WTS Announcing P99market.com

[Chewboy]

To answer some of the other questions:

Where's the data coming from?

I wasn't sure if there would be enough demand for this sort of thing so I opted not to do the actual log uploader as trying to employ folks to use it sounds like a pain in the ass. People already use the one for ahungry and these days I don't play much p99, nor am I in the tunnel enough to use my own logs for data. The data is currently scraped from the ahungry site directly every couple of minutes so p99market is 100% reliant on ahungry not making major updates or blocking the ip of the machine doing the scraping. This is by far the largest pitfall of p99market.

That said, the auction parser that I've built is extremely robust and could easily parse the log data if I had direct access to it. I'd love to see a centralized log service that any p99 auction site could share. Maybe something that just shoves all logs into S3? just an idea.

I figured for now just scraping would be fine. The sad part about this is that while I could build a "live auction tracker" I feel as though it would be hijacking all of ahungry's work and claiming it as my own which I definitely do not want to do. Hopefully you can understand? Maybe if I got the okay from him I could implement a feature like that if he's not too mad that I'm scraping in the first place.

As far as the idea of a reportable system, I'd love to have something like that. I imagine it would require some level of manual intervention on my part as having an automated system probably isn't a safe bet. There are some definite challenges there, but I really like the idea.

I've also considered building a feature which allows a user to input a phone number and get a text the next time an item is being sold in their price range, but not sure if anyone would use that (or how much it would cost me).

Sorry for any typos, I'm mobile.