New Listing Automatically on Crawl?

[Paladin]

I listed a couple of items this morning and they have not appeared on the crawl. Is there some sort of time delay or maybe a waiting period for a new listing to appear on the crawl?

Ray

[Bryan]

Hi Ray,

I've recently made a few changed to the way the crawler accesses content & how it loads.

It used to display the 10 most recent additions to the store. This often caused one seller's items to take over the entire real estate, so I rewrote the program to pull a maximum of two consecutive items per seller. In theory it is supposed to work like this...

If you were to list 10 new knives, only the last two would display on the crawler. If I subsequently listed ten knives, my last two & your last two would display... Then if Dale were to come along & list 10 knives, his last two, my last two & your last two would display. This would continue until 10 items were displayed from 5 or more different sellers.

The problem is that I also changed the way the content gets loaded. I have it set up as a cached file that periodically updates. It appears some browsers are caching the file client side; despite my efforts to tell them not to...

By this, I mean that some browsers are not reloading the new content when available. They are showing an older version stored on local memory.

All this results in different crawler displays. It may be older crawler version in chrome, new version in Firefox, etc...

Good news is that I do think I have the solution to fix it & should have that done here very shortly.

Hopefully this makes sense.

Best,
Bryan

[orvet]

I kind of, sort of, think I understand a little bit… No not really!

Question #1 –
If I list two knives early in the morning, then it should load two knives to the scrollbar, correct?
If Ray lists ten knives about 10 AM, than the last two of his knife should load, correct?
If Phil comes along at noon and lists five knives, the last two of his knives load, if I am following you.
If muskrat man loads three knives at 3 PM, the last two of his load onto the scrollbar.
We are now at a total of eight newly added knives for the day, plus two knives from the day before, for a total of 10 knives.

Now, at 5 o’clock in the afternoon I add one more knife.
Does that bump one of the knives from the previous day or does that bump one of the knives I have added today?


Question #2 –
I just clicked on an image on the scrollbar, it appeared to be some sort of switchblade with a bolster release. The picture was small I couldn’t really tell, but when I clicked on the picture it said: “The Page You Requested Cannot Be Found.”
Does that mean the knife has already sold or the storeowner has pulled it from the store?


The old method may have been a little annoying, especially when someone listed 10 knives of the same pattern, and the only difference between them were the stag handles and the serial number on the bolsters. But, as soon as other store owners started listing new knives, the numbered stag knives were slowly pushed off of the scrollbar.

At least every new knife got to spend a few minutes or a few days on the scrollbar and I knew that they were seen. I listed a beautiful custom a couple of days ago that didn’t show up on the bar, actually that’s not true it was on for about five minutes and then it disappeared. I really wanted to see it on the bar, to A) see how it looked, and B) so that my potential customers could see it.
Instead a couple of other knives I had listed stayed on the bar for three or four days.

If I want to make sure that the knives I list end up on the scrollbar, then the maximum I can list is two per day, is that correct?

I may have to change the way I list my knives, instead of listing several on one day I may have to space them out and list two per day to make sure they appear on the scrollbar.
Am I understanding this correctly?


Thanks Bryan for trying to explain this!
Explaining how the site works so a bunch of old guys who can remember when they saw their very first computer, (and I don't mean a desktop), to understand how the program works, may be your most difficult challenge!

[Bryan]

If I list two knives early in the morning, then it should load two knives to the scrollbar, correct?
If Ray lists ten knives about 10 AM, than the last two of his knife should load, correct?
If Phil comes along at noon and lists five knives, the last two of his knives load, if I am following you.
If muskrat man loads three knives at 3 PM, the last two of his load onto the scrollbar.
We are now at a total of eight newly added knives for the day, plus two knives from the day before, for a total of 10 knives.

As of right now, the above is all correct...

Now, at 5 o’clock in the afternoon I add one more knife.
Does that bump one of the knives from the previous day or does that bump one of the knives I have added today?

As of right now, It will bump a knife listed the previous day & you would actually have 3 items on the crawl ... I will probably be changing this to bump one of your earlier listings to keep with the max 2 plan... This is not the most efficient algorithm at the moment, but I'll work on it more as I get time.

At some point, I intend to prioritize featured items above non-featured items so that instead of each seller's last two, the scroll will pick up last two "featured items" when available. That should enable everyone to pick & choose what appears on the scroll. If no featured item is available for any given seller, It will be their last two...

[Bryan]

I just clicked on an image on the scrollbar, it appeared to be some sort of switchblade with a bolster release. The picture was small I couldn’t really tell, but when I clicked on the picture it said: “The Page You Requested Cannot Be Found.”
Does that mean the knife has already sold or the storeowner has pulled it from the store?

This occurred because the item was sold & taken out of inventory. The update script will remove those from the scroll automatically within 1 minute of sale occurrence when I get everything set...

[Bryan]

If I want to make sure that the knives I list end up on the scrollbar, then the maximum I can list is two per day, is that correct?

I guess this kind of depends on what other sellers are doing. If, for example; ... say you are the only one listing knives going forward, you will always have a max of 2 items on the scroll no matter what day...

If, on the other extreme; 10 sellers list new items 2 minutes after you, your items will no longer be on the crawler in only 2 minutes time. You adding more at any given time after the 10 sellers list their items will place up to two of your items back on the scroll.

[Bryan]

Just to clarify intent; the idea behind the change is to prevent the following situation ...

A regular seller lists a dozen or so knives. All show up on the crawler & life is good for him/her. A minute later, another regular seller lists a dozen knives or so & suddenly the first seller is not so happy anymore as they now suddenly have no knives on the crawler.

[orvet]

Thanks for the explanation Bryan.
I just wanted to understand how the process works so that when I get an item that I really want on the crawl I will know how to get it on there.
I think the crawl is an excellent sales tool and they want to be able to maximize the exposure of certain knives.

Thanks again for taking the time to explain this to us.

[orvet]

I thought I understood how the crawler worked, but I’m not sure I do.
Does every item I put in my store and upon the crawler? I thought if I clicked do not feature or offer sales discounts on this product when I listed the new item then it would not appear on the crawler.
Is that the way it is supposed works, or does every item and upon the crawler whether you want it there or not?

[Bryan]

Does every item I put in my store and upon the crawler? I thought if I clicked do not feature or offer sales discounts on this product when I listed the new item then it would not appear on the crawler...

Hi Dale,

Right now, every item is "equally eligible" for crawler space. It currently makes no difference if the item is featured/discounted or isn't.

At some point, I do plan to prioritize featured items over non-featured items so that everyone has more control over which of their items shows up, but haven't had a chance to get that done yet.