CanuckMonkey

Ok, I have come up with a workaround for my problem with the queue, but please let me know if you think it will cause major problems!

When something comes up that isn't listed in the Marketplace, I enter a value of 999,999 for it. To avoid skewing the dataset overall, though, at the end of each session of using the queue I go down my "Your Submissions" list and open each item with a value of 999,999 and remove that value from the item.

I experimented a bit, and if I remove the value immediately the item goes back into the pool of "50 items that have gone the longest without updates" so to be able to skip them entirely I have to leave a placeholder price in place until I am done entering other data. One benefit to this however is that it means that my placeholder prices don't cause the system to think that the item has been updated recently, so it will still show up in the queue for others after I am done, and will still get priority (assuming a listing does appear in the marketplace!)

I think I see the problem now. If it's looking at the 50 items that have gone the longest without being updated, but the allies get updated frequently, then they never make that top 50 list. Once I have updated all of the top 50 that have listings, I only get repeats of the 10 or so that have gone a long time without updates, but have no listings now, so I can't update them and get them out of the top 50 list.

What would be ideal is if it looked first at what I haven't updated for over 24 hours, and then grabbed the top 50 of those that have gone the longest without updates, but I assume that woud be a much uglier programming task since the top 50 list would have to be generated for each user instead of globally.

Actually, thinking again I swear the queue gave me at least one ally early on. When I did entries yesterday I did allies first, so they're all more than 24 hours ago now, so I'm not sure why I'm not getting more of them coming up in the queue now. Weird.

Just a few more thoughts on the queue:

1) I LOVE IT.

2) It doesn't seem to include any allies--can these be added?

3) After a while the items I have skipped (because there were none for sale) get annoying--they keep coming up again, sometimes twice in a row. Could this be updated to make skipped items not show up again in your personal queue for something like 15-60 minutes?

4) I really do love it. I managed to get a lot more entries done today, and was able to accomplish more other stuff while doing it (I fish and keep an eye on my own marketplace listings while checking prices.) Really great feature!

That's ok, I can run some filters to clean up bad data. Any really high or really low points generally need to go--they're going to be either typos, intentionally incorrect submissions, or outliers--case in point, my entry for the Mahogan Toboggan a little while ago, which was well over double the average price--I know that it's correct, but I'm also sure that it just represents all the reasonably priced items having sold out and nobody jumping in to fill the void yet.  For any practical purposes (for buying or selling) these outliers are useless anyway, regardless of the reason for their presence in the dataset.

I have to agree with this, especially since one of the features of Gold is being able to use a custom image (which you might not want to be partially blocked by the sash).

Thanks for the free week, it is nice being able to try out the features before making a longer-term decision!

Oh dang, I did the same type of guide--prompted by your comment on the August goals post. (I even thanked you at the end, it was a great idea!) Better to have two guides than none, though!

I went ahead and made my guide visible just in case; I'd still like to add more images and content but need to sleep now and may not be awake before the contest closes!