a game in your library is flagged as 'removed', click its name and visit its page. If it's marked as '(removed)' then it was probably revoked. If it's marked as '(delisted)', it means it was probably banned from the store by Steam (i.e. removed, trading disabled and author ridiculed.)

The 'delisted' flag is calculated from simple math-- if at least 20% of LT owners have it as removed (with a minimum of 5 removed), then it's delisted. It's not a perfect guess, but the only way to be sure would be to update libraries for inactive users, and that's a lot of effort just for something like that.
Also, I've noticed that BVG has started to mark some games as 'Steam Delisted', so if you're seeing that (in bold red) instead of 'Steam', then you know it's delisted for sure. Not all delisted games are marked as such, which is why I decided to implement a fallback here.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 24th, 2017, 04:26 PM
NEW: Just a couple minor additions...

- All list pages will now tell you the number of items per category at the end of the page. For Steam items, apps are counted separately from DLCs, so there's that. Interestingly my Steam profile indicates 778 DLCs, but that's over 100 less than on my LT profile... Would be worth taking a look.... Not.

- The 'Loading' animation will now also animate the small colored banner at the top of the page. Yeah, I know, there's little point to that. I just thought it'd be funny.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 24th, 2017, 10:07 PM
FIX: Number of items wasn't shown to non-admins, I forgot to remove my debug code. Oops :^^;:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 29th, 2017, 02:43 PM
FIX: Unique offer counts were being incorrectly calculated, as they counted 2 users if you initiated a trade with someone and then the same user initiated a trade with you[1]. This only affected 66 users, most of whom were off by 1 or 2 offers. I'm by far the most affected, with 10 less actual unique users than shown. Sonic Storm and Pika! Pika! both had 3 less users than previously thought, and other affected traders all had 1 less users, IIRC.
 1. Technical reason for the technical-minded: I used to SUM() two sub-queries: count of unique users who offered, and count of unique users who were offered, when I should have UNION'ed both queries (which takes care of dupes) and then done a simple COUNT() on that.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 29th, 2017, 03:19 PM
NEW: If when looking at an offer, you see "1 👫" next to a game entry, it means that tradable is currently in an active offer elsewhere. This shouldn't be a very important detail, but if you're seeing a high number for it, it means the item is likely to get traded soon, meaning that offer will need some reworking/canceling. This should encourage you to accept it as quickly as possible if you want the item in question, of course.

I hope you'll like this, it'll save you a trip to the game's page to check that information for YOUR tradables, and when the item is on the other trader's page, it's actually new information you couldn't get otherwise (unless you enjoy checking all of their active offers manually...)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 30th, 2017, 05:20 PM
NEW: if a game is currently on sale at Steam (well we're in a sale right now...), in bundle & offer pages, the game list will mention it -- right next to the usual Steam link, you'll find something like "($5, -25%)", meaning the usual price is $7.5 and last it was checked, it was at $5.

This is mostly done to discourage people sending offers for a rare game that just got on Steam for a few cents, hoping to do the trade before the user realizes it. (Yes it's not a scam but it's still not very nice. I can understand trying to get rid of things you already had in your tradables, but buying them off Steam for cheap after the offer was accepted, nuh-uh. At least not if the user doesn't have the information under the hand, which is what I'm doing now.)

PS: I tweaked the thing and now also showing the price even if it's not on sale, just because, well, information is good as long as it doesn't take too much space. Feel free to complain if you feel it's too much information, guys.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on November 1st, 2017, 12:35 AM
NEW; Steam prices & promotions are now also shown on your List pages (most interesting for your Wishlist, of course.)

I'm considering doing a notification system to encourage users to set a custom value on wishlisted games... i.e. if game is currently below custom value on Steam, you'd get an e-mail or probably simply a website notification. What do you think?
It may also be a premium feature in the future. I'm crazy like that. I thought I'd make it public for now because there's a lot of sales now and up until January.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on November 1st, 2017, 09:43 PM
That's a pretty cool feature.
Maybe add prices to all games, and show discounts in bold? Or do you think that's too much clutter?

By the way, i recently browsed the site a bit more then the usual "Check wishlist / offers / forum" daily routine, and have to say, it's a pleasant user experience, smooth, responsive, seamless, all around a good browsing experience
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on November 2nd, 2017, 06:15 PM
Quote from /u/humpaaa on November 1st, 2017, 09:43 PM
That's a pretty cool feature.
Maybe add prices to all games, and show discounts in bold? Or do you think that's too much clutter?
That's what I did... I simply don't have all the prices available.
There's no magical API to get all prices off Steam for everything at once so I'd have to do like 10 entries per minute at most, takes a lot of bandwidth, isn't crash-free, and that includes DLCs (and I'm not even sure Steam packages can be queried), so that's like 30k+ entries to go through with the API, so I just rely on another one that does everything at once-- but isn't updated in real time. Which is why so many games are still seen as 'on sale' here. (Or maybe it's a bug on my side...)
Quote from /u/humpaaa on November 1st, 2017, 09:43 PM
By the way, i recently browsed the site a bit more then the usual "Check wishlist / offers / forum" daily routine, and have to say, it's a pleasant user experience, smooth, responsive, seamless, all around a good browsing experience
Thanks ;) I really do my best to turn it into a good Steam (& GOG, etc.) helper site[1]. I still have MANY things left to implement... Ideas I get from time to time, that I take not of, then revisit later, and if they still click as 'great', then I'll work on them as time permits.
 1. Okay, I still need to do a better layout for the tag & studio lists, and harmonize the layout for game entries. I think the trading site's code (outside of the framework I wrote) is now over 400KB, so it's a lot to maintain, a lot of code that repeats itself but sometimes it's impossible to merge everything into one path and add exceptions here and there. You wouldn't like to see my code, even though it's commented quite a lot.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on November 3rd, 2017, 04:22 PM
FIX: Last night I semi-manually fixed another ~700 videos that were marked as games before. Also, in tag lists, videos will now be marked with a camera icon, just so you don't have to bother clicking them if you're looking to wishlist everything of a specific tag. (Note: not done on other lists, only tag lists... Perhaps I should.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on November 7th, 2017, 11:13 AM
FIX: the 'pending trade' warning on the offer list was incorrectly pointing out pending trades for items that were on two opposite sides of a trade (e.g. I'm trading game A for game B while I'm also trading game C for game A from someone else, and LT would indicate that game A was pending trade. Oops.) I figured out a simple one-liner to accomodate for that.

FIX: similarly, 'missing tradable' errors were often found when they shouldn't. Originally I wanted to make sure that one couldn't swap out a high value tradable item (e.g. Steam gift) for another (e.g. HB key) right after the trade offer was read, but then (1) why would anyone attempt that kind of scam? (2) there's actually a simpler way to change the item type without having to edit your offer, lol, so... really useless. I'm now looking for missing games in your tradables, rather than missing tradable IDs, which solves the oft-seen issue of tradable IDs being changed by a manual tradable list sync.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on November 9th, 2017, 02:01 AM
FIX: Much of my work on Lestrade's these last couple of weeks has been on fixing games in the database. Either because the scraper broke, or because the games needed adjusting. For instance, I fixed tons of 'games' to be shown as 'videos' instead; I also fixed many DLCs that were previously reported as games. There are still a few left to fix, but I have to manually update the database entries for their parents as well, and it annoys me and I can't be bothered to write a script to automate type changes in game pages.

I'm strongly considering focusing on a Steam website scraper as my next task, with a button on game pages to allow you to request a data update straight from the Steam site. (So, basically: you find something weird? Double check on the Steam site... If it's not weird over there, just request a data update. If it's STILL weird, contact me.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on November 11th, 2017, 11:36 PM
FIX: About 2000 (!!!) videos have been marked as videos instead of games or DLCs. (I left a few DLCs such as Indie Game The Movie's Special Edition, or stuff that seems to have downloadable EXEs in addition to videos.)
This is really a big limitation on BVG's database... It treats videos (most videos?) like games. Also, considering there are many shows on Steam (mostly anime TV or game documentaries), that's an awful lot of entries in the database that are absolutely useless for trading purposes. (Basically, most of these episodic videos are included in a package, and it's the package that's (rarely) tradable, not the individual videos.)
I spent several hours on this; in the end I was tired and started doing mass conversions (e.g. Sailor Moon, Power 'Get that out of Steam!' Rangers, Hunter X Hunter, CS:GO & Dota player profiles...), I hope I didn't flag anything as a video by mistake, if you find any issues feel free to contact me. I estimate there are less than 100 videos remaining to be flagged, but the rest has to be done manually and I stopped after another ~100 such manual operations. It's really boring.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on November 12th, 2017, 05:03 PM
NEW: Added a 'sort by latest added' option in the Tag page. This'll allow you to easily spot new games for a genre you enjoy. I've already added a dozen games to my wishlist just thanks to that lol.
Also, I added some internal code to allow me to edit game types (game, DLC, movie, or junk which is stuff which shouldn't show up in the search engine at all). I would have been much inspired to do it like yesterday, so I didn't have to manually change 200 videos or so... ^^
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on November 17th, 2017, 12:54 AM
FIX: Some tags would yield no results for games when accessing their tag page. (I suspect this happened for most or all of the tags that were added recently, and there are a lot.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on November 17th, 2017, 11:44 PM
NEW: 'Export' button on tradable tab will allow you to easily export your tradable list to your SteamTrades trade topic, or anything else that supports markdown. (Will keep working on this feature to improve it and make it more complete. For now it's already pretty usable & fine enough!)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Pika! Pika! on November 18th, 2017, 04:26 AM
Quote from Lestrade 尚 on November 17th, 2017, 11:44 PM
NEW: 'Export' button on tradable tab will allow you to easily export your tradable list to your SteamTrades trade topic, or anything else that supports markdown. (Will keep working on this feature to improve it and make it more complete. For now it's already pretty usable & fine enough!)
Thanks a lot! This is a great feature. One suggestion I have is to put the link in regards to sorting choices at Lestrades by default near the top of the list instead of at the bottom as some might only see the feature when they have looked through the list. As added bonus it might also redirect more people to Lestrades. I initially thought I would prefer alphabetical sorting, but it is actually quite nice to have the rarest games at the top by default.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on November 18th, 2017, 11:07 PM
NEW: improvements to the export feature...

- Steam gifts are now shown in their own category at the top, considering they're usually more valuable than regular keys. Note, your gifts will still show "(Steam gift)" next to the name; I wanted to hide those, but then I started wondering-- what if you type "castle of illusion steam gift" in the Steamtrades search engine? Will it match a Steam gift that's not marked as such in the same line? Just to be sure, I decided to keep the mention.

- Delisted items are no longer shown in the 'Other' category (unfortunately they still are in regular list (i.e. non-export) viewing, but I'll try to fix that later)

- Link to LT's is put on top. Feel free to remove it (or move it to the bottom), of course, it's only there for convenience.

- Added option to sort items alphabetically.
- Added option to prevent showing Steam gifts in their own category, and just mix them with the rest.
- You can also combine both options.

Enjoy :) I think I'm done with the feature for now.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on November 18th, 2017, 11:43 PM
FIX: Custom item values weren't being shown in exported lists.

Also, I noticed that Steamtrades limits the size of its lists to 60000 bytes per side (have, want). I've devised a quick workaround by preventing exporting wishlist items tagged as 'no offers' or 'filler' (I was already skipping items marked as x0 quantity for both tradables & wishlist). In case it doesn't help you, I can try & have a look at simplifying the code even more, but even so I'd recommend using 'filler' on everything in your wishlist that you really don't bother enough to want to export to Steamtrades or Reddit. It makes sense to me, at least.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on November 22nd, 2017, 06:38 PM
NEW: Trailers, teasers and free videos are generally junk, but I didn't want to remove their 'video' status, so I created a new 'junk video' status that is now applied to them. As a result, they will no longer show up in search results. Hooray!

PS: this amounts to 1500+ videos.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on November 22nd, 2017, 06:57 PM
NEW: added a 'show' option in matches for Skipped users. Previously, the option would only show if the user was inactive & not e-mailable, so in these situations, if you wanted to quickly check out matches with that user, you had to unskip them then skip them again. Now you simply need to click Show.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on November 24th, 2017, 05:13 PM
FIX: Well, as usual these days, I fixed a lot of database items... This time I focused on the new database additions (over 10K in just a few days... BVG got crazy), most of which is absolute junk -- so I marked demos as demos (which are ignored by the search engine), some servers as junk, trailers and teasers (thousands of them?) are now junk videos, and I still have to deal (i.e. set to video) with episodic anime being added en masse for some reason... (Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in...)

It's really, really not fun...
Also, I'm building a new tool that'll make it easier to browse games if you're not looking for specific tags. Still have a lot of work to do though...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on November 26th, 2017, 11:27 PM
FIX: BVG seems to have changed its way to classify games as decommissioned (now called 'delisted', which I like better so I'm adopting it as well), possibly using the list from steam-tracker.com, and as such many DLCs previously marked as decommissioned were marked as 'normal', even though they're still not on the Steam store. While probably a dozen games got 'had' by the change, I noticed it quickly enough to counter this by manually checking games, and reclassifying DLCs as another form of delisted items. I think I caught them all so far (about 200?), I even ended up writing a script to auto-generate the list of IDs that should be marked as delisted again... Anyway!

I can't believe all the time spent on fixing BVG issues these days... :(
I'm actually writing some code to allow for volunteers to modify game pages (not all of the page contents for now), à la Wikipedia, and I'll be monitoring this. I don't know when it'll be ready, but I just got started so...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on November 27th, 2017, 06:26 PM
FIX: Hopefully this time the 'pending trade/acquisition' warnings on your offer page will work properly 100% of the time (regardless of who sent the offer to whom.)

FIX: Half a dozen games that were improperly marked as delisted when they were actually just released.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on November 28th, 2017, 01:20 PM
FIX: In game pages, users with tradables/wishlisted will now be considered active if they're inactive but have a valid e-mail address (allowing them to respond to your offers). Previously, this was only the case in Match pages, but I didn't see any reason why it shouldn't also be the case in Game pages.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on November 30th, 2017, 04:42 PM
NEW: A feature I worked on for a while... Bundle search! You can now search for bundles by name. This, of course, includes expired bundles. As always, the search is real-time and super-fast. It indicates the bundle's name, number of games in it, year of release, and bundle site.
The banner shown next to the bundle is from the most wishlisted game in the bundle.

If you type 'indiegala', 'bundlestars', 'fanatical', 'groupees', 'humble', 'humble bundle' or 'humblebundle', the search results will show you all bundles from those sites, most recent first. If you type 'positive', you'll get 4 bundles (3 from Humble Bundle, 1 from Flying Bundles). If you type 'flying positive', you'll get no results because the sites mentioned above are the only ones I'm willing to support (because they're the most popular AFAIK, so if you get many results you can just add 'indiegala' to only see results from that site, for instance.)

