Based on the comments from the previous post, there is a lot of confusion about how our new “Three Strikes” feature works – partially due to what may have been an unclear explanation, as well as a bug that didn’t correctly ignore counteroffers.  Everything is now working correctly, and we’d like to take another stab at explaining how it works.

The 3 strike system is simply a temporary black list of items on which a specific buyer must wait before sending another offer.

Think of it as a friendly reminder for buyers that send a very high amount of offers.  Instead of repeatedly making an offer a seller has already rejected multiple times, we simply limit the number of times a buyer can get an offer rejected.  You get 3 “strikes” for every 90 days for each item.  If the item is sold to another seller, your strike count resets to 0.

Buyers and sellers don’t get strikes.  Only items get strikes, and those strikes are specific to buyer/seller combinations.  Sellers can get offers from hundreds of different buyers on the same item and reject all of them.  When a specific buyer gets 3 offers rejected on the same item in the past 90 days, the buyer must wait before making another offer on that same item.  We have removed all strikes on items predating May 23rd, so everyone will have a “clean slate” going in.

While this feature is more of a tool to help make offers more effective, we still encourage our users to utilize some etiquette when communicating offers.  Some things we would ask user to consider regarding offers include:

• Think of making an offer as walking into someone’s store or up to their table and asking them to sell you a card at a discount.  How receptive would you be to your own offer?
• Keep in mind we allow offers up to 50% off asking price.  A “low-ball” offer should be seen as a starting point of negotiation, not as an insult.
• If you and another user do not reach an agreed upon price for an item, please do not be offended.  Just as in face-to-face negotiations, it happens.

We would also like to thank everyone for so actively contributing to our Blog discussions and Facebook pages.  We’re proud to have one of the friendliest user bases around, who aren’t afraid to speak their minds and tell us how we’re doing.  As the site grows and more users are frequenting these areas, we feel it is our responsibility to set up a few guidelines.

Things we cannot allow:

• Any kind of personal attacks or “callouts” on other users (regardless of prior posts, personal grievances, etc.)
• Linking to or promoting unaffiliated websites
• Profanity, slurs, and inflammatory posts
• Posting personal information (someone else’s or your own)

Posts not abiding by the guidelines we’ve set will be deleted, and anyone who repeatedly ignores them may find they are unfortunately no longer able to contribute to these pages.

Again, we would like to thank each and every one of you for making this community the amazing place it is.  We at COMC want to be proactive in our responsibilities to help keep it that way

I finally set aside some time to make improvements to the site. Here are some of the things I was able to get done this weekend.

Performance Improvements
Now that we have been getting a lot more data, there have been some noticeable slowdowns on certain parts of the site. Here are some areas where we improved performance this weekend.

• Home page average render time was about 3 seconds, now the average is 0.03 seconds
  • This 100x performance improvement was achieved by using a technique called Partial-Page Output Caching. We couldn’t use the simple output caching because we display the number of items in your shopping cart, and this always needs to be calculated.
• Search page render time was commonly 3-10 seconds, now it is almost always less than 1 second

Quantity Manufactured now displayed in the search results
You no longer need to dig into the card details page to see if a card is serial numbered. The quantity manufactured is now tacked on to the end of the description. Also, you can choose to sort the search results by the quantity manufactured.

Sort by Quantity Manufactured

More Meaningful Sorting by High Book Value
Cards that are listed in Beckett but do not have a book price are now mixed in with the rest of the cards when sorting by highest book value.

We have been getting more and more cards that have very low serial numbers and do not have a price listed in Beckett. The previous default sort order would put all of these at the top, and this kept burying the legitimately high priced cards further and further down. Now we try to weave in the un-priced cards approximately where they might be if they had a book value.

Hi there folks! Andy here.

A few days ago I changed the theme of the main website to match our branding, and now I have altered the blog to follow suit. I used the infamous WordPress theme ‘Contempt’ (thanks Vault9!) as a bedrock and modified the style to my liking.

The new blog layout has yet to run the gamut of different browser versions, so if you see any oddities, I would really appreciate it if you would let me know.

Thanks!

Andy

With 4% growth per day, it is hard to stay ahead of demand, but hopefully the new servers I just ordered today will keep us going for a while.

What we currently have:

• An entry level server that is running our mail server, web server, and sql server.

What we are adding:

• A dedicated web server with a quad core processor and the fastest SAS hard drives.
• A dedicated SQL Server with two of the fastest quad core processors and 16 GB of RAM.
• A 15 disk array to allow for maximum hard drive performance and redundancy in case of drive failure.

The servers are scheduled to arrive around August 16th. Hopefully we will have them up and running the week of August 20th.