[fadetree]

The problem (probably) is that there is no history of items. One thing you could do would be to expand the table that holds the items to have a globally unique key ( if it doesn't already ) and then instrument the rest of the code to lay down log records in a big ass log table everytime something significant happens to an item. Creation and trading events would be logged with the items UUID. That way, you could run a query to pull the creation and trading events for any item at any time.

Not sure how the duping works, but it seems like at some point the system would wind up inserting a (mostly) duplicate row into the item table...if you could figure out a signature you could make that a unique db index and have the system fail the insert. Would need to know more about the item system and the db schema to be sure.