I'm also considering to add support for studios, but right now you could just go to the /studios/ page and do a Ctrl+F browser search to find who you're looking for... I don't know if it's worth the hassle..? Also maybe a search tab for junk items, i.e. items that are normally NOT returned by the game search results.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on November 30th, 2017, 11:47 PM
NEW:

- Quick Search for Studios (includes number of games per studio, and banner for their most wanted game.)
- Quick Search for Junk (i.e. demos, non-tradable stuff, and anything that's not returned by a regular game search.)

Well, that's one busy search box now... :^^;:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 1st, 2017, 02:57 PM
FIX: Another 3000+ videos were tagged as such. Seriously this is getting annoying, considering I have to work on these things for hours, and it's stopping me from working on actually useful features.
I'm even tempted to mark all episodic videos as 'junk'... Only reason I'm not going to do that is that I can't easily differentiate between the 'master' app (which contains all episodes), and the individual episodes. (Not all episodes are conveniently titled in an obvious way.)

Still, there are now close to 5000 'episodes' on the database, it's absolutely ridiculous. I'm aware this is mostly because Valve recently started to return episodes as 'regular' apps within its Steam Store API, but it doesn't change the fact that it sucks balls.
In fact it might be simpler to just move ALL movies to the 'junk' tab, and assume that if you're looking for a specific regular movie that's been bundled in the past (here's looking at you Groupees), you'll simply go to the Junk tab. Maybe rename that tab to 'Others', and put it next to 'Games'.
Or I could also mark all videos as junk, except when a video has been bundled before, I don't know. It's less logical, but more practical.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 9th, 2017, 05:09 PM
FIX: I haven't posted anything this week but rest assured I keep working on the site every day (despite having to deal with flu at home this week.)
Mostly, I fixed more game/bundle database entries, reworked some icons to use Unicode (thus saving about 3KB worth of gzipped data in the main CSS file download, save bandwidth, save trees!), and also updated Day mode to be 'watchable', as it had fallen victim of my not checking it out too often when updating designs. The background is back to a pure white, corners are darker, buttons are less gray, and ratio colors are darker and more readable (among other changes.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 10th, 2017, 05:51 PM
FIX: Manually checked hundreds of demos & trailers to see if they were as marked. Most of them were but a dozen of each were improperly labeled, so I fixed that.
Also, I added a simple video player for video junk (trailers & teasers). I also double-checked that all of the 'delisted' videos are ACTUALLY not delisted, they're only marked as delisted because their parent game is, or because they're now viewable on the Steam client. So I've marked everything as not delisted, except for three videos (APB, a Zoo game and a trailer for FEAR whose ID later got reused as a Tropico 4 DLC, I'm guessing!), which I did mark as delisted.

There you go... No one cares, but at least a couple games that were marked as demos are now in the regular search engine.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 12th, 2017, 09:25 PM
Before I forget...

NEW: Add "-delisted" to a title in the search box, and it'll hide all delisted items. This can be useful if there are a lot of delisted items that come up (was useful for me when I took it upon myself to mark all Mighty Quest for Epic Loot DLCs as delisted...)
(Note that it has to have the minus sign before the delisted word.)

Also, Barter seems to have switched its game database to use steam-tracker data for delisted items; unfortunately steam-tracker doesn't cover everything, so there were dozens (if not hundreds) of items that were improperly marked as available after this move; I've double-checked all of them and marked them as delisted anyway; also, I kept a log of all of those incorrectly handled items, in case the Barter admin wants them (list of Barter-compatible item IDs.) I'll provide them if requested.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 13th, 2017, 11:05 PM
NEW: Finished yesterday's change to the search engine.

(1) Now you can actually type delisted to restrict all results to delisted items.
(2) And you can also use the minus sign to dismiss anything in the name, not just delisted items.

Example:

agarest dlc -zero -> Returns all Agarest DLCs, unless they're for Agarest Zero games.
grim -gog fandango -> Returns Grim Fandango, but not the GOG version.
black flag uplay -> Returns AC4 Black Flag, but only the Uplay version.

Note: the store stuff was implemented long ago, the only new thing is the minus feature. I simply didn't bother to document it. The following terms are accepted as store names: "gog", "gog.com", "itch", "itch.io", "uplay", "origin.com", and the still very much dead "desura", which I can only imagine you'd include in a search with a minus sign. There's no support for 'Steam', because there are many games with 'Steam' in their name. This is also the reason why I'm only accepting 'origin.com' and not 'origin' -- you still want to be able to find Ys Origin on Steam or GOG... Please tell me if you can think of other games that may have the aforementioned store names in their name.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on December 14th, 2017, 03:14 AM
I feel that the search feature and others are better suited as documentation or I am afraid it will be lost on the vastness of the forum.
Didn't realise the store stuff had been implemented before for example. Quite nice  :D
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 14th, 2017, 08:04 AM
Well, at rhe very least it'll be mentioned in the monthly change log too. Okay maybe I should make a topic for it. Perhaps link to it in a help pop-up. I'm not done yet with the search engine. I'm quite fond of it. For instance, I need to add a way to show all results when there are too many. Maybe an extra page, sonerhing one can permalink to.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 14th, 2017, 03:13 PM
NEW: I updated the search engine again.

The main difference since yesterday is that it no longer accepts 'gog' for instance as a keyword, but '+gog'. Why? This is so I could add more keywords to the list without fear of getting conflicts with the game name.

So, without further ado, here's the new list:

'delisted' to look for delisted games or exclude them from results
'dlc' for DLCs (Steam or GOG)
'steam' for Steam games or Steam packages
'package' or 'sub' for Steam packages only
'gog' or 'gog.com' for GOG.com games
'itch' or 'itch.io' for itch.io games
'origin' for Origin games (I removed the .com, which is now unnecessary due to the rewrite)
'uplay' for Uplay games
And 'desura' for Desura games

Example search:
furi +dlc +gog -soundtrack

As in, "I'm looking for a Furi DLC on GOG, I don't remember the name, but it's not a soundtrack."

- You can also use only keywords if you want. "+dlc +gog" will list all GOG.com DLCs for any games, limited to the first ~20 it finds, of course.

- An added feature is that the keywords are now case-insensitive (this wasn't the case before today.)

Disclaimer: due to how the search engine optimizes search speed, you may get unwanted results in some situations. The 'solution' is to press Space and then Backspace. Easy to remember-- space+backspace. It's been that way since the beginning (basically it's how quick search works in Wedge), but because of the new keyword system, it happens a bit more often when using them. I'm considering getting rid of that optimization (making it 100% accurate but possibly slower to get new games because it means one server hit per letter entered), or possibly doing a server hit only when you haven't typed anything for like 300ms, I don't know which is best, I'll try to look into it and make it as good as I can. (As always!)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 14th, 2017, 03:44 PM
FIX: Sometimes, the icons would show up as garbage (actually their ISO-8859-1 representation), due to the server not specifying the utf8 charset on text/css content. I was gonna fix that by setting it, but instead decided to look at removing the UTF-8 characters and replace them with char codes -- turns out, it actually saves space in the gzipped CSS, in addition to saving space by not sending the charset header... Cool.

(If you understood the paragraph above, then you're a web developer. Otherwise, please move on.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 17th, 2017, 01:49 AM
FIX: Went through the last 2000 entries added to the database (58k to 60k), and spent 2 hours just fixing games to be 'demos' or 'dlcs' etc, and I flagged hundreds of entries (yes, hundreds...) as videos. (Also fixed dozens of video titles that were labeled as 'Adding' on BVG, thanks to their parent being known.)

Seriously, Valve, you need to do somethin' about your videos. Every episode of every stupid Naruto show gets its own app ID, it's quite simply nearly worse than Steam Direct.
It's becoming even more urgent for me to add an 'episode' type, as opposed to just 'video' or 'vijunk' (= trailer junk). These apps *can* be bought independently, I just don't know anyone who would... Really looks like a waste of app IDs to me. (And database space here... Since you can't retrade episodes... Then again, the trading site isn't really my end-game, I'm more interested in making it a Swiss knife of Steam helper features.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 18th, 2017, 12:03 AM
After fixing another ~50 episodes to get the 'video' tag today, I decided to go for an 'episode' app type, so there it is. Unfortunately my sql queries to automatically turn episodes into that type were unsuccessful, I was only able to transform ~500 items out of the thousands that are in the database now.
I'll look at the 'Episodic' tag and probably change all of these to episodes, but (1) they'll need to have a parent (which isn't always properly populated in the database) because a parent-less episodic video is usually the show's Steam store page itself (e.g. when you type 'berserk', it'll show you a page where you can buy all those pseudo-DLCs that are episodes. Oh, and don't buy those Berserk episodes, they suck. And I don't think Steam has the 1997 show.) (2) within the same show, some episodes are properly tagged, some aren't tagged at all. Gonna have fun with that...

I'm hoping you guys will accept that I'm never going to have the perfect database anyway. Well, until the day I write my Steam scraper and actually deal with episodes (which aren't presented the same way as DLCs are.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 18th, 2017, 10:35 PM
I manually force-canceled 15 old accepted offers that were obviously not completed at all. I also force-completed a dozen offers that seemed to be completed but either both users didn't bother to confirm it, or one of them didn't, and they were stuck in half-completed limbo.

I should probably work on some way to auto-complete and auto-cancel offers after a few weeks without updates... I don't know.

Also, reminder: I added a 'Cancel' feature for offers in 'Accepted' mode, as requested many times. Please refer to the topic 'Offers to cancel manually' (or some similar name) where I'm asking for feedback/tests. ;)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 19th, 2017, 01:53 AM
NEW: Added 'episode' and 'series' types to video items in the database. I've manually updated over 3.000 entries, so please forgive me if something is screwed up. The Walking Dead was a mess (as if the show itself wasn't already a mess by now...), it has more than 200 children (episodes, after-shows, docs...), and uses the same naming scheme as the Telltale games, so I ended up with lots of bugs which I had to fix manually, too. I'm scared now that when the BVG scraper comes back to these items, it'll screw them up again.

NEW: Search engine was updated to reflect that. '+video/-video' is now renamed to '+media/-media', and allows you to filter out videos + series + episodes. The 'video' tag is now only for regular videos (e.g. movies). Introduced 'series' and 'episode' tags, you know what they're for.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 20th, 2017, 01:51 AM
I know you guys don't care, but I finally wrote myself a small script to be able to manually edit parents & children on game pages without having to manipulate the database. (It also updates, adds & removes the games to their parent of child.)

And needless to say, fixed countless games in the database manually. I haaaate that job...

Also, I have yet to see anyone comment on the mutual cancel feature. Did anyone test it...? You can obviously do a fake offer and cancel it. I just don't wanna do it myself.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 22nd, 2017, 06:26 PM
NEW: Added an 'All games' link to the homepage... With which you can view the entire database, starting from newest additions. ;)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 24th, 2017, 06:17 PM
NEW: All linked games will now show an icon in case you have wishlisted, blacklisted, owned them, or have it in your tradables. This might be a bit overwhelming in some areas, I'm disabling it on list pages (e.g. if you visit your wishlist, all items should have the wishlist icon, so they're implied and not shown, but icons like Tradable or Owned will still show up.)
I'll allow you to disable the option when I'm ready to rewrite profile options.
You may find some bugs here and there, in the form of duplicate icons. I'm currently in the process of removing icons where they were added automatically, but it takes a while, and pretty soon I'll be off to dinner (and I believe it's not a random dinner :P), and I'll hardly have time to finish fixing icons tonight, so please bear with me! I think it's great that I get to see these icons everywhere...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 24th, 2017, 10:11 PM
FIX: Match page was showing tradable & wishlist icons in the 'expected place', so we had icons everywhere... I fixed it in a very smart way (seriously, I'm annoyingly proud of myself. I boasted to the missus about the simplicity of my solution.)
I think it's very interesting that you can now see owned items in your tradables. Really, really useful when considering whether to send an offer! (Owned items = less intimidating to retrade.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on December 26th, 2017, 04:44 PM
Regarding the "all games" section: https://imgur.com/a/jciFN
Is this supposed to be like this? Error on lestrades or error on steamdb (that is your data source, right)?

Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 26th, 2017, 05:02 PM
New games are scraped off BVG (so that I can easily retain game IDs and associate them with tradables & wishlists when syncing user account data).
BVG gives these errors in various situations, most notably:
- When the game isn't released on Steam yet (but the Steam API started reporting it as existing, without much data),
- When the game was removed long ago from Steam, often out of a mistake (you can usually find data about them at SteamDB but they're often flagged as 'Unknown App ID' or something),
- When it's an episode of a TV show. (In which case, watch me have fun manually fixing all of the episodes... Yes, I do that regularly. It's like a full-time job for me.)

I chose not to 'hide' these entries from users, but I could just as easily do it if you prefer. Things like that, I call them 'internal soup'.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 27th, 2017, 12:04 AM
FIX: Turned another few hundreds generic videos into series & episodes... Gosh this is just so annoying. It's made much easier by my new working method, but it's still a real hassle, like, I have to have 5 tabs open with 4 SQL queries ready to be tailored for a new discovered show, and another tab to navigate the game list and spot stuff that was 'forgotten'...
Also, I'm now pretty much convinced that BVG's association between series & episodes (over there it's called game & DLC, lol) is done manually by a regular user. They may want to work on Lestrade's instead, because it can be done with a few clicks :P

Anyway, if you find a lone episode not linked to its series, or a series/video/episode/etc. that's tagged as a game, please tell me so I can fix it!
There are now 7658 videos listed on the site. Including 271 TV shows and 6522 episodes. Which only leaves only 1136 'regular' videos (movies or whatever.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 27th, 2017, 12:45 AM
FIX: LT will no longer try to add icons to game names if there are over 2000 games sporting that icon on the page. This should be a decent enough number. Otherwise it just slows down the page loading for no reason. Also-- it's another argument for me to implement pagination on library pages, I guess!

PS: that's for @theemu, who's been hitting the server trying to update his tradable for the last hour. I don't know why he's so adamant on using the site to its full extent (look at his online stats), and yet never ever send/accept a single offer... :^^;: Maybe he just likes looking at game databases, I don't know. :P
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 30th, 2017, 05:31 PM
FIX: I've worked out an alternative layout where the sidebar is now forcibly shown at the bottom of the page. I like it because it's been a while since I haven't done some kind of horizontal sidebar, but I don't know about you, what do you guys think about it..? Likey, no likey? I can easily revert back to the old behavior if you prefer. Or maybe you just don't want to see all the extra information, I don't know. Maybe I can keep some of it (Quick access at least) to the homepage...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on December 30th, 2017, 07:04 PM
Personally, i like it. Clean!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on December 31st, 2017, 01:44 PM
I see you reverted the profile, is it optional now?
You also seem to have broken something in the process: https://imgur.com/a/3si0R
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 31st, 2017, 07:22 PM
I actually reworked the sidebar to only show at the bottom if viewed on a mobile phone, as was intended. I will however mive it to the bottom on pages where it's currently hidden, like list pages. Just needs more work.

