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Possible Retromags Inventory System for 2019...


Phillyman

Retromags Inventory System Poll  

48 members have voted

  1. 1. Would you like an Retromags Inventory System?

    • Yes
      37
    • No
      3
    • Undecided
      8


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  • Retromags Curator

For a while now I have been toying around with the idea of leveraging our Magazine and Strategy Guide Databases into a full fledged inventory system. What do I mean by this? Well if you went to the record for "Nintendo Power Issue 50" you would see 3 new buttons.

  • [Own]
  • [Want]
  • [Selling]

Clicking on the OWN button would add that issue to your personal inventory, where you could note down...

  • Quantity - How many issues of this you have
  • Condition - The condition of this issue
  • Notes - This issue is in box 5, in the garage

Clicking on the WANT or SELLING buttons would add that issue to a your personal want or selling list, again listing out condition, quantity and perhaps your price point. These buttons would also (if you wan) add the record to a public list that other users could browse. So you could see everyone that is selling a copy of EGM Issue 99, or everyone who is interested in buying a copy of GamePro Issue 39.

I would hope to have it tie into your profile page, perhaps creating a grid of magazines and guides that you own, and I would also want the ability to let you guys export your inventories to CSV formats for your own safe keeping.

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1 hour ago, Ethereal Dragonz said:

I think it's an interesting idea, but I don't think it will be utilized or updated enough by members to justify the work involved. We still have the old tagging system of 'Acquired' and 'Vote to Preserve' which are like 'Own' and 'Want'. 

While I grant you your first sentence is probably true, I think there is a difference between 'Acquired' & 'Vote to Preserve,' and 'Own' & 'Want'.

As Philly laid out, "own" and "want" are a way to keep track of what you have in your collection, as well as making it possible to set up sales transactions between members (I'm dubious as to how well that would work out, but...)

"Acquired" and "vote to preserve" (in my opinion) serve no other purpose than to discourage members from becoming involved with preservation. 

When someone sees that a magazine is "acquired," they think that therefore whoever marked it as such will scan it in time.  Yet the reality is that many of the mags marked "acquired" were done so by people who are no longer active on the site.  And even if they are, the less-than-a-handfull of active scanners have so many unscanned mags in their collections that they will never actually get to them all, so there is no guarantee an "acquired" mag will ever be scanned.  Meanwhile, some newbie who might have considered scanning their copy decides it's unnecessary, because the issue has been marked "acquired."

"Vote to preserve" started out as a fun idea, allowing scanners to see what issues were most in demand, but the truth is that such knowledge has very little impact on what actually gets scanned.  But more problematically, it promotes the idea that scanning is someone else's job.  "Just click here, and someone else will scan that issue for you while you wait!"  We don't need people to be voting to preserve magazines, we need people to be preserving magazines.  And this is beside my point of why it should be done away with, but since there's never been a handy way for anyone but Phillyman to see what issues are being voted on (to my knowledge), the feature was essentially useless, anyway.

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  • Retromags Curator
17 hours ago, kitsunebi77 said:

"Acquired" and "vote to preserve" (in my opinion) serve no other purpose than to discourage members from becoming involved with preservation. 

When someone sees that a magazine is "acquired," they think that therefore whoever marked it as such will scan it in time.  Yet the reality is that many of the mags marked "acquired" were done so by people who are no longer active on the site.

I can mass reset the Acquired status if we feel as though it is stale data. Very easy to replace the "A" with an "M". I can then bring up a new field called "Who has this?" and let it be a multi member field like the "Thanks To" field is and only let Team Member see/modify this data.

On the Vote to Preserve, it was to gauge interest in what we should scan next, it costs me $60 a year to have that feature. If its not being used, we can always blow it away too.

 

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1 hour ago, Phillyman said:

I can mass reset the Acquired status if we feel as though it is stale data.

Well let me ask you, have you marked your entire inventory as acquired?  Has E-Day?  I know I sure haven't.  I just don't see the point to it, other than (as I said) to discourage anyone from possibly scanning their own copy of a mag because they've been given the impression that anything marked "acquired" is already in some sort of queue to be scanned.  As a scanner myself, if I saw something I own as marked "acquired," I would react in one of two ways:

1. "Oh thank god, someone else has it - let that poor sorry SOB scan it."

2. "Hmm...guess I won't scan that one - don't want to step on their toes if they were planning to scan it."

In other words, the "acquired" label is effectively a "do-not-scan" label.

