NightWind's Card Searcher

This is completely unacceptable. Who said you were allowed to have a life? I know that I certainly never authorised such a thing.

I need to save my life onto a memory card so that I can reload it later...

Save it onto two just in case one of them gets corrupted.

Note to self: Do not reformat self.

When I searched for the Khrimech, it came up with 17 for how many Holiday Spirit which is wrong since at the time of the post it was 0. I did two more searches and they showed 0. Im guessing its pulling up Gloopzilla's number if you use the list on the wiki as the list you search off of.

Searching for Khrimech is working fine for me right now. Given that HS has exactly 17 Gloopzillas and that Gloopzilla appears first on the list of HS cards in stock, it would make sense that it was getting Khrimech and Gloopzilla mixed up some how. But there don't seem to be any obvious correlation between Gloopzilla and Khrimech as far as I can see, so it might just be a general glitch.

(12-31-2008 10:33 AM)masamunemaniac Wrote:  This is completely unacceptable. Who said you were allowed to have a life? I know that I certainly never authorised such a thing.

This post literally gave me nightmares a few days ago.

I just tried myself and it seems it's returning 0 HS cards for Khrimech as expected. The 17 value for Gloopzilla didn't seem to turn up - though I'm curious as to why it did for that particular instance.

Zerosa - did you remember what values you entered to get the "17" bug? Maybe the wiki page was being edited at that time?

Also, the Raindeer bug seems to have fixed itself (yays!) ^^.

Just show store results and having khrimech in entry box for card name.

Then it could be that the wiki page was being edited... after all HS seems to have lots of edits per day.

hmm
i don't think thats the problem
no one has edited the wiki in hours (i was the last) and well...

ok so i just did three separate searches
all of them had monster selected as card type
all of them had the include store searcher results button checked

one of the searches had dark between 3 and 3 in mana cost
one of the searches had light between 3 and 3 in mana cost
one of the searches had grey between 3 and 3 in mana cost

the dark search showed no sellers for e-mouse
grey and light searches both show that holiday spirit has 17 copies of e-mouse

so yeah something is messed up somewhere

i just noticed that light and grey also both show HS having 17 copies of Ninja no Niji (among other cards) but again dark is showing the correct results (i think)

hope that helps

It seems this is one of the (many) problems with an ASP server... I've seen this stuff happen before with the other projects I'm working on - even those which had existing code I'm working off.

I can see the Gloopzilla bug and here's why:

Thing is, the search page "goes cold" if it isn't accessed every now and then. And when that happens, the code doesn't complete it's full run - which means you get Gloopzilla €results. The part which takes the longest to execute is where it obtains the HS feed. On slow startup it will time out, thus fooling the rest of the code to print Gloopzilla's quantity instead.

This explains why the Khrimech problem reported by Zerosa was only seen by him the first time he ran it. When I ran it, it was perhaps during a busier time, when the page was already warmed up. Same goes for Nacho's results. I saw the Gloopzilla bug when I ran it during the quiet hours, but upon refreshing the results in the next minute or so, the bug "disappeared".

If the stats from the other finance projects serve right all ASP pages should need to be accessed every 20 mins to keep them warm.

This also means that most users won't see the Gloopzilla bug because there are enough users to keep the page warm during busy hours. This will however, cause the bug to appear to the users who use the page during the quiet hours.

First workaround:
To have a javascript page on a 24/7 that constantly requests a dummy search every 20 mins to keep the page warm - But this doesn't work as I don't have access to a machine which can run a javascript page and be kept on 24/7.

Second workaround:
Refresh the page if you see the Gloopzilla bug. After refreshing, you should be then seeing the "warmed up" and thus correct results. If that still doesn't work, try running the search after a 5 min wait.

This bug should only impact the HS results and not the personal store results. If you're on low bandwidth, I'm sure you'll notice that wikipedia on first load takes about 5 times as long to even show the background image.

All, if you see the Gloopzilla bug, let me know how many refreshes and the duration it takes for the bug to disappear. Does an immeadiate refresh work? 2 refreshes? Or do you have to wait 5 mins? I'm going to do some testing of my own, but it's hard as the environment can't be isolated.

Also, tell me what you think of the workarounds above. If you are annoyed by the "Gloopzilla" bug which shows 17 for all the other cards, I can remove the HS results altogether.

Having the HS results be optional (like the store search results) would probably make more sense than removing them altogether.

But then I wouldn't object to you removing them as I never use them, I find them an annoyance

I'll code the HS checkbox this weekend.

since the whole searcher is starting to get a bit crowded might i suggest replacing either the "do not display card images" checkbox or "only return a list of card names" checkbox with the HS one?
i haven't actually used either of them much but it sounds like they do pretty much the same thing making one of them redundant

If I'm understanding it correctly, one will still display the cards cost, color, ability, pretty much everything but the card art and the other one will just display names, meaning that they both have their uses. But I could be wrong, I've never actually used them.

oh i see
hmmm
i guess the one with no card art is useful for newbies on a slow connection
most vets know everything about a card without having to look (aside from some of the more obscure and/or uncommon ones)
and i think it's more likely that vets use the card searcher then newer players

so if it came to a vote i'd vote to remove "do not display card images"

though i'll bet nightwind can fit the HS checkbox in without removing anything anyway so i'm sure it's not an issue

Things have changed a bit since these were implemented...

"Do no display card images" was to hide the card itself (i.e. "hide a getcard"), but it would still show who's selling what. It's also in a (somewhat) more neatly formatted - being arranged in a grid like fashion. Plus, it has a column on the side with the stats you searched on. Edit: Also, plus - it has the "Buy from personal stores" button.

"Only return list of card names" was supposed to be an even more stripped down version - only displaying the card names and no store searcher results. But after a while, it was decided to also include the store searcher results in the list only option, thus deeming it moot. It also loads much faster, at the expense of the user having to do a lot of scrolling.

So after quite a number of versions and feature extensions, this has now made one of the two obsolete.

(01-13-2009 03:15 AM)Bubbleman Wrote:  If I'm understanding it correctly, one will still display the cards cost, color, ability, pretty much everything but the card art and the other one will just display names, meaning that they both have their uses. But I could be wrong, I've never actually used them.

The "card image" is actually more like a getcard. Originally, it was exactly calling getcard.jsp, but was later on changed to rely on the info in the database.

(01-13-2009 03:48 AM)NOLDER Wrote:  oh i see
hmmm
i guess the one with no card art is useful for newbies on a slow connection
most vets know everything about a card without having to look (aside from some of the more obscure and/or uncommon ones)
and i think it's more likely that vets use the card searcher then newer players

so if it came to a vote i'd vote to remove "do not display card images"

though i'll bet nightwind can fit the HS checkbox in without removing anything anyway so i'm sure it's not an issue

So far we have the following votes:

Remove "Do no display card images": NOLDER
Remove "Only return list of card names": NOLDER

Voting closes on Friday.

actually after testing them both i think i'd like to switch my vote
in the past i only used the "only return list of card names" option to search big lists but never to actually buy
since you can't buy from the store with "only return list of card names" and you can buy from the store with "do not display card images" i like "do not display..." better

they're both the same really but "do not display..." does slightly more

Noted.

Heh, I'm feeling quite groggy atm, so it's no wonder I'm forgetting things. Let's just hope I don't accidentally sign things...


Remove "Do no display card images": ???
Remove "Only return list of card names": NOLDER

OH GOD NO DON'T GET RID OF "Only return list of card names".

I don't use it much for store searching (but now that I've looked at it, I kinda like it for that), but I use it all the time for pretty much anything else.