As for the search box it's a bit broken right now. I fixed your issue I suppose because I'm not seeing it on mobile at least. You still cant use search on mobile, unless you're looking for users. (An alternative is to search on steam and replace the steampowered text in the url with lestrades, a well known hack.)

I'll get to fixing all of that tomorrow, hopefully. Meanwhile, enjoy the festivities? ;)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on January 1st, 2018, 12:40 AM
Yep, its fixed. Search icon is still a bit bugged, but at least the top bar extends all the way.
Happy New Year!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on January 2nd, 2018, 11:00 PM
FIX: Hopefully, I've fixed ALL issues I introduced these last few days with both the 'Preview offer' feature (this one should be OK, tested it on multiple devices, *and* I figured out what I was doing wrong, too), and with the quick search engine rewrite. The latter's rewrite was needed because mobile devices wouldn't show all of the options, so I replaced the usual type list with a dropdown, but it got messy real fast. (Notably, you couldn't search for games any more, then I fixed that, and it broke bundle search.) I just finished testing on my smartphone and my Opera, and it seems to be working great now.

Phew...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on January 11th, 2018, 11:18 AM
FIX: It was impossible to mutually cancel an offer because the recipient (not the sender) was unable to cancel on their side. It only took someone to report the problem to me before I looked into it. Why is no one reporting huge bugs like these..? I thought no reports = no bugs... So I never bothered to double-check myself...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on January 16th, 2018, 06:16 PM
FIX: Can now quick search for games with Chinese characters only, such as 影踪 - 斩玉剑.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on January 17th, 2018, 10:39 AM
NEW: This has been here for a few days, but I forgot to mention it... When creating an offer, all games are now available for you to select from (except if blacklisted IIRC.) You can restore the previous behavior (i.e. hide games from library & tradables) by following the new link at the top of the list of games.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on January 18th, 2018, 12:39 AM
NEW: This was requested more than once, so I finally did it -- match pages now sort results by trader last login dates (i.e. first results come from the most recently online user), rather than the 'Barter way of doing it'.

As a reminder, I'd reverse-engineered Barter's sorting method to be done this way: first results shown were the ones with your oldest tradables (e.g. the first ones you added to your account and that have a potential match.) I had a good reason to use Barter's sorting method before -- I wanted users to feel at home when everyone was transitioning from Barter to LT. Because Barter came back, and tradable lists are now often vastly different, there really isn't a reason to sort matches in this weird way. If you want to keep sorting à la Barter though, you can simply add '?byage' to the URL. So, that'd be "/match/?byage" for a global site match request.

Hope you like this change. I can also do other types of sorting, just ask.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on January 24th, 2018, 10:46 AM
FIX: Importing items from BVG was broken, I've tested with tradables and it's working again now.

FIX (your mileage may vary): Day mode had one drawback compared to Night mode-- Steam game banners are built with a dark mode in mind, so they often appear too dark on a bright background. I devised a quick & easy trick to make this more acceptable by decreasing the contrast of these banners in Day mode. Feedback is welcomed.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on January 29th, 2018, 11:31 AM
FIX: Your Barter stats are now updated again when you sync with them.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on February 13th, 2018, 04:00 PM
It has come to my attention that BVG recently updated their tag list. Because they hadn't so in years, Lestrade's was using its own tag list generated from the partial BVG list and added a hundred or so new tags. Because of the new tags, some games are now improperly tagged. I'm currently working on a long-term solution that doesn't involve on-the-fly conversions, but for now I'll have to do with it. So, tags are fixed on game pages, as well as the tag list. Elsewhere (such as bundle pages), they're not fixed yet. No biggie...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on February 14th, 2018, 12:57 PM
NEW: In your Tradables page, you can now choose to ignore may-keep items when exporting. This was of use for me because I had reached the maximum allowed size for 'Have' games at SteamTrades, *and* I was getting bored of everyone sending me shit offers for my may-keep games... So, now I have a shorter tradable list, and I'm more likely to trade those games now. Yay.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on February 16th, 2018, 03:33 PM
FIX: The Steam wishlist page changed and broke Lestrade's sync function. I fixed it, and as an added bonus the 'Added' date in your game pages will now reflect the time the game was added to your Steam wishlist, rather than the time it was first imported into your Lestrade's wishlist.

Also, this 'bug' shouldn't have affected you if you didn't take any action when visiting your wishlist and being presented with the option to clean up your wishlist. (And, of course, if you didn't visit your wishlist page at all.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on February 16th, 2018, 03:37 PM
FIX: (Well, err... Sort of..???!!) "Home" and "Profile" icons in the main menu were screwed up (= showing a diamond) on some browsers. Unfortunately, I'm not able to determine whether it's fixed on all browsers that had the issue. But it's fixed on mine. Oddly, by removing a "width: 16px" CSS rule. That's so weird. I don't really see why this could cause issues...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on February 16th, 2018, 05:49 PM
Fixed on chrome
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on February 16th, 2018, 07:16 PM
Oh it was also buggy on Chrome for Android..? Didn't notice.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on February 17th, 2018, 08:03 PM
I don't know, it was more meant to say "no bugs on chrome".
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 1st, 2018, 05:25 PM
FIX: Couldn't change custom game values from within multi-tagging in game lists (wishlist etc.), could only change from individual game pages.

UNRELATED: I now have fiber. ^o^ Uploading updates for the websites now takes a few milliseconds instead of 5 to 10 seconds, lol. So good! I waited 15 years for that moment...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 28th, 2018, 10:23 AM
FIX: Had a few 'undefined' errors popping up everywhere on the site since yesterday. This was due to a small change in my codebase to accomodate for a new 'Package' tag that is shown next to, err... Steam packages. (Similarly to DLCs, demos, videos, series, episodes and trailers.)
The change was required because packages aren't flagged in the same way as regular game types, but I forgot to update a few areas in my code. This didn't impair functionality at all, it simply showed that silly error everywhere when sending an offer for instance.
(I would have noticed earlier if someone had posted a bug report. Like, I easily had a few dozen users get the error and none of them bothered to post. :P)

UNRELATED: And yes, as you can see, I'm still working on the site... :P Work slowed nearly to a halt this month while I'm entering a new relationship. (So it's for the better good. Well, my better good!)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 11th, 2018, 11:54 AM
FIX: the package rewrite screwed up the 'removed' flag. A total of 2976 owned packages were affected by this, I've reset their flags, my apologies. Also, unrelated to the rewrite, nearly 1000 DLCs were marked as removed when really the only way to 'know' for sure is to look through the dynamic API, and it's not reliable enough for my algorithm. Finally, a further 3000+ items were flagged as removed incorrectly, not because they're not removed, but because I can't make sure they really are.

So that's a total of nearly 7000 items that are no longer 'removed'.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 11th, 2018, 07:12 PM
FIX: Fixed another 200+ items manually to prevent removal, i.e. items that were classified as games when they're either junk, trailers, demos or DLCs.

Relying on the Barter database for this kind of information saves me a lot of time, but Barter's is incomplete as well, so I have to fix a lot of things manually-- if I have time!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 19th, 2018, 12:49 PM
FIX: Could no longer add packages to your library manually or through the Steam importer.
Also fixed an unrelated issue that offered you to add demos to your library even though they're not 'allowed' (so LT's would keep offering to import them when syncing your DLCs & packages.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 22nd, 2018, 08:17 PM
FIX: Unable to log into the website with Steam since yesterday or so. Was due to a restrictive test on my side that broke when Steam made a change without warning. (Would have been shorter, but I was too busy IRL this weekend to look into the site.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 2nd, 2018, 09:47 PM
Just a quick note to indicate that I've fixed a few hundred game titles and made sure that default names being shown are those from the barter database. (Up until now it was Steam database names because barter's weren't being updated when names changed, but it turns out it's no longer the case.)

I'm just saying because there were many issues with names taken from Steam, including error messages.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 11th, 2018, 07:38 PM
FIX: Many recent games were entered with an incorrect app ID and thus didn't have a proper link to Steam. I'm fixing them right now.
Also fixed all 'Unreleased' games being marked as 'Delisted' by mistake. (I'd hit the wrong number of my keypad...)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 17th, 2018, 10:59 AM
NEW: I actually implemented this a few days ago but forgot to mention it... Offer creation pages now only show respective wishlisted games by default, and you have the option to extend the lists with a checkbox. This is IMHO more useful (and faster to load on mobile...) than simply the option to hide disabled entries (e.g. items that are in your wishlist but shouldn't be, since you already have them & they're not tagged as Extra copy, things like that.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 17th, 2018, 04:32 PM
Changed the default skin to Day mode for a change... Not that I was bored with Night mode, but I'm trying to determine if people prefer Day or Night these days. I know I tend to use Day more.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on May 18th, 2018, 12:09 AM
I like day mode more aswell =)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 18th, 2018, 09:40 AM
Although night mode is better for hardcore steam users, I fixed that issue long ago by adding a small rounded corners around steam banners which makes them more pleasing to the eye. (I'm even considering adding slight fade out effect around the borders to better accommodate for some ugly banners but otoh it's probably gonna slow down rendering.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on May 19th, 2018, 12:37 PM
Is the "DONE / UNDONE" Text while looking at matches intentional?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 19th, 2018, 07:06 PM
Nope it's the remainder of a botched fix I forgot to remove. Game links are also wrong. Thanks for reminding me... I'll fix that asap.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 20th, 2018, 12:24 AM
FIX: Publisher data was screwed up by an API bug. This is now fixed on my side, and I've deleted all extra unneeded studio names (which was basically half of the lot.)

FIX or NEW, depending on your point of view:

- On New Offer pages, your side will now be show on the RIGHT, rather than the left. This is to keep in line with the 'Matches' page. I would very much like to know if you guys prefer that I invert everything..? Your side on the left?
- On New Offer pages, you will no longer see the Tradable icon on your side, and the Wishlisted icon on their side. This is much, much cleaner now. All other icons will still show up (which was the goal, really!), i.e. on your side (tradables), you'll still see "wishlisted" icons for items that are both in your tradables & wishlist.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 20th, 2018, 03:36 PM
FIX: Latest comment (as shown on your Offers page) didn't take comment privacy into account. Please note that 'Just me' is pretty much a moot privacy setting-- the other trade in your offer will STILL get a notification even if you set your comment to 'Just me'. I could fix it... Just not sure whether to rewrite my notification settings to handle that, or just not show 'Just me' at all...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on May 20th, 2018, 06:08 PM
Quote from [Lestrades.com]Nao 尚 on May 20th, 2018, 12:24 AM

- On New Offer pages, your side will now be show on the RIGHT, rather than the left. This is to keep in line with the 'Matches' page. I would very much like to know if you guys prefer that I invert everything..? Your side on the left?
I kind of prefer my side on the left.
But its really nothing deal-breaking, just a preference.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 20th, 2018, 06:35 PM
That's the thing... Nobody ever complained (even until now) about the order being reversed between match time and offer creation time. It always bothered me a bit. It really needs to be discussed more than it currently is, I think. :P
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 25th, 2018, 11:55 PM
NEW: Privacy settings in offer comments were pretty useless, especially "Just me" (which makes your comment, uh... Only readable by you... But still generates a notification to the other trader, uh...), so I added a "Just us" option which indicates only the offer's sender and recipient will be able to read it. (As well as yourself, if you're not part of these two of course.)
This is only barely tested-- I would need to test with someone else. Send me a PM if you wanna see an offer where I posted such a message, tell me if you can see it etc.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 26th, 2018, 01:02 AM
(Reminder to self: feature doesn't seem to work properly (i.e. can't see my own comments) when posting a new comment and the page auto-refreshes. Forcing a refresh fixes it though...)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 26th, 2018, 11:05 AM
FIX: Sorting option was not being saved across page loads if you had a huge library of games (e.g. would work fine on a small Tradables page but not on your library with several thousand games).
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 3rd, 2018, 12:40 AM
NEW: Pagination on wishlist/tradables/blacklist/library pages!

I worked on this for months, abandoned it at one point because of technical issues and finally devoted a couple days to working on it seriously.
- If you're visiting a list that has more than 1000 items (on desktop; or 500 items on mobile devices, 200 on desktop with banners enabled, and 100 on mobile with banners enabled), the list will be split over multiple pages. The number of items was chosen arbitrarily based on my own experience of performance comparisons between on-the-fly sorting and AJAX-based sorting. (Basically, on mobile, on-the-fly sorting speed was absolutely terrible beyond a few hundred items...)
- Paginated lists can still be sorted on the fly, but instead of sorting them through JavaScript I'll sort them on the server. This makes performance actually much better on mobile, but I'm close to the server physically so I don't know about you guys. I'd like to point out that if you checked items on your lists and then changed the order, they will still remain checked internally even if they disappear from the page (e.g. same sorting algorithm, reversed order). Once you reset the sort order, you'll get your items checked again. I'm insisting on this because it was the main cause for concern that I had to fix this week. :P
- I'm considering completely dropping JavaScript sorting because arguably server performance is always better on mobile devices and often on par with JS sorting on desktop devices. However I'm not 100% sure, it needs a lot more testing.

So, don't forget to send your bug reports..!

The only drawback of paginated lists is that you can no longer filter through all items at once, obviously. I'll try to add some kind of realtime filter like the search engine in the top bar, or the wishlist filter at Steam. We'll see about it... Right now I just want to go to bed. :P
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 3rd, 2018, 01:10 AM
FIXES:
- (Hopefully) fixed a silent Ajax error. I don't know what originated it but I modified something to ensure it wouldn't trigger.
- Pagination only generated valid page links on your own lists.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 3rd, 2018, 11:14 PM
FIX: Pagination didn't take banner viewing preference into account.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 8th, 2018, 06:12 PM
FIX: Associated 1611 demos with their parent game. Yes, not very useful but I still wanted to have them all, as Barter only does it very occasionally (and marks demos as DLCs as well...)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 16th, 2018, 11:35 PM
NEW: Added a new JSON output option to the Export feature. This is for Barter only. It will export your games with the following specifications: quantity (0, 1 or more), source store (only the most popular are transmitted), key type (key, link, gift), and that's all for now because I can't bother to convert tags between sites.

Important: Barter limits the size of their JSON text input to 40.000 characters, meaning you can't enter more than ~600 to ~800 games. If you have more games, the import process will fail at Barter, so just fall back to the original BVG format which only indicates game IDs. (Yes, I'm in that position and it's frustrating...)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 18th, 2018, 07:14 PM
The bundle page is a bit crowded for my taste on mobile so I'll be reworking it soon.

