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agamoto Posts: 45
7/14/2021
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I’ve been busy over the past several months cataloging and grading my entire collection. With nearly 30,000 comics in the PC, it’s been quite a journey but I’m finally within sight of the end with only a couple thousand more comics to go. I, and especially my wife, couldn’t be more thrilled to finally be done so I can get them sold off and out of the house!!!
These are the things I wish this site could do for me. I should preface this by saying I used primarily a chrome browser on both a chrome book device and an iPad Pro 12.1". Rarely was a PC used to do search and entry. the #1 method of adding books for me was to search for the indicia title and then drilling down into the correct series from all the results listed, which then usually shows each issue for that series in its own row in chronological order defaulted to 100 issues or results per page. I would only specify an issue number if I was processing boxes with many multiple series… (a very lengthy nightmare I might add).
1. An undo button… I cannot count the number of times I accidentally added the newsstand variant of a book instead of the direct market copy. Easy to do when working on the web version with an iPad. It’s obvious when it happens as I can see the ‘owned issues’ value change below the issue when I add it. Correcting this involves opening that issue in another tab, going to my issues and then editing or deleting the record in place. Having an undo button on the page somewhere would cancel the last action.
2. Floating "your toolbar"… the default search results for a page of issues is 100 items. Because the toolbar does not float on the side of the page as you scroll, you have to find your item in the search results, then scroll all the way to the top to ensure the grade and working box # is what it should be, then you have to scroll all the way down to the book in your search results to hit the add button. Yes, I could always drill down to the issue itself, and avoid this, but in my case I would often have multiple copies of an issue, with multiple grades and multiple variants. It is much easier to keep all of those variant results on the page at once, adding them as you go, but if the grade changes you are screwed because you have to scroll up to the top every damn time. Floating tool bar solves this.
3. Remember the box I’m working on… This one drove me insane. If I looked up a new series or issue, which would commonly occur when inventorying boxes with mixed series, the box I was entering items into would switch back to ‘unorganized’. With over 200+ boxes at last count, having to manually click the down arrow and scroll down through 200 rows to get to the box I was working on every time I looked up an issue from a different series was/is a colossal PITA. It should almost be a separate section of the toolbar, some sort of floating visual indicator that you are working with box # (whatever) and remember that box no matter what I search or do on the site.
4. Ability to change the default grade… for starters, 9.4 is probably an unrealistic average grade for anyone’s collection and I disagree on it being the default. 9.0 VF/NM is much more realistic. Just like with the working box problem described above, the grade of the book would have to be reset every damn time a new series was searched.
5. When adding a run, allow me to specify newsstand or direct… You do accommodate for variants, but all I want is my run set to either direct or newsstand. It seems this gets chosen for you based on some unseen arbitrary flag. The result of this problem is that I have probably hundreds, if not thousands of books that were mistakenly entered as newsstand copies instead of direct, or vice versa. Which leads me to another suggestion.
6. Bulk edit… When I look at a list of books in my collection, I want to be able to select the books I wish to edit and then perform a bulk edit on just those books using the tool bar. Let me change the grade, the qty, raw/graded status and signature info, and the box number.
7. Fixing quantity entry mistakes… I have a number of books with quantities of 30, 40, 50 or more. Many times I would enter a book at this quantity and then mistakenly enter the next book, but the quantity would still be set to the previous value. Imagine what happens when I just legitimately entered 50 copies of x-men 281, and then when I click the ‘add’ button three times for my three copies of x-men 282, I suddenly have 150 copies of that issue. The REAL headache is fixing this problem. There seems to be no method to undo last action and no way I can tell to bulk edit quantity, leaving me forced to delete the books, one by one, having to confirm deletion each time. God almighty.
8. Sort search results by date… when I search for something using a partial term and issue like Spider-man #2, I get presented with hundreds of results. They seem to be presented in alphabetical order, but it would make more sense to display them in chronological order of published date or give me the option to display chronologically. I cheat past this on results with less than 100 rows by simply searching for the year of publication using the browsers find on page feature, but the trick does not work when there are more than a few hundred results. I can’t count the number of times I had to scan through dozens and dozens of results rows to find the book I’m looking for when
9. Sort search by most common… I see this problem a lot at many sites. 95% of the time, when someone searches for a particular book like Spider-man whatever, the first results should be the most common titles, or at least that should be an option. Amazing spider-man volume 1 always comes to the top followed by his other most popular titles in their order of popularity. Would make searching for stuff much easier.
10. CSV output… while I understand why you do your exporting the way you do, the CSV output provided requires a PhD in excel in order to strip out/parse the most salient data on my books so that I can plug that data into other tools I use to track values, sales, etc. it would be far better to have a simplified, single-row entry for each book so that I can easily export AND import the required information I need. The ability to export a master list of ALL books, ALL publishers, Graded or Raw, Signed or not, all in one CSV, each entry on a single row, with mappable fields. You know, standard faire. This leads to 11.
11. This would be one of those holy grail thing and it’s something I do with the raw data that cpg poops out now, but it’s a huge ass pain. I.’d want a method to analyze my comic list in relation to a trending sales list from a site like gocollect or gpa. I set a threshold value, we will say $200, and the feature tells me all the books that are non the way up and which I should yank out and submit.
Just my 10 cents. There’s other suggestions, but those were the big ones.
Thanks!
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