Big Changes Aplenty

A number of pretty big changes were made to the site tonight, and I wanted to specifically call a couple of them out in case they may affect you.

Extensive Javascript Updates

We've finally had the chance to update our main Javascript library and combine what had been numerous big Javascript files into fewer small ones. The benefits of this are that 1) the site will download faster when you first browse to it (if you use the site from a modem, this should be a pretty significant difference) 2) some slower javascripts (like the ones that run the booth chat) may now run faster and 3) we have a bunch of new Javascript effects and such opened up to us. The bad news is that Javascript changes are some of the riskiest and most difficult-to-test changes that we make, because they can affect every browser differently. If you find yourself getting Javascript errors or otherwise having problems where you previously had not, please clear your browser's cache before you report it as a bug; if your browser has the old Javascript files in memory, then you're likely to experience weirdnesses.

More Cart Updates

Many users have mentioned that 1) it's easy to miss the "Edit" link next to the "payment type" in the cart and 2) it's annoying to not be able to change your offer if you clicked "Buy now" but then realize you want to change your payment type. Both are now fixed. You can now change details about your offer any time until it's accepted or purchased (whichever comes first), and the edit link has been made far more prominent. Also, if a buyer clicks "Buy now" but chooses not to pay for the item, it no longer clutters up the seller's list of offers

Bonanzas Once Monthly

With more and more sellers having more and more Bonanzas, a suggestion we've often heard is that we should make Bonanzas more unique (e.g., bigger discounts, cooler items). Knowing that this would eventually be an issue, we've long intended to move to once/monthly Bonanzas as a means to combat Bonanza boredom, but the question was "when?" The answer is now. In the next week or two, we will allow you to have up to two or three Bonanzas per month, by allowing you to purchase extra Bonanzas if your heart is truly set on the getting the extra exposure and fun of more Bonanzas. For now, though, Bonanzas will be capped at one every four weeks. This doesn't affect already-scheduled Bonanzas.

eBay Importer Updates

We now import eBay Motors listings, and our HTML importer has gotten a lot smarter about importing HTML attributes with UPPER-CASED NAMES (e.g., <SPAN style="">my bold element</SPAN>). We also now strip out style, script, and object tags, rather than leaving them in to ugly-up your imported items.

Extra Web Servers Re-added

We originally tried this last Thursday and ended up crashing the site for a few hours. Whoops! The good news from the episode was that 1) it convinced the founder to set up automated updates to have his phone call him if the site was down and 2) it was only a matter of time until we worked out the issues and gave it another shot. That time has now come. Having extra web servers means that you should have less drag waiting for pages to load during peak times of the day, when our existing web servers have become pretty flooded with all the traffic.

And That's Not All

There's a slew of other medium and minor improvements that you can see from the "What's New" list. Usually, we much prefer to update things one-at-a-time so there are less things to go wrong; but sometimes having a big group of updates like this are inevitable. Our apologies for a higher-than-usual liklihood that you might find a bug or two on Wednesday. We'll clean their clocks as soon as we find them and I'd expect any temporary weirdnesses to be wiped out by Thursday.