In the meantime I added counters for owned & tradable games in addition to wishlisted items. :)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 18th, 2018, 11:36 PM
NEW: Added "Matches" and "Takers" buttons on the multi-copy editor (the popup that sets tags and removes games etc.), available in both your list pages (Wishlist etc) and Bundle pages.
For instance, you can now match for all games in a bundle to determine, for instance, if anyone on the site is interested in any of your leftovers from a bundle you just bought.

This is a really nice feature that I added a year ago and only made available to Premium users (of course there is only one besides me). I figured that if I still don't have any way to automatically acquire Premium status over a year after I coded the damn thing, I might as well make it available to everyone, for practical purposes. Hope you like it!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 19th, 2018, 11:29 PM
NEW: Added a filter search function for list pages. For instance, if you're on your library and you want to quickly find a game you own, just go there (it's the input box near the top of the page, right before the actual list of games), type a few letters and the game(s) will show up, you only need to click them to edit their tags on their game page.
I originally wanted to update the game list on the fly with this, but figured that it'd be a bit complicated and might risk screwing up your current selection. So instead I'm re-using the global game search input box, with the major difference that's it's set to only search within the current user's current list.

Well, I certainly hope you like that. It's something I'll probably use in the future, especially now that library lists are split over multiple pages and it's harder to find the game I want.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on June 20th, 2018, 12:02 AM
This is very useful. I personally prefer if when the game is found instead of taking to the game page it would select it instead. Thanks anyway ;)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 20th, 2018, 12:51 AM
I know, but I can't with the current technique. I could possibly select items but only if it's on the current page. Because I can't be sure of that, it means I'd either have to manually add it to the list, perhaps at the top... bit weird..? doable but weird...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 21st, 2018, 03:52 PM
FIX: Lestrade's would crash on you if you attempted to sync with a Barter list with more than 12.000 items (estimated number.)
I fixed it to hopefully work on many more items at once. In the future it might break again as we reach ridiculous numbers of games on Steam, in which case I'll fix it more aggressively, but for now I guess you can import up to 20.000 items now.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 23rd, 2018, 12:05 AM
FIX: Another batch of series & their associated episodes should now probably be properly tagged... Also, made a blunder when fixing those automatically, so there might be a couple DLCs that are now considered episodes, or whatever. I think I fixed those... But really, fixing the Barter database is a never-ending task-- some things just break over time.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 23rd, 2018, 03:33 PM
Lestrade's should now support exporting to Barter with tags, at least 99%!

TUTORIAL

- Go to your Wishlist or Tradables
- Click the 'Export' button
- Click the 'BVG format (JSON)' button (No, it doesn't say Jenson Button... it does not.)
- Click the 'Copy list to Clipboard' button.
- Go to barter.vg and to your Wishlist or Tradables
- Click the Edit button (don't forget to empty your list as needed.)
- In "Add by:", click the "JSON" option.
- A textarea should show up with a sample of what you're supposed to enter.
- Important: if you have more than ~1500 items in your list, at this point, right-click the textarea, select "Inspect element", the textarea tag should show up in text form. Double click the "150000", press the Delete key to remove that. Press Enter. At this point it should just say maxlength instead of maxlength="150000", and you should be able to enter your data properly. The admin was asked to lift this limit but he has yet to do it.
- Click the textarea, press Ctrl+V or whatever to paste your JSON data in it. Click the "+ Add JSON" button.

Wait a bit... And you're done. All Barter items, properly tagged through Lestrade's ultra-simple multi-item real-time tagging tools. Now you no longer have an excuse not to use it, if only for the tagging system. Tell your friends, shameless plug :)

:edit: BVG silently changed their maximum textarea size from 40.000 items to 150.000 items, so it should make this easier to do in the future.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 27th, 2018, 06:14 PM
FIX: Offers got an 'already pending trade' warning even if the tradable had a quantity higher than one. I don't need to deal with those.
FIX (well, sorta...): You can now add F2P/demo games to your tradables, albeit with a confirmation box to click before you can do it. The reasoning is that the BVG database has some games incorrectly tagged as Free to play, and you may not want to wait for the guys in charge to fix the tag before you can add the game to your tradables. (e.g. the latest Life is Feudal game.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on June 29th, 2018, 03:42 PM
The Barter tutorial should be moved out to another thread. In here it will lose visibility pretty quickly
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 29th, 2018, 09:30 PM
I actually linked to it from the export page yesterday precisely because I thought it could help. Just watch out for the '?' icon!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 1st, 2018, 10:18 PM
FIX: Banned Steam games no longer seem to show up in libraries when querying Steam... So I've added the ability to bulk-add them (they still show up when doing "Add DLCs/Packages" from your library page), or directly add them from the game page (or remove them, if you made a mistake.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 2nd, 2018, 03:10 PM
Note: 'Episodes' will now be classified as Junk items internally. While they're not exactly 'junk', usually you add them to your library through buying the parent 'series', and I don't believe you can buy episodes individually... So it doesn't really make sense to clutter the default database search with untradable stuff.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 4th, 2018, 05:34 PM
FIX: Tags imported from BVG were incorrectly listed in the Tag list. (I was actually converting tag IDs the other way around... Anyway it doesn't matter.)

Also added a few tags that BVG added recently. This one really, really makes me wonder... Where the hell does BVG get its tag lists from? Certainly not from Steam or Steamspy... https://lestrades.com/tag/450/ (There are plenty of games I wouldn't consider to be shit games, either!)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 4th, 2018, 05:41 PM
NEW: Added a 'crowdfunding' store, per user request. This is mostly for Kickstarter-issued Steam keys but you can use whatever crowdfunding site you used, obviously...
PS: the icon is butt-ugly! Complain with KS, not me...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 7th, 2018, 10:03 AM
FIX: Fixed exporting games to BVG JSON for some wishlisted items: (1) games with the 'no offer' tag, as long as you choose the JSON option of course. (2) games with the 'filler' tag weren't exported at all, now they're exported with the 'lowest tier' tag, which is even lower than what LT's supports. (And really that's what 'filler' stands for, pretty much... Stuff you don't really care about.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 17th, 2018, 10:43 AM
FIX: Starting recently, Steam packages could no longer be added manually to your library (even through bulk add.)

FIX: The Game list (https://lestrades.com/games/) was unable to show the first page of results.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 24th, 2018, 01:44 AM
FIX: Reverted another fix (but I can't remember which!) because it caused quick item sorting to fail. I need to find which feature is now broken. If you have any idea, please share... :^^;: I'm off to bed anyway.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 25th, 2018, 04:03 PM
FIX: Refixed the fix from just above. I simply made sure to restrain my fix to that specific case, so previous fixes should no longer be affected. (Also, I think I figured out what the previous fix was.)

FIX: Permalink on lists was no longer working for your own lists, which kinda defeated the purpose. (Was broken by the implementation of paging.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on July 25th, 2018, 07:17 PM
Quote from [Lestrades.com]Nao 尚 on July 25th, 2018, 04:03 PM
FIX: Refixed the fix from just above. I simply made sure to restrain my fix to that specific case, so previous fixes should no longer be affected. (Also, I think I figured out what the previous fix was.)
Feature-Request: Patchnotes should contain the word fix more often!
Good work, Monsieur.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 25th, 2018, 08:13 PM
Fixed that for you. No, actually, that was enough fixing for today.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 7th, 2018, 06:08 PM
NEW: Long match lists are now cut off after 15 games. You can unfold them individually (and view the remaining games), or all at the same time (the site will remember your preference.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 16th, 2018, 11:09 AM
I just noticed that Firefox doesn't correctly render inline SVG images on the site (this will be visible in things such as the 'Add to wishlist' button), because of a logic error on my side (I'm forgiving myself because it's complicated, it's all that matters. :P)
Unfortunately, as my modem got bricked a week ago (thanks to a wonderful little firmware update that failed to complete... And this damn thing has a so-called 'rescue mode', lol... It doesn't even allow me to select it...), I'm currently using LTE data to access the web and I can't seem to be able to connect to FTP over SSH, so I'm stuck not being able to upload my fix.

If the buttons get fixed, then it means I got a new modem. (And rejoice, Internet. Or at least me.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 18th, 2018, 05:40 PM
Internet's back, bug fixed. ;)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 24th, 2018, 03:28 PM
FIX: Tag support is now back to normal, or close to. Because SteamSpy stopped sending out tag lists a while ago, I was relying only on BVG to provide them, but this still wasn't perfect. I'm now getting tags back from SteamSpy (albeit individually, per game, as they're updated). This means I'll have to do another full database scrape at some point which will slow down future updates on new items, but it's better than nothing.
Example: https://lestrades.com/game/77336/ -- this upcoming game is 'Free to play' on the Steam store and Steamspy, but that tag doesn't show up on BVG, so it's now properly added. Of course, any extra 'bad' tags like the 'illuminati' stuff will still show up if they're stored either at Steamspy or BVG, since I'm showing a combination of both. I'd rather have too many tags, than too few...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 27th, 2018, 11:23 PM
Note: the list of 'VR Only' games is now properly up-to-date. (Give or take a couple games, which will eventually be updated automatically.)
https://lestrades.com/tag/410/
That's an additional 320 items, compared to the last version of the list. This is really, *really* useful when it comes to VR bundles.

FIX: About 1670 games had demos pointing to their parent game, but the parent didn't have a link to their demo. (Similar to what Barter does... Except I like linking every item to one another.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 1st, 2018, 11:51 PM
NEW: I forgot to mention, it's been a few days now but Lestrade's is now indicating two game scores-- the official one (if it's got enough votes, otherwise it doesn't have an official score), and the 'old style' score, based on number of positive & negative reviews. Review numbers are also more up-to-date than before. So, basically, I'd recommend following the old style score for most games, except those with low wishlist counts, which usually indicate a crappy game with stolen assets and fake reviews.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 21st, 2018, 11:13 AM
FIX: A logic error made it so that the quick search popup would ignore junk status on items (whether looking for a regular or junk item), and take it into account when filtering your wishlist/tradables. This, of course, was supposed to be the other way around, sorry about that.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 1st, 2018, 03:19 PM
FIX: Importing blacklist was no longer working, due to a format change. I've fixed packages as well, but since I have none in my blacklist, make sure to tell me if you're experiencing issues with them!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on October 1st, 2018, 07:09 PM
Good job on the gamescores!
Will look into blacklist, havn't updated it a while i think

Edit: Works!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on November 3rd, 2018, 06:38 PM
FIX: Games that are 'pending' in Steam and not showing up in your library can now be added to your library manually.
Note: this can only be done through Bulk Add for now... i.e. the Add DLCs/Packages button at the top of your library page. Just follow the instructions, you'll see all of your 'pending' games listed, confirm, and they'll be properly added. Previously, they would be rejected because they're regular games, and normally Steam reports them all... Since it's no longer the case, I really needed to do that. If it doesn't work for a particular game, feel free to tell me!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on November 3rd, 2018, 06:59 PM
NEW: You can now filter bundles by their store... Just click the icon on the left next to a bundle.
This will be more interesting once I implement paging for bundle lists, because for now, well... It's only useful if you're trying to find a specific bundle quickly and you can't bother to type Ctrl+F ;)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on November 3rd, 2018, 11:34 PM
I like that feature, however there should be something to explain that it's possible.
I think most people not following this topic would miss it
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on November 7th, 2018, 08:42 PM
It's no biggie. I like to think people who need this will figure it out ;)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on November 9th, 2018, 04:26 PM
NEW: Implemented real-time sorting on Studio pages. e.g. https://lestrades.com/studio/2179/ -> you can sort games by ratio, rating, name, etc...
(Note: this setting won't be remembered across page loads; I feel that having it sort alphanumerically by default is just fine, you'll only occasionally want to sort the list differently.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on November 11th, 2018, 11:40 AM
FIX: Hopefully I'm now automatically fixing duplicate studio names (i.e. studios that can't bother to properly type their own names on their store pages). Example: "The House Of Games" is sometimes spelled as "The House of Games" (which makes more sense to me, but "Of" came first AFAIK, so whatever...) Before, I would have to fix these duplicate names manually in the database, now it should be automatic.
This also means that the studio/publisher lists(https://lestrades.com/studios/) are actually more accurate than Steam's, because Steam counts these different spellings as different studios (IIRC). And sometimes, it doesn't even show you developer games anymore, and directly redirects to the publisher's custom page.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on November 12th, 2018, 10:22 AM
Ooouf.
I hate the new steam developer pages anyway. Way to much marketing there, way too less overview over the released titles.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on November 13th, 2018, 10:04 PM
At least they're nicely designed.
But yeah, one more opportunity for us to get lost in a page that gives us the information the studios want us to have, rather than all the details we're looking for.
Eh, it's my main reason for wanting to have this studio page on Lestrade's in the first place... (And I'm surprised BVG doesn't have one.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on November 16th, 2018, 11:39 AM
NEW: Improved library pages when it comes to removed games. The mention 'Removed' was replaced with either:
- 'Not found' (less scary..?), for games that were probably revoked;
- 'Delisted' for games that were apparently removed from Steam but have an unclear status (the jury's out on whether it got revoked from your library or you're safe);
- 'Pending' for games pending Steam verification (meaning they really are in your library, just not disclosed for now officially);
- and 'Banned' if the game was removed from Steam for rule violation, thus implying it will no longer show up in your public library but you're safe playing it.

The same process is used in game pages, with a short explanation when you hover the word.

BTW, does anyone have Silent Service(https://lestrades.com/game/4820/) in their library, yet marked as revoked/delisted..? The game is still on Steam, and it doesn't seem to be under any kind of scrutiny, given its age. That's weird. Same for 'Star Swarm Stress Test', actually. That's the only two games in my 6000+ game library that are incorrectly marked as removed. Also, some of my free video series ("Let's Play", for instance) are also marked as delisted, I'm guessing Steam no longer shows them as owned..?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 5th, 2018, 06:32 PM
FIX: I had an issue with a custom SQL call I made, which in turn corrupted the library and wishlist databases.
As such I had to reinstall them from a backup dated from about 18 hours. I also restored the tradables database, though it was uncorrupted, to ensure the same consistency in your data. Assume ALL of the tradable/wishlist/library data you entered *manually *(or through a BVG sync) less than 18 hours ago has to be re-entered.
I apologize about that.


