PlanetCatfish.com

Because PlanetCatfish.com is such a large website with alot of targetted traffic, why not take advantage of this and create an auction site, which could eventually rival Aquabid?

You would get alot of initial signups from the dedicated members here at PlanetCatfish, and you could easily get an auction script such as phpprobid.

I think it's something you should seriously consider, as it could also bring in a little revenue, and it may encourage more people to signup to the forums as you offer another service.

Actually, it's in the roadmap, I've just not had time to implement it with the catelog upgrade. It'll be more functionally rich than aquabid and will be integrated with the rest of the site.

Jools

Sounds great. I really think it could work, mainly because most people I have talked to say the AquaBid auction software is poor, and hard to navigate.

I've got this up and running and have started to learn about it and how it can be configured.

So, what categories do you think we should have for selling stuff?

Jools

I would suggest just mirroring the forums and then adding plants, drygoods, and perhaps a section for other undesirable fish.

I've more or less built it, however, how much of a pain would it be for everyone to register for it? I could look into shared the user information with the forum but that will take some time...

Jools

Presumably, you don't need to register unless you want to sell or bid, right? So just looking is available to everyone?

Shared users is of course a lot better...

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Mats

MatsP wrote:Presumably, you don't need to register unless you want to sell or bid, right? So just looking is available to everyone?

Shared users is of course a lot better...

Yes, but you can't watch items if you're not registered...

Jools

Jools wrote:

MatsP wrote:Presumably, you don't need to register unless you want to sell or bid, right? So just looking is available to everyone?

Shared users is of course a lot better...

Yes, but you can't watch items if you're not registered...

That would be another one that I'd expect needs to be registered, yes...

Do you have some estimation of how much work it is to use the same user-database for both? I expect another benefit of the shared user-database would be that you can move from the Forum to the Auction site without having to log in again?

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Mats

MatsP wrote:Do you have some estimation of how much work it is to use the same user-database for both? I expect another benefit of the shared user-database would be that you can move from the Forum to the Auction site without having to log in again?

There are three jobs, a one off population for the auction user table with forum users which would take about 5 hours to write and test. Then about 1-1.5 days work to change the forum registration process to register someone with the auction site too. Finally the work required to avoid dual login which I am not sure about as it will need a lot of work at least the work up to this point means credentials are shared.

Jools

OK, after some though (and a look at what other things I have to do) I'm just going to launch this and see how usage goes, so here it is...

http://www.planetcatfish.com/watermart/

It's fully operational but I have not done any integration or skinning. If it starts being used (the fees are set really low - so go use it) I will work more on that side of things.

Jools

Looks cool, Jools!

but if I wanted a Sea Car



I don't think I'd found any on The Planet

maybe Sea cats? or probably Marine catfish. (or are those the Plotosidae? thought those were called Coral catfish or Reef catfish, but I'm not 100% sure on this)

Oh, well, I made up the categories late last night... Sea ctas was meant to mean the Ariidae. The idea with the categories is they can be expanded as the volume of items grows. No point in having hundreds of empty categories.

Jools