| Redisplay Messages: Compact | Brief | All | Full Show Messages: All | Without Replies| Author: | Teup  | | Posted: | Feb 6, 2024 13:30 | | Subject: | Re: Important proposal regarding catalog variants | | Viewed: | 71 times | | Topic: | Catalog | |
| In Catalog, Llewyn writes:
| | In Catalog, Admin_Russell writes:
| | I will post about this later at the start of a new thread, but the 11th part
of this project involving the tiles will be commenced on February 1 because it
doesn't involve sellers adding notes. We could do it today, actually, but
there are plenty of other things to do in the meantime, including making an XML
list for sellers.
|
It does affect a whole mass of other things though: integration with Studio,
importing of previously downloaded wanted lists (as BL doesn't have a backup
function), importing of parts lists for MOC instructions*, etc.
Your change impacts on the whole Lego fan ecosystem, and is incredibly ill thought
out. Not the changes themselves - I'm ambivalent about those - but your management
of it, lack of planning, non-communication of actual timescales, lack of actual
concrete timescales etc are completely incompatible with the responsibilities
of a platform on this scale.
This should have been planned with a clear notice period (minimum 30 days) to
take effect on a fixed date. That would have allowed the Studio team, Rebrickable
admins, MOC designers etc time to prepare and know when to make their own changes
live. Instead everyone else has been running round after your whim of "the
1st! no the 15th! no some unspecified point between the two!" You would also
have been able to publish a complete list of affected parts at the time the change
was announced, and shouldn't have considered setting a deadline until you'd
identified that.
If you were one of my project managers we'd have been having a disciplinary
review meeting this week. Bricklink clearly cares far less about its customers
though.
*A lot has been made of this change simplifying things for newbies, but so many
newbies' first experience of buying parts on BL is as a result of getting
a parts list for a custom build. I'm sure their experience will be greatly
improved by upload errors.
|
+1
Very well put. You've described exactly why I'm so disappointed with
Bricklink. I'm willing to bite the bullet on every change, I simply wish
they would communicate it decently and keep their *own* promises.
Also the choice to do the change slowly "so the changes will be gradually
asorbed" or something seems nonsensical to me and at best an assumption
that is not based on actual communication with impacted parties. It also feels
like a disingenuous post-hoc motivation. Because if Bricklink really was so concerned
with how fast other parties could adapt, then why announce postponing it to 15
Feb, only to suddenly start changing things 2 weeks ahead of that date, and only
casually mentioning that in a random comment that most will miss? That really
seems to contradict the claimed concerns.
We now seem to be in an unsteady state that will last for months. I am still
very much waiting for even a hint of a timeline on any of this mess, so I have
a rough idea what we're dealing with and how to anticipate. Not because I
want more fuel to raise complaints but simply because I want to find solutions.
|
 |
| Author: | Teup | | Posted: | Feb 5, 2024 19:00 | | Subject: | Re: Confirm, Stripe payment are all Cancelled | | Viewed: | 64 times | | Topic: | Technical Issues | |
| In Technical Issues, Hazborgufen writes:
| | In Technical Issues, 1001bricks writes:
I noticed something was wrong when I tried purchasing using Stripe. The page
would freeze so I'd have to close the window. When I returned to my cart,
many of the parts I had tried to order were now listed as out of stock. I wonder
if the inventory of those stores were updating for my attempted purchase, but
didn't return the items to stock when the payment failed. I kept trying,
removing the out of stock items from the shopping cart, and then other items
showed out of stock after the next failed attempt. It was really frustrating.
I ended up using PayPal for all my purchases, which did not have this issue.
|
Yes, this is a known problem: Payment fails to go through, Bricklink reserves
the items anyway, buyer is unable to try again because the items now show up
as out of stock. We've had several buyers message us about this.
Outside of Bricklink we never have problems with Stripe. The only times the payment
fails is when the buyer aborted it. So I don't know why it happens sometimes,
but it's clearly a Bricklink problem.
|
|
| Author: | Teup | | Posted: | Feb 4, 2024 11:50 | | Subject: | Re: Variants Thread - January 31 | | Viewed: | 64 times | | Topic: | Catalog | |
| In Catalog, SylvainLS writes:
| | In Catalog, Teup writes:
| | […]
Wow, thanks for the link, I missed that. Surprising, very strange reasoning IMO.