I'm actually working on purging the databases from all automatically imported items (Steam/BVG wishlist, BVG tradables and Steam/BVG library) from users who haven't been on the website in over 6 months, meaning they're unlikely to ever come back and this gives us incorrect item ratios.
So, expect severe ratio changes on some older bundled items, of course! You can always consult BVG to see the ratios over there, but they're usually wildly differenty already (especially on items added in the last year.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on December 5th, 2018, 07:59 PM
Auto purging is a much awaited feature for me. Similar to Barter. That'd be great :)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on December 5th, 2018, 08:00 PM
By the way... I have noticed that Barter implemented some of the Lestrades features, like separate filters for tags and stores, small ui changes, etc.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 5th, 2018, 08:34 PM
Quote from Akylen on December 5th, 2018, 07:59 PM
Auto purging is a much awaited feature for me. Similar to Barter. That'd be great :)
Barter has it..? Lol. I thought it was something I was the first to come up with. I mean how does it handle users who manually added items on the site..? Does it remove those as well?
The purge is over, BTW. About 2/3 of all wishlisted items & library items have been slashed. A smaller share of tradables has been removed, because of a technical issue: I never added a 'barter sync' for first-timers who imported their tradables from BVG. Meaning I have no way to determine if a game was added manually on LT's (not removable) or added through barter (removable), so I'm only removing games that were added later with a manual BVG sync. That still accounts for, like, dozens of thousands of tradables removed...

Note: if you want to recover your lists, you need to: (1) log into the site, (2) go to your wishlist and click to sync (your library will be updated as well), then proceed to manually import from Barter on all of your tabs. Also consider using 'add DLCs and packages' in your library page.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 6th, 2018, 11:40 AM
FIX: The game list was no longer working; I didn't any reports otherwise I would have fixed it earlier.
FIX: Forgot to automate deletion of outdated (only auto-added) user items.
FIX: Made offer pages slightly more readable.
Posted: December 6th, 2018, 11:10 AM

Note: all items added before September 5, 2017 are now assumed to be auto-synced from BVG if the user hasn't logged in in over 6 months (this isn't a random date; it's when I started flagging BVG imports as such when creating your account). This is because if your tradables are over 14 months old *and* you haven't been here in over 6 months, it's likely you won't come back at all (i.e. you've retired from trading or whatever), so I'd rather not screw up 'recent ratios' with old tradables you're unlikely to be able to get anyway.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 6th, 2018, 04:05 PM
NEW: Added 'most tradables' and 'most involved in offers' (received + sent) user stat charts in the Stats page. Not particularly interesting, but I thought you might wanna look into those.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on December 7th, 2018, 04:36 PM

Those are interesting stats. I should look that page more often. It is an underrated feature!
Quote from [Lestrades.com]Nao 尚 on December 6th, 2018, 04:05 PM
NEW: Added 'most tradables' and 'most involved in offers' (received + sent) user stat charts in the Stats page. Not particularly interesting, but I thought you might wanna look into those.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 10th, 2018, 01:10 AM
Well there are more stats in the page but they're only shown to me... Too depressing at the time, eheh. (Low numbers of trades completed, compared to BVG... Even though LT's was so much better. I left it time to catch up, it's still not as practical and well designed, but since I'm pretty much done with the idea that LT's would be a dashing success, I'm fine with it now.)
I should probably show the stats to everyone, I suppose.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 26th, 2018, 09:42 PM
FIX; Filtered bundle list was not showing 100 items unlike the unfiltered one. This time, you'll get as many bundles as you can see, even if they're expired. As always, filtered by date. I'm still on the fence regarding whether to paginate results and thus show older bundles.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on January 27th, 2019, 04:33 PM
Note: even if I don't spend time documenting changes to the website, I still keep fixing whatever needs fixing (such as weird database entries, bad bundles, etc.), as well as add minor features (e.g. slightly better support for Epic Games store.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on January 28th, 2019, 08:13 PM
Got a design idea: The grey bar below the notifications could light up orange aswell if there is an active notification.
Furthermore: Notifications generated by an incoming trade offer could be auto-read if the trade is interacted with.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on January 30th, 2019, 01:31 PM
First: not likely... It's already made well visible.
Second: yeah that's bothers me too, ahah... I never took time to look into marking these notifications as read. I didn't write the notification system, only tweaked it, and there are too many objects for what it does (i.e. the programmer intended to add more features but never did.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 2nd, 2019, 09:50 PM
FIX: Tweaked the 'Mark as farmed' feature on library pages. If you applied this on a game you actually played before, you can click the button again and the original playtime will be restored. Click again to mark as farmed. (Note: the UI doesn't bother telling you when you unfarm a game. Just trust me on that...)
My original goal was to allow you to set an amount of time spent farming (and consider the rest as played), but it's just too bothersome for a feature that seemingly I'm the only one to use. ;)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 4th, 2019, 02:14 PM
NEW: Tag pages now allow you to sort games by rating.
e.g. Best hidden object games: https://lestrades.com/tag/195/?rating
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 11th, 2019, 01:42 AM
NEW: Added a "show full games" filter on studio pages. This will immediately hide DLCs, demos, junk and other non-game items from the list.
Very useful for publishers that tend to release a lot of demos or DLCs... e.g. https://lestrades.com/studio/5/
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 30th, 2019, 04:52 PM
FIX: ITAD links were incorrect in the 'bundled in..' lists on game pages. (Thanks Lillly for the report!)

NEW: added a 'popularity' sorting option for tag lists. It will show the games with the most votes first. If some games have the same number of votes, the highest average rating will be shown first.

Also added a couple other minor details this week, couldn't bother to document them.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 30th, 2019, 10:55 PM
FIX: A few tag pages were returning far more items than expected. (To be specific, on recently added tags, I was returning entries from two different tags; 90% of tag pages were unaffected by this mistake on my side.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 31st, 2019, 01:09 AM
FIX: Fixed refine and exclude features on tag pages; I hadn't used them in a while and they were broken when I added support for more tags.
Also, I used the opportunity to speed up the process and consume less memory, so you shouldn't get crashes on pages where you exclude things like the 'Indie' or 'Action' tag (which have thousands of entries each.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 1st, 2019, 03:04 PM
FIX: Games that are "pending verification" should now be addable through their respective game pages, not just through the 'Add DLCs/Packages' feature. Also fixed 4 games that aren't 'pending verification' according to my sources but are either actually pending, or should still be considered that, including Gremlins vs Automatons and the Cities: Skylines package from Humble Monthly.

Note: if you have any games that you feel SHOULD be addable and aren't currently allowed, please post them here! I'll add their IDs to the database.

Also added The Stanley Parable Demo as an exception, because I replayed it yesterday (are you guys aware the main game is getting a major content update later this year? I'm stoked!), and it has nothing in common with the original mod or the Steam game, so I marked it as a 'game' not a demo, because it's basically that, a free-to-play game with something like an hour of content if you take your time. Ironically, I spent longer adding exceptions for this in my code, than replaying it, ah ah. But it was worth it. TSB has a special place in my heart, next to The Witcher 3.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 5th, 2019, 12:12 PM
NEW: Can see your game's playtime in that game's page, without the need to check out your library page.

NEW: Can fine-tune your actual playtime for that game in its page. Just edit the number of hours or minutes. Press Return or Tab or click outside the input boxes to confirm. This is in beta test, please report any issues or concerns!

Note: you can't set your play time to be below zero or higher than what's recorded at Steam. I may become more flexible in the future, regarding situations where you'd like to express the fact that you recorded a specific number of hours in a non-Steam version of the game. I'm also considering adding manual play times for non-Steam games, actually (without limits, of course.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 15th, 2019, 11:50 PM
NEW: Added a 'public' cheat code. Cheat codes are internal URL codes that only trigger for me, but I figured this one would be helpful to collectors wanting to clean up their libraries, so I removed the limitation for it, and made it usable by everyone. Go to your library, and add "?packs" at the end of the URL. (i.e. /library/?packs)
This will show you the list of packages whose items you already own. If one item is missing, the package won't be shown. So you can safely add the package to your library, unless you only want to add packages that are 'officially' disclosed by the Steam API. Personally, I used the option to find a few packages that still were in my wishlist, despite already owning all of the items in them.
Please don't abuse the feature, it takes a bit of time to generate the list. (I didn't bother to optimize the search.) This is also why it's a cheat code, not a proper button or link in the interface.

Have fun :)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on April 16th, 2019, 02:02 PM
This is great. I always wondered about the loose packages if you know what I mean xD
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 17th, 2019, 08:46 PM
Yeah, me too... I mean I wrote this because someone sent me an offer for Sniper Ghost Warrior Trilogy which I already got through a trade, and I figured it might be helpful to everyone. Of course, adding a package to your library doesn't mean you actually own the sub (e.g. if an app later gets added to the sub, you won't get it automatically!), but it's good enough if you're looking to clean up your wishlist & all.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on April 17th, 2019, 09:30 PM
Would be cool to pin these tips for reference later. Perhaps a FAQ. Have you thought about that?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 19th, 2019, 12:43 AM
Well, there's already an FAQ, but no one reads it (I recently even got insulted by someone who thought LT's interface "sucked" compared to Barter's... Sigh!), so I'm not bothering.

Also, I spent the entire day tweaking the database & scraping code to take advantage of the fact that BVG finally started showing app type data on game pages, not just search results. Which allows me to fix hundreds of items that weren't properly labeled.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on April 19th, 2019, 01:24 PM
I don't think that way. LT has a better and more fluid interface. With that said, Barter has other advantages that perhaps that user liked more, mainly userbase, but also offer preferences, auto wishlist removal, profile message, offer alerts, feedback request. The other barter features I don't deem relevant for me.

Overall it is more pleasant and usually sufficient to use Lestrades, but it would be nice to have these  :angel:

By the way... thanks for all the hard work sorting out the database. That is super important too.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 19th, 2019, 03:06 PM
Of course I think the same... LT's was carefully built. I'm probably bothering less these days, because the trading market clearly hasn't taken off the way I was hoping it would (making it impossible to work on this full-time without eventually becoming a crook like some three-letter websites), but I still try & improve it on a regular basis, sometimes even without mentioning it. (Off the top of my head: tag page looks better now; can search for applications only or without applications by typing the "+application" or "-application" keywords... These are two things I did yesterday, apart from my current work on overhauling the database...)

I don't know which is the more complicated to maintain... The game database (because I'm trying to fix BVG's inconsistencies and maintain them), or the bundle database (which is seriously messed up from time to time... I'm actually considering syncing with the BVG bundle list now that it's on par with ITAD's, but I'm not excited at the idea of maintaining two separate bundle databases, so.. for now, nothing.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Raggart 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!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 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.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 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.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 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.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 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...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on April 29th, 2019, 12:40 PM
Cool. I personally think it would fit better just before the trade buttons.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 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?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 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.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 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...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on May 8th, 2019, 02:15 PM
Support for other stores is always welcome :)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 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.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 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.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 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.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 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.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 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.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 15th, 2019, 10:14 AM
NEW: Added an 'owners' field to game details. If there are less than 20k users it'll say so. Otherwise, it'll be an average of the estimates given by SteamSpy. (Which is where I'm getting the data from, obviously. I know BVG also does it but I'm not sure if it's using SS data or using their own technique which they devised at some point but somehow stopped talking about..?)

NEW: Very minor, but games with a rating lower than 50% now show it in bold red, and higher than 84% now show it in bold green. This is only on the game pages now, not on game lists. I'm not sure it's a 'great' addition, so for now this is just an experiment. I care about layout and style!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 21st, 2019, 10:34 AM
Again, many changes these last few days, but I just can't bother to detail them all. It's mostly about game pages-- I'm fine-tuning them, trying to make them look better than before (and frankly, they already looked good enough, but...), also store icon CSS was rewritten for simplicity and fine-tuned, I hopefully didn't forget anything (if you see a store icon out of place, even by a pixel, please tell me.)

FIX(ES): the search engine had become slightly slower (returning its first results in a couple of seconds, instead of less than a second), not because I'm a lazy coder, but because I insisted on searching intros right after you started typing. There is, really, no point in returning all games that include the word, I don't know, "you", in your search results. I'm currently starting to search for intros with a minimum longest word of 4 characters, but I may increase that amount later. (Or also take total search term length, not just the longest word length.)

This is now much faster (pretty much as it used to be), and additionally I removed the limit of items retrieved internally when the word is long enough. This is to make sure you get results on very generic search terms that should exactly match a game, but it's not retrieved because Lestrade's found too many games using the same search word before even reaching it. For instance, I couldn't find "Project One", even when typing its name entirely. Again, that 'no limit' trigger should be when you type of 4-letter word or more. Please don't try that 4-letter word. Actually, do try it. It returns the game 'brainf*ck', with the star, and shows that the word 'fuck' is used in the description. It also returns 'Journey of Life', because it's has an alternative name of 'Journey of Fucker'. Don't ask me why! But it's shown as such, clearly pointing out it's in the alternative name.

Lestrade's is slowly but surely becoming the best search engine for video games, lol. (Kudos to BVG for letting me use their database; although I could switch at any time to my alternative work-only Steam database, it's important to keep connections with that database, if only because I keep sending fixes to it. Also kudos to Lilly for patiently listening to my fix suggestions for the past couple of years, and continuing.)

I can't believe it's still stuck in that upper right corner. It should have a big search box right in the middle of the page, ahah.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on May 21st, 2019, 01:30 PM
If I may ask, what is the source of truth for the game search? lestrades db pulled from barter or steam?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 21st, 2019, 08:10 PM
Source of truth? What do you mean?
- game list is taken from barter (so that IDs can match easily when importing and exporting)
- tags, publishers and prices are taken from steamspy API iirc
- descriptions come from the steam API
- most of the remaining fields are either taken from barter or from steam, or figured out by Lestrade's (for instance there are many errors that barter won't fix in game relationships, so I fix them myself and Mark these games as 'do not bother with barter Satan). I'm currently moving some of my barter imports to use steam imports instead, but I'll keep taking barter data for the foreseeable future because I appreciate how the site is progressing and without scraping its data I can't cooperate with them. (I get hundreds of weekly logs from my scraper that I carefully analyze by hand, lol.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on May 22nd, 2019, 12:39 PM
I meant if Barter or Steam data were to diverge, who would take precedence? Generally Barter is more structured and has a community behind it. Steam, specially with banned or removed games can be a bit frustrating to get the information.

You ended up giving a much better answer than the question asked. Taking each details from the best source possible :)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 24th, 2019, 01:13 AM
Yes, I see what you mean.
Barter data isn't always up to date. It's curated by humans (admin, theemu and Lilly, as far as I know), and sometimes they do things differently than I like. Sometimes they do things properly and I do it 'my way' (e.g. look at the Stanley Parable's demo, it's the only demo on the entire site you can actually add to your library, because I consider it a game on its own, rather than a demo of the base game), there is no "perfect" database for Steam, but I do my best to have one that's worthy of the tools I built around it.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 25th, 2019, 06:52 PM
FIX/NEW: Can now search for exact expressions in the search engine. For instance, typing find your way would return too many entries from game descriptions (I tried to debug it, but it wasn't working well for me.) I figured it'd be simpler to simply allow you to type "find your way", with double quotes, and there you got, first result.