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1 minute ago, kitsunebi77 said:

Well let me ask you, have you marked your entire inventory as acquired?  Has E-Day?  I know I sure haven't.  I just don't see the point to it, other than (as I said) to discourage anyone from possibly scanning their own copy of a mag because they've been given the impression that anything marked "acquired" is already in some sort of queue to be scanned.  As a scanner myself, if I saw something I own as marked "acquired," I would react in one of two ways:

1. "Oh thank god, someone else has it - let that poor sorry SOB scan it."

2. "Hmm...guess I won't scan that one - don't want to step on their toes if they were planning to scan it."

In other words, the "acquired" label is effectively a "do-not-scan" label.

If I knew everything I had I would fill out the Retromags store front with the duplicates, triplicates, quadruplicates and quintuplet copies I probably have of some of these magazines. I joke with E-day about having a donation drive to fly him down to my place for the weekend to help me sort and inventory all these mags. I don't even have the room to properly do it in my home with a toddler, so we would need to rent a moving truck and do it in the parking lot 🤣. My wife would then want him to take half of everything home to Canada afterwards :)

I do see your point on the Acquired field, it was more or less created to act as a "STOP! Don't Buy A Copy" to prevent users from wasting their money on a magazine that someone already owns.

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1 minute ago, Phillyman said:

If I knew everything I had I would fill out the Retromags store front with the duplicates, triplicates, quadruplicates and quintuplet copies I probably have of some of these magazines. I joke with E-day about having a donation drive to fly him down to my place for the weekend to help me sort and inventory all these mags. I don't even have the room to properly do it in my home with a toddler, so we would need to rent a moving truck and do it in the parking lot 🤣. My wife would then want him to take half of everything home to Canada afterwards :)

I do see your point on the Acquired field, it was more or less created to act as a "STOP! Don't Buy A Copy" to prevent users from wasting their money on a magazine that someone already owns.

Well again, "stop, don't buy a copy" means the same thing as "this is already queued to be scanned, so don't bother."  Let's look at your case.  You admit to having so many mags it would take an army to sort through them, so it's a safe bet that there's absolutely no way you will ever be able to scan and edit all of them in your lifetime.  So say you mark them as acquired.  A mag you own but may never actually get around to scanning will be forever unscanned, even though some other user who only has a few mags to scan (including that one) was considering contributing to the site, until the "acquired" tag turned them away.  I see what you said about making it something only team members can see, though for that I refer you to my previous comment on how I would react upon seeing something I owned marked as such.

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29 minutes ago, kitsunebi77 said:

Well again, "stop, don't buy a copy" means the same thing as "this is already queued to be scanned, so don't bother."  Let's look at your case.  You admit to having so many mags it would take an army to sort through them, so it's a safe bet that there's absolutely no way you will ever be able to scan and edit all of them in your lifetime.  So say you mark them as acquired.  A mag you own but may never actually get around to scanning will be forever unscanned, even though some other user who only has a few mags to scan (including that one) was considering contributing to the site, until the "acquired" tag turned them away.  I see what you said about making it something only team members can see, though for that I refer you to my previous comment on how I would react upon seeing something I owned marked as such.

I joke about the number of magazines I have, but honestly I probably am around 1500-2200 magazines. That sounds like a lot of magazines until you see.....

  • Having multiple copies of the same issue
  • Having copies of items already scanned
  • Having copies of items not allowed
  • Having copies of items outside our 10/15 year rule

If I had to guess, I would say I probably have about 500-700 magazines that have already been preserved. Another 500-700 magazines fall into the need to preserve category, and the remaining 500-700 magazines are newer copies of magazines or Game Informer/GameFan issues.

With that final number, scanning 600 magazines in 12-18 months is not unfeasible, scanning and editing that many is :lol:

 

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I only ever filled out Acquired for magazines I had for scanning purposes. I have a stack in the basement which I am sure I marked as acquired on the site a couple of years ago that haven't been scanned yet.

It might be a good idea to remove the option for Acquired since there is no way for members to tell who marked it as acquired and when it was marked as acquired. Missing, Scanning, Not Allowed and Preserved (with Preserved(R)) should be enough. Any member who is eager enough for a scan of a magazine that would go out an buy it hopefully would ask on the forums first if anyone had a copy for scanning.

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I would like to see "Acquired" retired as well - active scanners can probably better use their "Work in Progress" threads to hash out acquisition details.  I do like "Vote To Preserve" - I think it's a helpful gauge as to what visitors are looking for - but I'm not sure where to find the vote results page.  Could swear one existed at some point.

Loving the idea of an inventory/collection tracking system!  I've been wanting this for a good while now - I may have discussed it elsewhere in the forums, actually.  Beyond the utility of the idea, I wouldn't be surprised if the functionality attracts serious video game & computer magazine collectors who may eventually contribute to the site.

