Trade Optimization for Crafts/Eth/Superior

The current way the system works, is that you can only pull up the exact item from the database if you use the exact same term. ie:

Caster Amulet.
This will cause less than optimal searching and filtering, especially once the "list view" of trades is implemented. People tend to like more useful information in their title.

Example: 2/20 Sin Amulet vs "Caster Amulet"
Ex 1: post14935.html#p14935 - Example of common, informative title
Ex 2: trade/caster-amulet-t8761.html - Example of 'properly' titled "Caster Amulet"

Currently, the only way the filtering/sorting system properly identifies this as "crafted" is via example 2. However seeing a list full of "Caster Amulet" is not conducive to finding the item you want.

These same principles apply to trading and finding Ethereal and Superior items, as we cannot add those stats into titles; yet both would be important stats to find at a glance.
Solution 1: Checkboxes on trade creation for certain variables such as Crafted/Superior/Ethereal.
Solution 2: Smart or "Fuzzy" item look-up when typing the title. - IE You could type "15 ED eth Berserker Axe" and still be given the option to select the "

Berserker Axe" item.

#2 would help with informative titles, however not necessarily with filtering specifically for eth or sup items, which is currently only possible via searching from the search bar.
Implementing both solutions would be a best-of-both-worlds scenario imo. Better item sorting/filtering with checkboxes + more information in item titles possible when reading trades via a List View.

Hey BMAY, thanks for the detailed request.

BMAY wrote: 2 years ago

Checkboxes on trade creation for certain variables such as Crafted/Superior/Ethereal.

Would work well yeah, along with a few other 'toggle' options that people have requested for the trade market. Added to that list.

BMAY wrote: 2 years ago

Smart or "Fuzzy" item look-up when typing the title. - IE You could type "15 ED

Eth

Berserker Axe" and still be given the option to select the "

Berserker Axe" item.

Will look into this but I think the SQL for that would be really heavy with my current knowledge. I get what you mean and it would work well.

Note that when using the instant search in the marketplace, insta-searching for '

Berserker Axe' would still bring up a trade entitled '15 ED

Eth

Berserker Axe'. So long as the text is there, the filters will catch it.

But yes, implementing more submission options on trade creation would make things look a lot more standardised and allow me to control what goes onto the DB for that trade, meaning I can then add filters and better presentation for everything.

My philosophy at the start, from what people had told me, was to make creating a trade as quick as possible. Seems though that people would like some extra bells and whistles now though, and I'm inclined to agree that it'd not affect the speed of creating a trade too much.

@Teebling Once you have enough data to make a decent list, you could probably get pretty far with just a removing common "additions" to the item names. Do a regex replace with an empty string for those terms and make the query an OR condition using the original and reduced version.

Also MySQL has a built in "soundex" function (https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en ... on_soundex) that might be useful to handle minor misspellings. Might be worth seeing what kind of performance hit it'll create. Soundex also has the added benefit of ignoring non alphabetic characters when it tries to match. "+2

Arkaine's Valor" will result in a perfect match with just "

Arkaine's Valor"

I'd suggest to add checkboxes optional for "added details" so the adding a trade function remains quick. (

Eth checkbox, Quantity for like pgems...).

People who wants a create a detailed trade would also be able to.