PS: as usual, I'm no longer documenting new features these days, unless it's something that can be useful and isn't self-explained, obvious or documented elsewhere.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on May 28th, 2019, 01:43 PM
FIX: When force-adding to your library ("Add DLCs/Packages" button) and choosing to ignore at least one item in the import page, and any of the items before the ignored item is incorrectly viewed as not addable to your library, the whole thing would crumble and another game would be ignored, rather than the one you requested.

I know, it's complicated... Don't bother, it only happened to me anyway. I don't think anyone uses the 'ignore' checkboxes...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 5th, 2019, 08:43 PM
NEW: A nice little feature for those who might be paranoid about their library being visible to everyone... I just added 'Sexual nudity' to my library for the sake of testing an internal feature for mass-adding DLCs to adult games (because they're not processed automatically by BVG), and figured out, well that's a stupid game to own. Then again, I don't care. But I added a flag to hide individual games from view. Just visit the offending game's page, go to 'Owners' at the bottom, and click on 'Hide my entry'. (Do the same if you want to un-hide the game from view, e.g. you did this by mistake, or just decided it was okay after all.)
The game will still show up in YOUR library, but it will indicate it's only for you. Other users won't be able to see.

A little game for you guys-- I've hidden Mermaid Adventures (https://lestrades.com/game/64048/) from my library. Can you find anywhere on the site where it says I own it...? I doubt you can, but might as well try now! (I'll mark it as visible later on, because, well, I don't need the feature myself.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 6th, 2019, 10:47 AM
NEW: The bundle list is now finally readable on mobile devices. ;)
It's no longer printing out the name of the bundle site (which is sometimes already mentioned in the bundle name, otherwise there's always the site icon to help you find your way in), replacing it with Wikipedia's famous 'external link' icon. Also tweaked the expiration stuff.
All in all, there are no changes to the desktop version, only mobile. If you like the mobile version better, feel free to discuss. (I like both.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 6th, 2019, 12:19 PM
NEW: The tag list (https://lestrades.com/tags/) was a bit long and boring, so I made it span three columns on desktop browsers. It's now shorter, and makes better use of the available space.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 7th, 2019, 11:15 AM
NEW: Remember the icon that shows up next to your library games when you're reading through a list of games..? Well, there are now two different colors for it: the usual green for your usual library games that you've left to rot in hell, and a brighter (or darker, in night mode) icon for games you've already played. I needed this to be able to look for new games to play in my Hidden Objects tag page, considering I've already played most of the best rated games, and I didn't want to add a new filter to remove played games.

Obviously, it might also server as an incentive for you to actually mark unplayed games as 'farmed' if you've only farmed them. (Remember, you can do this from your Library page by simply pointing to a playtime and clicking 'Mark as farmed' when it shows up.) That way, you'll be able to find games to play more easily.

:edit: I'm a bit torn between showing the icon differently when it's been played a LOT, but also I'm currently not showing it as 'played' when it's been played from less than 3 minutes, just to account for games you farmed, marked as farmed (or not farmed at all), then later launched with the intention of playing them, only you changed your mind and decided to play it later. Please tell me if that's fine with you guys... Or if you'd rather have the icon shown differently even if played for just one minute.

(If it isn't already obvious, Lestrade's is no longer a simple "trading" website... It's mostly a place where you can deal with your libraries of games, tradables etc, in a more efficient way than within the Steam client; and future updates will probably keep that in mind, I guess.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 13th, 2019, 06:02 PM
FIX: The warning message for members in the sidebar had been there for months; I decided to move it to your Profile page, because it still has some important links, and I need to keep it somewhere anyway. But not on every page... Right?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 19th, 2019, 02:18 AM
FIX: Because the BVG database doesn't have a generic entry for 'grab bags' (they instead include possible game names in bundle lists, but it's too annoying to keep track of by myself), I've deleted some random music album at groupees and replaced it with a 'Random key' entry that does what it says, indicate there's a grab bag/random game key in the current bundle.
Applied to most recent Fanatical and Groupees that had one.
Honestly, I'm not sure I'll keep it that way, but it's looking okay for now.

Also, I'm working on pagination for older expired bundles. Should be ready tomorrow, just a couple bugs to fix.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 19th, 2019, 02:52 PM
FIX: Fixed incorrect layout in Firefox when creating new offers, more precisely next to the 'locked' icons. Apparently, this had been there for years with no one reporting it... (Probably thought it was normal..?)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 20th, 2019, 01:20 PM
NEW: There you go! Bundle pages are now paginated. And it also works when you're filtering by bundle site.

For instance, if you're wondering "what are the oldest Fanatical bundles on record?", you can find the answer in a few seconds: https://lestrades.com/stores/Fanatical/?start=700
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 25th, 2019, 12:53 AM
NEW: Game trailers are now being shown on game pages, in HD (yay!)
Just click the preview image in the sidebar. (And yes, I pretty much reserved the sidebar for trailers long ago... Was just too lazy to get the app IDs for said trailers.)
The list is being generated right now, it'll be done in about a week, I estimate.

On Firefox and Webkit/Safari/Chrome, you'll get an animation when clicking the trailer preview.
On Opera (Blink), the animation was disabled because Opera shows a stupid 'detach' button that is drawn through the Shadow DOM, meaning I can't hide it.
On mobile browsers, the trailer window can't be moved.
On Firefox, you can move a trailer by dragging the black background below it. (Which is the main reason I have some text there.)
On all other browsers, you should be able to drag the entire video, including by clicking and dragging the video itself.
Click outside the video to close it.

It took me an entire day to build this, mostly because of the browser bugs mentioned above that forced me to try various things to fix them. (I failed, obviously. But it's better than nothing.)

Note that I'll eventually support trailers & images for all Steam games. I just need to finish my updated API scraper.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on June 25th, 2019, 01:10 PM
Pretty neat! This is steps ahead of the competition  :eheh:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 25th, 2019, 02:06 PM
Thanks ;) Although I don't want to be 'better than the competition', I just want to be 'as good as I can be', if you understand what I mean. Just like the fact that Wedge[1] is 'the best I could hope for in a forum', rather than 'doing everything better than the competition'. (Maybe it does; I just don't care.)

NEW: Code was updated to support multiple videos playing at the same time. You can put them side to side if you wanna compare them or just watch them both at the same time, lol. I tested the changes extensively in Opera Blink and Firefox, and it works great. The new video will show up on top of the previous one, pausing it; you can move it, play the previous video and then compare. Or just ignore the previous video. Click on the 'pause' button on either of the video thumbnails to pause & hide its associated video. Note that pausing the video with the default controls won't change the thumbnail icon. I just thought it was more important to use that 'pause' icon as a way to track which videos are opened (which, when I'll end up having all videos for any given game, will be way more useful.)

Example (I can give you more links to games that have two videos): https://lestrades.com/game/96740/

Also note that the thumbnail icons look really fine and are animated. I actually wrote my own stuff and was unhappy with it on mobile, then found a real nice sample at CSS-Tricks that also had the added benefit of a morphing animation. Then I added a shadow filter, because box-shadows don't work on border tricks. (Which it is, really.)
This may not work on very old browsers, but who cares about IE8 anyway?
 1. The forum software I wrote, on which Lestrade's is based.[1]
 1. See? What other forums have nested footnotes out of the box?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 25th, 2019, 10:23 PM
FIX (not important at all, though): Firefox 55 (a while ago!) added support for proper -moz-appearance: none on checkboxes, so I'm now using the Chrome path for Firefox 55+ and you should see proper styling on checkboxes now, rather than some weird JavaScript and CSS hack.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on June 26th, 2019, 12:01 PM
IE  :wow:

Please do not get me wrong, I think Wedge is really fluid. However sometimes I get annoyed when I reply to a post and the result font is smaller than default or paragraphs have too much spacing. Something odd with the formatting. So I have to go back and change it for every paragraph. It happens frequently. Quick or full editor doesn't seem to make a difference. Using Chrome btw.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 27th, 2019, 02:09 PM
I don't care about IE. I only care about making the site work on it, doesn't have to look good.
I don't understand your issue... Are you using WYSYWYG mode, perchance? Either way, your post above is the exact same size as mine.
Posted: June 27th, 2019, 02:04 PM

FIX: On game pages with two videos, you can now click any of the videos to have it show up on top of the other one. Up until now, the first video in the list would always be behind the other ones, regardless of whether your clicked it first or last.
(Also fixed a JS error on some browsers.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on June 27th, 2019, 02:35 PM
I started another thread to show the problem https://lestrades.com/bugs/164/problems-with-formatting/msg2546/#new
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on June 28th, 2019, 08:40 PM
The trailers look pretty cool. Especially that they are freely movable.
Are they added automatically to every game page?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 29th, 2019, 12:00 AM
Quote from /u/humpaaa on June 28th, 2019, 08:40 PM
Are they added automatically to every game page?
Yes, because BVG started making them 'public' (previously they were non-guests only and I didn't want to scrape it with a hack, gotta respect that).
If a video isn't online for a game, check back in a few days.
Also, at some point I'll switch to getting video URLs from the Steam API itself. I just need to finish that scraper. It's based on very old code I wrote in 2017 and was buggy. I made so many changes to my scrapers, I'm probably better off restarting from scratch or close to.
When I'm using the Steam API path, I'll be able to store all trailers for all games.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 30th, 2019, 01:26 AM
Quote from /u/humpaaa on June 28th, 2019, 08:40 PM
The trailers look pretty cool. Especially that they are freely movable.
Note: while they are freely movable in Firefox as well, it has two limitations because it doesn't support mousedown and mousemove events on video tags. As I said, you can't move the video by dragging it, you have to drag the text below the video. And secondly, if you click on a video in the background to play it, it'll play, but it won't show on top of the previous video, you'll have to move the previous video aside. I could fix that one by putting the mousedown event on the bottom text as well, but... Well, man, it's a Firefox bug. I can't fix everything for them.

Also-- I fixed some game pages that used to have 2 videos and suddenly starting just having one again.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 30th, 2019, 01:47 AM
NEW: Game pages will now list related entries using the same code path as generic game lists.
- If there are 10 entries or less in a related category, they'll be shown using a banner.
- If there are more, they'll be shown without a banner, so it'll look very similar to what it used to look like, with the addition of card counts and some details like current price.

PS: I'm open to showing the banners on a higher number of related entries.

:edit: Here's Portal 2, a very good example with all three categories, one of which has more than 10 entries. As you can see, it's very 'readable', and allows you to quickly find outdated products (i.e. the ones without a proper banner).

https://lestrades.com/game/456/
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 3rd, 2019, 01:37 AM
NEW: Related items now show their own descriptions in game pages.
(limited to 250 chars on desktop browsers, and 100 chars on mobile browsers or when there are more than 100 items in that category.)

It sounds easy, but I had a real hard time debugging some of the visual alignments for these. Meh...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 3rd, 2019, 09:43 AM
Note: I've tested on mobile and there are issues. I'll have to work on them...
I don't know why I'm doing all of that. It's not triggering any interest... Dunno if I'm heading in the right direction.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 5th, 2019, 02:31 AM
FIX: Tag pages had become too slow to load due to the current size of the database (which is four times than when I first wrote the website.) I've tweaked my tag sorting method to ensure I could now freely go through the most common tags (Action, Adventure...), which tended to crash the page.

Also, I added game descriptions on more game lists-- /tag/ pages, /games/ and so on. I tweaked my code to make it usable on mobile devices. Unfortunately, it also created issues with the vertical alignment of game titles when there's no associated description. I don't know whethere I should bother to fix that, though...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 25th, 2019, 10:08 AM
FIX: Fixed various video playing issues on game pages:

- Opera now properly disables the pop out icon (which is useless because my player does pretty much the same thing), and thus I was able to use the Chrome codepath for it.
- Chrome (and thus Opera) now has the opening animation. (This is likely due to a bug in Chrome. It doesn't seem to trigger CSS animations if an element was moved around the DOM in the same function. I had to deport the animation start to an event.)
- Firefox no longer has weird window sizes during the opening animation, because it now only triggers the animation when the video's dimensions are properly retrieved.

Well, looks like we're good now...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Annoyer13 on August 5th, 2019, 07:41 PM
First time on the site and it looks really good
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 8th, 2019, 08:21 PM
Thanks :-)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 11th, 2019, 11:00 PM
NEW: the games(https://lestrades.com/games/) page now offers a dropdown list of options to filter out stuff you might not want to see... You can include or exclude specific stores, app types, delisted status or package status.

Note: this isn't actually a new feature to me, I wrote it alongside the rest of the game page code, I just forgot to make it public or something. Maybe it means it's buggy, but since I've been using it without issues for literally years, I don't see any reason not to make it public.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 12th, 2019, 01:01 AM
FIX: in the game matching page, the other user's side showed an incorrect number of items when they were hidden from view. (e.g. "150 more" instead of "10 more".)
This was due to my code incorrectly using the number of items in your side here.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 29th, 2019, 07:25 PM
NEW: Worked on the Export feature.

- Added a "Steam only" option: don't export non-Steam items. (TF2 keys and such are considered non-Steam items, here.)
- The textarea will now indicate the length of the text inside. That's important because both websites targeted officially by the Export feature have a limit.
(a) Barter has a 40.000 character limit, although it can (thankfully) be avoided with a short manipulation. There's a warning that shows up if you choose the JSON format, with an additional link to the tutorial.
(b) SteamTrades has 60.000 character limits on both wishlist & tradables. I was able to confirm that the website counts line breaks as two bytes, instead of one. This is probably a leftover from the Internet Explorer area... I don't know. But I'm taking this into account when calculating the text size.
- Finally, I've modified the links to use a new shortened URL[1] for games. They will transparently be turned into full-form URLs, but in the meantime this saved about 10% off all list sizes. (I guess at this point, you can tell both my wishlist and tradables are JUST a couple kilobytes above 60.000 chars, so it's quite useful to me.)
 1. Note: it's encoded in base 64, I could have gone for a higher base by using more characters like @ or ! or commas, etc. but adding one more character only shaved about 3 bytes off the total list size for me, so it was useless. Removing the only two non-alphanumeric characters added about 300 bytes though, so I guess 64 was just the 'right' size for encoding game IDs. Nao out.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 29th, 2019, 09:10 PM
FIX: Game pages will now show owners sorted by unfarmed playtime, that is, it will respect the data shown in the user's library. (Previously, it wouldn't remove farmed time from the recorded playtime.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 6th, 2019, 04:22 AM
FIX: SteamSpy stopped serving the 'all' version of its API, which is a real bummer (I suppose it got abused by other websites; Lestrade's would only retrieve it once in a while, and then cache it for further processing.)
I modified my code to instead recover the data I used to get there, but game by game. It'll take longer to update (I guess a week for the first pass..? Maybe a bit less?), but it'll get done eventually.
Well, I guess now there's not much that prevents me from directly scraping the Steam store... At least I'd be able to consolidate multiple APIs into a single process, ah ah.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on September 9th, 2019, 08:17 PM
Quote from [Lestrades.com]Nao 尚 on August 29th, 2019, 07:25 PM
NEW: Worked on the Export feature.