I'd like to see collection tracking take both digital and physical into account.  So something like the following:

  • Have - Physical and/or digital
  • Want - Physical and/or digital
  • Selling - Physical

Allowing a collector to flag both Have and Want for any given magazine should be a given.  This would take into account wanted condition upgrades, digital copies to supplement physical, higher-res scans, etc.

Mass Add/Remove options would be nice as well.  Perhaps by entering a range of issue numbers for any particular magazine.

Thinking about it, "Want - Digital" data could essentially replace "Vote to Preserve" if lists are public.

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11 minutes ago, RetroDefense said:

Thinking about it, "Want - Digital" data could essentially replace "Vote to Preserve" if lists are public.

This would be far better, in my opinion.  "Vote to preserve" is very misleading.  Grammatically, it explicitly states that by voting for an issue, it (or possibly whatever gets the most votes) will be preserved, which is false.  It might be the case that no one even owns the issue, or it might be the case that those who do either don't have the time or inclination to scan it.  Regardless, it suggests to whoever clicks the vote button that they have proactively taken a step towards getting that issue preserved, when really, all they've done is cast a vote saying that they want that issue to be preserved.

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13 hours ago, Ethereal Dragonz said:

Is there a way to see which magazines have the most number of votes to be preserved?

Actually no, I just logged in and realized that I forgot to renew it, so stats is turned off. :lol:

I can turn it back on for $32, but not sure its worth it at this point. Says we are averaging 2-3 votes per day. Might be time to retire this one

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On 10/2/2018 at 4:14 AM, RetroDefense said:

I would like to see "Acquired" retired as well

 

On 10/1/2018 at 11:48 PM, E-Day said:

It might be a good idea to remove the option for Acquired

 

On 9/30/2018 at 9:44 PM, kitsunebi77 said:

"Acquired" and "vote to preserve" (in my opinion) serve no other purpose than to discourage members from becoming involved with preservation. 

480 Records just got flipped from Acquired to Missing status. For anyone who is interested, this is the list.

OldAcquiredList.txt

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2 hours ago, Phillyman said:

 

 

480 Records just got flipped from Acquired to Missing status. For anyone who is interested, this is the list.

OldAcquiredList.txt

Well that file isn't viewable, but it's the thought that counts ("Try it now" reply from Phillyman in 3...2...1...).  Are we going to kill the acquired status altogether or just avoid using it?

 

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  • 1 month later...
  • 2 weeks later...

Maybe there is something I don't quite understand about this whole debate, but I have formed an opinion anyways.  Phillyman says that data collection feature costs $60/year

On 10/1/2018 at 3:29 PM, Phillyman said:

On the Vote to Preserve, it was to gauge interest in what we should scan next, it costs me $60 a year to have that feature.

and kitsunebi77 says "acquired" and "vote to preserve" have come, primarily, to discourage members from acquiring or scanning mags

On 9/30/2018 at 9:44 PM, kitsunebi77 said:

"Acquired" and "vote to preserve" (in my opinion) serve no other purpose than to discourage members from becoming involved with preservation. 

I can certainly relate to Kitsunebi77's perspective on this, as I seem to recall sometime in the past wondering if there was some way I might eventually contribute. Yet, for some reason, I was under the impression that many missing magazines were either already scanned and not uploaded, or ready for scanning, but simply not done yet.  It was probably these "acquired" and "vote to preserve" fields that gave me that impression, because something alerting me that scans were on the way seems vaguely in memory.  Any imagined contribution I might make, seemed unnecessary in light of the fact that

On 10/1/2018 at 5:46 PM, Phillyman said:

1. "Oh thank god, someone else has it - let that poor sorry SOB scan it."

2. "Hmm...guess I won't scan that one - don't want to step on their toes if they were planning to scan it."

In other words, the "acquired" label is effectively a "do-not-scan" label.

Logically, it seems that Retromags is financing a feature that potentially impedes its' ability to expand its archive. The feature may have been useful early on, but today so much is already preserved, that the popularity of a particular addition seems irrelevant.  Any addition to the archive is equal to +1, in my opinion. 

As for the "own," "want," and "selling" feature, I am going to down vote it.  Though I like the idea of an active market place for physical magazines, I have doubts that it would be active enough to be a reliable source for what one seeks.  Isn't that part of why Retromags exists in the first place?--because no such market exists, and is even practically impossible? A simple tally of what is missing from the site, such as in the *.txt file phillyman posted in this thread seems sufficient for directing new scans and uploads.

Just some thoughts. Thanks for all the dedication to the project.

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