Software is not organic tissue. Nothing gets absorbed if you just do it slowly
or in small doses. Pretty sure everyone benefits from a clean full update, that
is well announced and well documented, so only 1 update has to be made and the
risk of human errors is much smaller. I'm still waiting for Russell to give
me a rough timeline so that I know what I'm going to have to be working with..
|
Even more baffling is that Studio wasn’t immediately updated. It’s BrickLink
Studio. Not a third-party software. They are in the same building!
It’s not the first time parts were re-IDed. It always takes weeks (and messages!)
to have them fixed, but then, one could imagine the Studio team isn’t always
warned (hence the need for messages). Here, the team knows (I checked), and,
anyway, that should be automatic!
The more I think about it, the more I get upset. I should stop thinking about
it….
|
Haha, good point. And the fact that the link/picture of the tile in the help
topic ABOUT this change was broken after the item number change is also telling.
I mean, that's really not a big deal and it was fixed quickly after it was
reported, but it just shows the whole process and the consequences weren't
really thought through... and doing it slowly just creates more episodes of it.
|
|
| Author: | Teup | | Posted: | Feb 4, 2024 09:43 | | Subject: | Re: Variants Thread - January 31 | | Viewed: | 53 times | | Topic: | Catalog | |
| In Catalog, SylvainLS writes:
| | In Catalog, tmtomh writes:
| | In Catalog, DaddyOs_Bricks writes:
| | Has any consideration been given to how this update and merge will affect the
traffic that is driven to bricklink when buyers are generating wanted lists from
sites such as rebrickable, either from their set inventories or MOC inventories;
or any of the design programs with the parts/ part numbers that that have been
in use prior to the changes on the 1st and future proposed changes?
When I try to use rebrickable to buy the parts that were updated on the 1st they
can no longer be found for sale on bricklink via rebrickable. I would think the
same result will happen when trying to buy the part list for a MOC that includes
affected parts.
I apologize if this has already been asked or addressed but I have not been able
to find it. The lengthy threads across multiple posts are not easy to navigate
or follow for those that do not spend time in the forums on a regular basis.
Bill
|
It appears that either:
(a) No thought has been given to this important issue you raise, or
(b) Thought was given to it and the conclusion was, “We’ll announce it and Rebrickable
and all the other sites, software apps and tools will have to figure out how
to deal with it.”
|
(c) “We never know what kind of impact this has on third parties, but will be
sending lists to our affiliates (Brickset and Rebrickable) and Brickstore just
in case. Most of the changes should be absorbed by normal processes, but our
concern here is volume. We will make the changes batch by batch, and not all
on the same day.”
— https://www.bricklink.com/message.asp?ID=1450771
|
Wow, thanks for the link, I missed that. Surprising, very strange reasoning IMO.
Software is not organic tissue. Nothing gets absorbed if you just do it slowly
or in small doses. Pretty sure everyone benefits from a clean full update, that
is well announced and well documented, so only 1 update has to be made and the
risk of human errors is much smaller. I'm still waiting for Russell to give
me a rough timeline so that I know what I'm going to have to be working with..
|
|
| Author: | Teup | | Posted: | Feb 4, 2024 09:04 | | Subject: | Re: Versturen naar bv Amerika. | | Viewed: | 48 times | | Topic: | LANG Nederlands | |
| In LANG Nederlands, LeeGo73 writes:
| | In LANG Nederlands, Teup writes:
Zijn de 50 vermelde zendingen naar buitenland alleen, of minimaal 50 naar buitenland
& NL?
|
Zoals ik het opvat, dien je per product er op jaarbasis 50 stuks van af te nemen.
Dus welk land maakt niet uit, maar dus wel 50x "buspakje untracked" buitenland.
Handigste dus, als je weinig verstuurt, om dan te settlen voor óf alleen met
tracking, óf alleen zonder tracking afnemen. (Overigens zijn ze hier volgensmij
niet heel streng op)
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