- Added a "Steam only" option: don't export non-Steam items. (TF2 keys and such are considered non-Steam items, here.)
- The textarea will now indicate the length of the text inside. That's important because both websites targeted officially by the Export feature have a limit.
(a) Barter has a 40.000 character limit, although it can (thankfully) be avoided with a short manipulation. There's a warning that shows up if you choose the JSON format, with an additional link to the tutorial.
(b) SteamTrades has 60.000 character limits on both wishlist & tradables. I was able to confirm that the website counts line breaks as two bytes, instead of one. This is probably a leftover from the Internet Explorer area... I don't know. But I'm taking this into account when calculating the text size.
- Finally, I've modified the links to use a new shortened URL[1] for games. They will transparently be turned into full-form URLs, but in the meantime this saved about 10% off all list sizes. (I guess at this point, you can tell both my wishlist and tradables are JUST a couple kilobytes above 60.000 chars, so it's quite useful to me.)
 1. Note: it's encoded in base 64, I could have gone for a higher base by using more characters like @ or ! or commas, etc. but adding one more character only shaved about 3 bytes off the total list size for me, so it was useless. Removing the only two non-alphanumeric characters added about 300 bytes though, so I guess 64 was just the 'right' size for encoding game IDs. Nao out.
I love reading these updates so much. <3
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 10th, 2019, 12:58 AM
Well, at least someone reads them! :lol:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 14th, 2019, 12:26 AM
FIX: I broke some scripts on the site earlier today by mistake, sorry about that. Should be fixed now. (For instance, it had become impossible to add games to your wishlist from a bundle page.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 15th, 2019, 02:52 PM
NEW: This is a quick hack I devised for my own use[1], like often here, except I couldn't be arsed to add a UI for it...
Go to one of your lists (library, wishlist, tradables, blacklist), and add the following to the URL: "?tag=195", and the list will now only show games that have the desired tag number. If there's already a question mark in your list's URL, just add ";tag=195" instead (a semicolon, rather than a question mark.)
To find a tag number, just find a game that has the tag you want, click its tag name, and the tag ID is in the URL, obviously.
 1. I'm trying to find a specific hidden object game I played months ago just by remembering a specific set of backgrounds it uses, but I'm at a loss right now...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 17th, 2019, 12:15 AM
NEW: I'm testing out a new system where I'm showing Steam game banners for itch.io and Epic games, instead of a boring placeholder.

The idea is that I'm getting the 'related' items from those, and if one of them is on Steam, it's very likely that it's the Steam version, so I'm using its banner. If there are multiple Steam apps associated to the game, the oldest one will be used (it may not be a great fallback, so you might find errors here and there, feel free to report them, either here or on the game page, or by PM.)

Epic sample: https://lestrades.com/bundle/7305/
itch.io sample: https://lestrades.com/bundle/7330/

As you can see, I used a custom logo for itch.io, but I'm thinking of just using regular text like with Epic, for consistency.
PS: I'm also planning to do that for GOG and others, but I'm not in a hurry for anything. I was planning to support Groupees, but most of their associated Steam items are marked as children, rather than loosely related. I don't know. I guess I can take that data from their children, too.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on September 18th, 2019, 01:38 AM
Seems like a good idea, to get rid of a lot of placeholders.
Visibility on the logos could be improved.

Suggestion:

Steam has colourfull banners for categories like "DLC (purple) or "Mod" (yellow).
Maybe style the EPIC and ITCH-Banners like them.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 19th, 2019, 11:23 AM
The advantage of showing the names as text is that it doesn't actually hide said category banners. I could simply move the store name to the right side of the banner and have it use a similar plain background, I actually started doing it this way before falling back to a drop shadow. The problem is that I have very limited space on banners :) Perhaps I should just write 'Epic' for Epic Games Store, and 'Rockstar' for Rockstar Social Club (I just realized the names actually overflowed in mobile mode, I'll have to reduce the font size for that.) But I don't know.
I'd say that for a start, it's a good one. :)
And I know a thing or two about incremental UI improvements, ah ah, see my post about the new Steam library interface!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on September 28th, 2019, 10:53 PM
When steam is slow and doesn't work, and you go to Lestrade to check the wishlist.
Thanks for being here 'D

Btw... their website kicks me off every 2 weeks or so. I have to login again every time. So annoying!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 29th, 2019, 12:48 PM
Yeah, Steam has been very unstable these last few weeks, dunno why... DDOS attacks? Either way, it's great to be able to refer to Lestrades.com in these situations, I do the same myself, but that wouldn't be surprising eheh.
Their website doesn't "kick you off" though, it simply expires the login cookie. Normally it shouldn't expire that often... I think there are tools to allow you to extend the lifetime of a cookie, you should look into that.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 17th, 2019, 01:27 PM
Please note that following 2 requests over the last few months, I finally implemented proper removal of accounts, including linked offers. So if you want to remove your account from here, send me a PM. I'll look into your account details and if you haven't had many offers completed, I'll delete your account. (I may also allow it for bigger accounts in the future, but that'd mean keeping the offers online and I like keeping track of every detail in the offer list, so I'd have to keep the account name in the archived offer...)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on January 9th, 2020, 07:54 PM
I was thinking about the login cookie expiring. Perhaps they do it because of security, since it requires my steam guard to login again. Although, all other websites that use steam login will stay logged (including this one) :hmm:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 10th, 2020, 04:31 PM
Fix: because there are very few users who get banned from Lestrade's (basically there's only just ONE user who keeps insulting people and trying to scam then, and then comes back under a new name), I forgot to implement a few things related to banning.
So, from now on, when a user is banned:
- this information shows up on their profile for everyone to know (previously, it was only viewable by me)
- their tradables, wishlist, library and blacklist are all emplied, and all ratios updated. (Previously, well, nothing.)
- you won't be able to send them an offer anyway. (I don't know if it's important, since their lists are emptied...)

I'm on the fence regarding deleting active offers, though. It might be considered as censorship. (?)
Posted: April 10th, 2020, 04:26 PM

Note: I've noticed a minor issue, but...
Lestrade's is set to auto-delete any accounts with no contents after 6 months or something without logging in. I never even considered ban status. Meaning people who got banned before might technically be able to come back after 6 months. I'll have to look into it seriously, but since this only applies to just a handful of people, it's easy to check.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on April 11th, 2020, 12:52 AM
Quote from [Lestrades.com]Nao 尚 on April 10th, 2020, 04:31 PM
Lestrade's is set to auto-delete any accounts with no contents after 6 months or something without logging in.
My bad-- I double-checked, and I'm only deleting tradables/wishlist/library that were added automatically, so that nothing gets lost in the process. It doesn't delete members at all. It's just that I tested on a wrong member ID.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on June 20th, 2020, 03:34 PM
As you may have noticed, I recently started overhauling the bundle page to separate giveaways from bundles.
The reason was two-fold:
1/ It was getting a bit crowded, especially with the many permanent giveaways that I didn't have the heart to remove,
2/ I wanted to make it easier for 'f2p' users to quickly access the latest giveaways.

First, I moved giveaways to the top of the page, and proceeded to hide 'older' giveaways, as well as giveaways that are already in your library (main reason being: why add clutter for something you already have, and which you're unlikely to be able to retrade anyway, since pretty much all giveaways except for Humble Bundle's don't come in the form of a redeemable key?)
Of course, you can show all giveaways, including those owned, by clicking the corresponding checkbox.
Then, I listed games individually, rather than giveaways entries (which were, internally, considered as bundles). This is because most giveaways only have one title in them. For actual giveaway bundles, I'm still listing entries individually, but they're now spaced in a way that indicates they're bundled together. (That's mostly for monthly Twitch Prime entries, really.)

Finally, today I restored store icons, and I added a link to the corresponding Steam game if it's listed in the database. For instance, if Epic releases a free game that was in your Steam wishlist, this will allow you to see that it's wishlisted, even if you didn't wishlist the Epic version.

I hope this helps as many people as possible. I find it helpful to myself, which is why I did it all anyway. I'm a selfish bastard! :eheh:
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Naoto on July 6th, 2020, 02:15 AM
New here. Great job on the Site Lestrades. It's very helpful and I can tell you put a lot of thoughts into it. Looking forward to trading here.

Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on July 9th, 2020, 02:08 AM
Thanks :) yes I worked on it for months and have been maintaining and improving it for years.
It's not a very popular trading site (which in turns means I didn't spend most of my resources on improving the trading system beyond the Ajax features), but I really enjoy using it as a library management tool.

Btw guys I'm thinking of removing restrictions on adding items to your library. There are so many situations where you Wouldn't want to rely on the Pending tag to be able to manually add or remove games ..
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on August 28th, 2020, 11:07 AM
Note: despite my lack of posting new updates on this thread, I'm still active on maintaining the website.
Mostly by fixing bundles as imported from ITAD (not doing a perfect job at it, but it still requires a lot of attention), also adding minor improvements or fixes.
I don't think my daily updates were followed by many people as I tended to talk a lot, so now I'm pretty much doing the opposite, ahah.
Anyway, hope you guys & gals had a nice vacation, personally I stayed home, stayed safe, and worked on this and other things.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on September 16th, 2020, 11:43 PM
I've merged 'Twitch Prime' and 'Amazon Prime' items together. Should work better now. I've refactored many things internally to elevate Prime to 'real' store level, as opposed to occasional stores (console stuff, etc.), if anything because ITAD bundles often include those games. This should also automate importing Prime games into the bundle database, although it'll only work if BVG already has the game in its database _and_ it's associated with the equivalent Steam game, which unfortunately rarely happens. (I'm considering automating adding Steam associations when importing BVG games categorized as Prime or Epic, although it'd open the way for many false positives.)

Also, I've done the same with Epic games, although the store itself was already elevated to the highest level.
Now I know this doesn't matter much, as neither Prime nor Epic games are tradable per se, AFAIK, but I like having a clean database, and if I were to stop fixing bundles manually, I'd like for them to be as automated as can be. (Or maybe I'm just bored having to fix them all..)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: AJ on October 2nd, 2020, 04:56 AM
Hi, is there any possibility to use only the Steam profile ID number in all the URL of the Lestrades.com profile page rather than mixture of the Steam custom ID name and ID number?

I wrote a script to add a Lestrades.com link on the Steam profile page.  All works great except sometimes the URL of the Lestrades.com profile page is not correct because the ID names in the URLs of Steam and Lestrades.com are different.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 6th, 2020, 11:45 PM
I don't remember how I'm handling those things internally.. I could, however, add a hidden URL option to redirect to a profile based on its Steam ID. I probably store them, even if I have access to the Steam custom URL...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: AJ on October 11th, 2020, 12:00 AM
Nice!  May I ask when and how can I use that new URL system?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on October 15th, 2020, 10:35 PM
I haven't started work on it yet...
Other things on my mind, these days...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: AJ on November 30th, 2020, 03:32 PM
Any update for the new URL system?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 16th, 2020, 11:57 AM
Nope... :-/
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: AJ on December 16th, 2020, 04:24 PM
Ok....
Anyway, I did this. 
https://i.imgur.com/3dTKeeP.png

I wish someday the new URL system would fix this problem.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 28th, 2020, 10:34 PM
I've had a quick look at the URL system.
Apparently, the code does check for a Steam ID when the URL is in the format /profiles/123456
I didn't know what to change to make sure it was... I'm pretty sure nothing was needed, but you can also use the format /profils/steamid123456 and then you can be sure it won't be mixed up with something else.

Anyway, TL;DR: I'd already implemented Steam ID redirection years ago, simply forgot about it, and it's /profiles/(steam ID)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: AJ on December 29th, 2020, 09:12 AM
Quote from [Lestrades.com]Nao 尚 on December 28th, 2020, 10:34 PM
Anyway, TL;DR: I'd already implemented Steam ID redirection years ago, simply forgot about it, and it's /profiles/(steam ID)
But the problem is how do I create a Lestrades.com link when the URL of the Steam profile is in the "/id/(Steam custom names)" format and the names in the URL are different in both webpages of the Steam and Lestrades.com, e.g. like yours?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on January 1st, 2021, 12:39 PM
I don't get it... You can provide a custom name in the @ url format, or a steam ID if there's no custom name... The /profiles/ shortcut is only there if you reliably have a steam ID, and want to make sure you're redirected to the proper user profile.

Happy new year everyone, by the way..!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: AJ on January 2nd, 2021, 07:19 PM
The Steam ID format is no problem here because it's a unique number.  But to use a Steam custom name in the URL for a Lestrades.com profile could be a little tricky for creating a link for that profile because they might be different for some reasons.  For example, your custom name in the URL on the Steam profile is: "../id/naogilles/" but on the Lestrades.com is:  "../@Nao/".   Therefore, I can't use the custom name to create the Lestrades.com profile link because there is no such URL ("../@naogilles/") on the Lestrades.com.  Any idea to have a workaround about this? 

And, Happy New Year 2021, too!!! 
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on January 3rd, 2021, 01:03 PM
I see what you mean, now. For some reason, I thought the LT user name was taken from the Steam user name. It is not.
Thing is, Lestrade's doesn't store Steam user names at all, it gets the Steam ID through the API, and then stores that.
When logging in, one of the response elements has the proper ID in it. That's what I store, and then I move onto other things.
I'm sorry that I can't help in this regard.
I could, ideally, add some code to turn a Steam user name into a Steam ID on the fly, by doing a request internally, but it'd imply doing some exchanges between LT and the Steam server, and as you know, there's a limit to how much I can do per day, so if someone decided to write a quick script to request a Steam ID from a random, non-existent Steam user name, they might be able to get Steam to softban Lestrade's for a while, and make it work less reliably.
What I'd suggest is to look into your own side, see if there's a way to get an ID from a user name, perhaps with some quick Ajax code. I could even help you with that, if you're not sure how to do it.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: AJ on January 10th, 2021, 01:20 PM
Thanks for the tips and I definitely need and welcome any help!

But I'm not sure I understand your first two paragraphs above.  My question is:  Since the LT's already get the Steam user ID in the first place and store them in the LT's server, why not just put it on the URL of the LT's instead of the inconsistent user names?  And why would this make LT's less reliably?

And about getting the Steam user ID, do you have any experience with Steam API, e.g. to retrieve the Steam users' data(ID, library...etc), games info, and market items info?  I really want to learn it.  Any suggestion for a good place to start from?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on January 10th, 2021, 10:39 PM
There are urls I believe you can simply call to get the info you need, no need to get an API key etc, but I'd need to look into that.

