Feature suggestion: Trade Watchlist

As much as I like the concept of the "WTB" trades that was implemented, based on my experience since then, most people tend not to use or respond to those but instead just make their WTS post as usual and save themselves the extra time.

A result that I've noticed from that is that, as someone who is currently looking for multiple rather rare items and doesn't want to miss those, I typically have anywhere from 4 to 7 tabs with different trade searches open for those items, each of which gets refreshed on a regular basis, in an attempt to see an offer for such an item early enough if one does come in. I would wager an educated guess that I'm not the only one stuck doing that.

I would also dare say that more likely than not, these individual refreshs end up creating more DB load than a combined pull would.

My idea/feature proposal is hence as follows:
Addition of a "trade watchlist" that allows us to add/remove multiple sets of search criteria to/from a list that can then be executed as a single combined search (basically fusing multiple searches into a single execution and output list). Apart from adding quite a bit of convenience, it'd likely reduce server load at least a little bit. In a perfect world, this list would actually then be integrated with the notification functionality and automatically notify you when a trade that matches your criteria is created and/or gets a new post. Though the latter, while adding even more convenience, would probably also add more load overall, rather than less (assuming folks don't currently refresh at every possible interval or something like that).

Cool concept, but building a multi threaded search watchlist with custom user configuration so that you don't have to have 7 tabs open... is a bit of an ask for me mate.

WTB listings are functioning fine - traders who choose to make WTB listings give themselves a better chance of flogging their item in a competitive end of season market if they're looking to exchange for a particular item.

Schnorki wrote: 3 years ago

it'd likely reduce server load at least a little bit.

It wouldn't. Even if it wasn't running a cron or something to 'trigger' a notification to everyone when wishlist trades are detected, the number of queries involved in a multi wish list like you described would make it a heavy consumer.

To me it sounds like you've already found a very efficient way to keep tabs on the items you're hunting for. If I had a professional full stack dev team and unlimited time, could it be streamlined more for you and others? Of course, but I don't have either of those things yet (:P).

Agreed, not the simplest of asks.

And yeah, the trigger/notification definitely wouldn't reduce load. I meant that having a manual combined search should reduce load (minimally), simply because you end up with the same search load (combining the various queries) but reduced overhead (executing them in a single call vs. n calls). Once you add in notifications and auto-triggers..then yeah, load def goes up.

I don't think I made myself clear in my first post Schnork: even if there were no notifications in your concept, it would still be a heavy consumer. Having users request the results of one huge batch of complex search queries on page load is more impactful on this website than a series of separate, more spaced out requests. That's not an argument against your concept which I think is cool, but you can't just say that you think something will reduce server load because you think it will. Joining separate queries together optimises the performance of that one query, I learned that last patch, but in this context, where that one query is processing all the custom search config the user has specified, I'm not so sure.

The server right now sits at 0-50% usage of CPU and Memory (Memory slightly less than that) even during peak times because I spent a lot of time on query optimisation and new schema last patch. Not really interested in pursuing what I think would be a rarely used feature (power users such as yourself only) when it sounds so complex to develop for very little return - even if it were made in a way that reduced server load somewhat, fine for performance atm.

Again, I'm not bashing the concept, it would be awesome if I could specify 10 different auto searches and then just get pinged when that Jeweller's

Monarch of the Whale shows up. What i'm saying is that it's far too much labour for me to justify spending my time on, especially considering the number of other flaws, bugs and requests already taking higher priority, sorry!