As for showing a custom user name instead of a steam id, that's because Lestrade's uses the wedge codebase and, even though I wrote that as well, it'd take a long time to rewrite that and there's no real reason for me to do it, since it's also convenient to allow users to change their user name here.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on January 27th, 2021, 03:40 PM
New feature (been a long time!) for maintaining your libraries, most specifically for choosing new games to play...
Just choose a tag on a game page, refine it as needed (e.g. Hidden object + Match-3), this gives you a list of games with these two tags combined. So that's a good thing to find games, but it was already there. Now, click sort by rating to see the best of the bunch.

Here's the new one. Now you can now select the Show Owned games option in the Premium menu at the top of the list. This will show you the best of the bunch in your library so you can easily find something to play. Alternatively, if you're looking for a game to BUY or trade for, you can instead choose Show Unowned games, of course.

Either way, I've wanted to add this option for myself for a long time, and now it's there. Enjoy it :)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on February 4th, 2021, 03:54 PM
Fixed a bug in the new sorting feature, where owned/unowned games were only showed correctly if you selected a secondary tag or main sorting option first. Sorry about that, should have double-checked.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on February 4th, 2021, 04:08 PM
Note that since Lestrade's is now 95% a game library handling tool, rather than strictly a game trading tool, I'm open to suggestions on things to sort your library (or non-library) with. I don't know if other websites have ways for you to find some specific games by some very specific data (e.g. card numbers or whatever), but if you can't find any, maybe it's just a matter of minutes for me to add an option to the site. I can't say I'll say yes to everything, but doing the feature above was really fun, and I find myself using it a lot.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on February 4th, 2021, 04:52 PM
For me it is more about how to sort my games from different stores now. The rest is doing fine :)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on February 4th, 2021, 07:15 PM
Aren't they already sorted by store in your lists..? (Not in non-user-related lists, though... okay...)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on February 5th, 2021, 06:41 PM
I couldn't find options to filter by store. Like only show items for a particular store. Another idea is to find items that are duplicates from other stores and vice-versa.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on February 5th, 2021, 08:45 PM
Finding duplicates would be more like a button to launch a process, rather than a proper filter. As for filtering by store I don't know, do you have any use cases for that?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on February 7th, 2021, 06:10 PM
It is more to due to find duplicates and compare what games I have on each store. I mostly use GOG and Steam. But since Epic Games has been offering games, which I have been collecting :eheh: I might want to avoid purchasing them elsewhere. It would help to know that.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on February 11th, 2021, 02:20 PM
Actually that's why the bundle page now lists given away Epic games alongside the Steam version, so you can see if you have it wishlisted, in which case you can choose to edit your Steam version to either say 'x0' or 'no offers' (meaning you don't want it offered to you, obviously), or simply remove it from your wishlist.

I'm not sure it works outside of the main bundle page, tho'.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on February 11th, 2021, 03:31 PM
New: game pages for titles you own will now indicate the date the game was added to your library, under the "Release date" entry.
It's also indicated as a tooltip on the "In library" button.
I figured I might as well show this information, since it's also been recorded.

Note that it only records when the title was added to your Lestrade's library, so there are two limitations:
- The added date will be the same as your Lestrade's signup date if you already had a full library before.
- If you remove a game manually from your library, and then re-add it, the added date will also be updated.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 8th, 2021, 11:20 AM
Tag pages will now allow you to filter entries out by whether you own them (or don't), and have played them (or not).
This will make it even easier to sort through tags where there are many games and you've already played most of the games you own in that category.
As a remind, you can also restrict a tag page by multiple tags, and ignore games from specified tags.

(That feature is probably the one I use the most on my own site, lol, so I spend a lot of time trying to think of ways to find new games I want to play...)
(Maybe coming next: filter in/out by keywords in the game's description!)
(Maybe coming next: free hugs!)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Pika! Pika! on March 8th, 2021, 09:56 PM
Quote from [Lestrades.com]Nao 尚 on March 8th, 2021, 11:20 AM
Tag pages will now allow you to filter entries out by whether you own them (or don't), and have played them (or not).
This will make it even easier to sort through tags where there are many games and you've already played most of the games you own in that category.
As a remind, you can also restrict a tag page by multiple tags, and ignore games from specified tags.

(That feature is probably the one I use the most on my own site, lol, so I spend a lot of time trying to think of ways to find new games I want to play...)
(Maybe coming next: filter in/out by keywords in the game's description!)
(Maybe coming next: free hugs!)
Hi Nao, I was thinking....is it not possible if you would develop these new ways of sorting games for Steam? Steam could really use something like what you have and you can perhaps earn good money with it as well. It is quite pathethic of Steam that it still does not have that (along side no way of removing games they have banned from one's wishlist). It was just an idea......of course if that were to happen it would make your website less important, but at the same time your work would then permanently be part of Steam itself.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 11th, 2021, 07:03 PM
You mean, as a Chrome extension..?
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Pika! Pika! on March 11th, 2021, 11:51 PM
Quote from [Lestrades.com]Nao 尚 on March 11th, 2021, 07:03 PM
You mean, as a Chrome extension..?
I thought perhaps in a way integrated into Steam itself. Admittedly I have no expertise in this area, so I might just be saying something that makes no sense. Nevertheless your work potentially has value to Steam (and its competitors) and thus I could possibly see reason for them to hire you to help them make that possible. Of course that is not absolutely certain and it also would depend on yourself. Maybe you are more than fine where you currently are. I just thought that considering how much time you put into it, you might find it pleasing if your work could be integrated into Steam itself and be properly compensated for it as well. I do not know if Steam management and shareholders are smart enough to see that, but if I was a Steam shareholder I would want to see your library sorting and game selection / search features integrated into Steam itself.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 12th, 2021, 09:08 AM
I would have to be a Valve employee to be able to do that.
Their web client interface sucks and has always sucked. They have limited interest in it indeed. Lestrade's is sort of my way of putting as much interesting steam data into a nice interface indeed. (I'm working privately on rebuilding the filter and sorting systems to be applicable to all pages and all areas of the site, but it's extremely complicated.)
Sadly, even with Chrome extensions, such as Enhanced Steam, it's still not quite easy to navigate their site with a browser. The client is even worse...
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on March 14th, 2021, 03:15 AM
Quote from [Lestrades.com]Nao 尚 on March 12th, 2021, 09:08 AM
I would have to be a Valve employee to be able to do that.
Their web client interface sucks and has always sucked. They have limited interest in it indeed. Lestrade's is sort of my way of putting as much interesting steam data into a nice interface indeed. (I'm working privately on rebuilding the filter and sorting systems to be applicable to all pages and all areas of the site, but it's extremely complicated.)
Sadly, even with Chrome extensions, such as Enhanced Steam, it's still not quite easy to navigate their site with a browser. The client is even worse...
Completely agree. If it wasn't for Augmented Steam (the most recent fork), I could not even imagine going back to using 'normal' steam. The interface is outdated and difficult to navigate. Even with the extension, there are many limitations. Steam has the most content of any gaming platform, but the worst way of organising it >:(

In regards to the site, it could be easily used by anyone to help organise their libraries/etc, because that's what I do. The problem is folks might not be aware of its capabilities besides trading, due to the name.
Not sure if Nao would like that, but perhaps let users register without a steam account. It could then be integrated to other platforms, so that it becomes more than a steam thingie!
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: /u/humpaaa on March 22nd, 2021, 02:07 AM
Quote from [Lestrades.com]Nao 尚 on March 8th, 2021, 11:20 AM
(Maybe coming next: free hugs!)
<3
Quote from Pika! Pika! on March 11th, 2021, 11:51 PM
I thought perhaps in a way integrated into Steam itself.
It's a long shot, but Valve is hiring in really mysterios ways.
Can't hurt to write a pitch and mail it in, who knows what happens next.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on March 25th, 2021, 12:17 PM
@humpaaa, you're assuming I'd like to be hired by anyone. While I'm open to offers I might receive, I never do job searches myself. I'm fine as I am.
Quote from Akylen on March 14th, 2021, 03:15 AM
Completely agree. If it wasn't for Augmented Steam (the most recent fork), I could not even imagine going back to using 'normal' steam. The interface is outdated and difficult to navigate. Even with the extension, there are many limitations. Steam has the most content of any gaming platform, but the worst way of organising it >:(
Well, assuming you don't take ex-Uplay, Epic and GOG into account... ;)
Interestingly, GOG used to be really great, but the 2.0 version is horrible to me. I loved the idea, but somehow they thought it would be a good idea to trade off their nice design & speed for a client that's inferior to Steam itself, just so we could have all of our games in one interface. Well, okay. Maybe I should work for GOG, not Valve... (Heck, I'd be more interested in that; I mean, TW3 is still my favorite AAA game.)
Quote from Akylen on March 14th, 2021, 03:15 AM
In regards to the site, it could be easily used by anyone to help organise their libraries/etc, because that's what I do. The problem is folks might not be aware of its capabilities besides trading, due to the name.
The name's a play on Trading, yes, but since the very beginning I went for a generic name that implied being in a gentlemen's club (Lestrade's, with the mustache), rather than a trading website (Let's trade).
I try to live up to this idea of a comfy place where you can do whatever you like as long as it remains 'gentlemany'.
Quote from Akylen on March 14th, 2021, 03:15 AM
Not sure if Nao would like that, but perhaps let users register without a steam account. It could then be integrated to other platforms, so that it becomes more than a steam thingie!
Well, I don't know:
1- Most serious players who need to sort through their game library already have a Steam library.
2- Steam login allows me to do other things that take advantage of your Steam profile data. Such as determining whether you're a seasoned player or not. It also allows me to avoid having to deal with spammers.
3- It's very, very easy to log in, due to (1).
For instance, I'm doing some prospective development work using an obscure language, and their documentation is using a comment system that's not based on Diskus or Facebook, but rather on Github issues. Why use that? I don't know, it's not worse than anything (also, you may take the comment system out and still keep the comments available, or write your own plugin, etc.) but more importantly, most of this language's users already have a Github account, so it makes sense to ask them to log in through that.

So, it's unlikely I'll go back to being able to open a new account. Seriously, spammers are the worst.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on March 25th, 2021, 02:08 PM
Quote from [Lestrades.com]Nao 尚 on March 25th, 2021, 12:17 PM
Well, assuming you don't take ex-Uplay, Epic and GOG into account... ;)
Interestingly, GOG used to be really great, but the 2.0 version is horrible to me. I loved the idea, but somehow they thought it would be a good idea to trade off their nice design & speed for a client that's inferior to Steam itself, just so we could have all of our games in one interface. Well, okay. Maybe I should work for GOG, not Valve... (Heck, I'd be more interested in that; I mean, TW3 is still my favorite AAA game.)
The GOG website store is very appealing to me. Sure it is missing a lot of features that steam has: developer updates, mod support, gamepad integration, community hub, comments on comments, achievements, all the other community stuff (i.e. inventory, trades, emoticons, etc), but overall I much prefer it for its simplicity and speed, when it comes to buy games and manage my library. I like the theme, and just wish they would make a cyberpunk 2077 one.
On the other hand, the community stuff is a disaster. It sits on super old technology, missing all the modern features and capabilities. It is no match for steam. Which is exactly the reason why steam is king, because they invested a lot in the community.
CD Projekt Red might not the biggest of gaming companies, but they are not small either. By now, they have the budget to pay to develop their platforms to the modern age. As I said the community stuff is crucial to the growth of any gaming company imo.
I have not used the GOG client, so I can't comment on that.
Quote from [Lestrades.com]Nao 尚 on March 25th, 2021, 12:17 PM
In regards to the site, it could be easily used by anyone to help organise their libraries/etc, because that's what I do. The problem is folks might not be aware of its capabilities besides trading, due to the name.
The name's a play on Trading, yes, but since the very beginning I went for a generic name that implied being in a gentlemen's club (Lestrade's, with the mustache), rather than a trading website (Let's trade).
I try to live up to this idea of a comfy place where you can do whatever you like as long as it remains 'gentlemany'.
There is a certain charm with the gentlemen’s club, and I do appreciate it. But, that also hinders the idea of expanding the website, as a club is generally a closed system. I do not mind though. Small communities tend to have more collaboration and less negativity.
Quote
Well, I don't know:
1- Most serious players who need to sort through their game library already have a Steam library.
2- Steam login allows me to do other things that take advantage of your Steam profile data. Such as determining whether you're a seasoned player or not. It also allows me to avoid having to deal with spammers.
3- It's very, very easy to log in, due to (1).
For instance, I'm doing some prospective development work using an obscure language, and their documentation is using a comment system that's not based on Diskus or Facebook, but rather on Github issues. Why use that? I don't know, it's not worse than anything (also, you may take the comment system out and still keep the comments available, or write your own plugin, etc.) but more importantly, most of this language's users already have a Github account, so it makes sense to ask them to log in through that.

So, it's unlikely I'll go back to being able to open a new account. Seriously, spammers are the worst.
These are very good points that I haven’t thought about. Some websites have integration with various platforms at the same time. A simple example is humblebundle, with support for steam, battle.net, epic games, origin, etc. Would something like this be possible?
The github comments makes sense if the target audience are IT geeks, and in my case, I much prefer something like that to the other two, which are a privacy nightmare.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 2nd, 2021, 12:28 PM
Note: I (finally) fixed icons here at LT's on Firefox, at least on Windows systems.
It's not _that_ important, but it always bugged me that I could control icon colors in most browsers, but not in Firefox. Turns out they implement emojis differently.
It's still not fixed on my mobile browser, though. I'm not sure those even ship with a monochrome unicode implementation though, so it'll probably be forever, unless I replace their text icons with SVG graphics (meh).
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 21st, 2021, 01:10 PM
Ad usual, I added a feature for myself, might as well mention it... ;)
In the game search engine (at the top right of the page), you can now specify " -intro" to prevent game descriptions from being searched. Useful when the game's name is very commonly used in game intros.
Also, " +all" is used to include all database entries in the search, so you'll get all of the junk, demos and other things the engine usually doesn't even bother to look through... (That one was implemented years ago, I just didn't remember I had that.)
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: Akylen on December 22nd, 2021, 09:33 PM
Quote from [Lestrades.com]Nao 尚 on December 21st, 2021, 01:10 PM
Ad usual, I added a feature for myself, might as well mention it... ;)
In the game search engine (at the top right of the page), you can now specify " -intro" to prevent game descriptions from being searched. Useful when the game's name is very commonly used in game intros.
Also, " +all" is used to include all database entries in the search, so you'll get all of the junk, demos and other things the engine usually doesn't even bother to look through... (That one was implemented years ago, I just didn't remember I had that.)
If you have the time, you could make an advanced filter, as these are easily missed by mostly everyone.
Title: Re: What's up at Lestrade's?
Post by: [Lestrades.com] Nao 尚 on December 25th, 2021, 06:17 PM
That'd probably require writing a stand-alone search page for all of the features to be properly exposed, and I can't be arsed to do it... :-/

Merry Christmas, though ;)