[tkaplan]

A LETTER TO OUR MEMBERS

Last month, we provided you with an action list of items that we felt would improve the performance on beckett.com. It included changes to Organize, which is a leading contributor to slow page loads and general website issues. We would like to share our accomplishments to date, as well as what we have planned for the future.

Our Accomplishments:

1. We have altered the functionality of the Calculate button. If you have a collection which contains over 100,000 items, and you do not have a Total Access or single sport Online Price Guide (OPG) subscription, you will receive a message that your calculated value will be available the following morning at 9:00am (central time). We were able to optimize performance for Total Access and single sport Online Price Guide subscriptions, but unfortunately not for player subscriptions. That is why those with a player subscription will have this brief delay in viewing collection values.

2. We have optimized many images on the website that due to their size and/or formatting were creating slow page loads.

3. We have removed many nonessential files loading in the site that were creating performance issues.

4. We have cached frequently loaded files on the website to improve the loading time of the homepage, product landing pages, and other pages.

Tasks in Process:

1. We will remove all items from members' TRASH folders. This will take place over a two to three day period early next week. We will perform this change during off hours to minimize any impact on the website.

2. We will alter the functionality in the TRASH folder. If you have over 50,000 items in TRASH and click the EMPTY TRASH button, you will receive a message that the items will be deleted by 9:00am (central time). We are nearly done with testing, so we will implement this change soon.

3. As part of our website improvement project, we will perform a large clean-up operation. We have found that there are over 49,000,000 items in Organize that do not currently include any HAVE or WANT quantities, and that have not had any action taken on them in the past two years. This is a large number of items creating a strain on the database every day. Based upon our data, it appears these items are not actively being worked on by members and may not actually part of a collection since there are no quantities. Over a two day period beginning early Monday morning, May 27th, we will remove these items from Organize. We will perform this change during off hours to minimize any impact on the website.

4. We are in the process of rebuilding the structure of Organize in the database which would handle large data queries from our Beckett members. Because of the complicated nature of Organize, it will take around two more weeks before it can be handed over to the testing team. Once done, we will rebuild the search engine indexing and add new hardware. We can continue with this step once we have our other steps completed.

As we are improving website stability, we are also exploring new features and re-designs to make your experience on Beckett even better. You may recognize a couple of these projects. They will be available this year!

Future Projects:

1. C2C Selling
This is a long awaited addition to beckett.com. It will incorporate selling and trading between Beckett members. This new feature will be called C2C Xchange.

2. Matchmaker
Matchmaker will be a new and improved way for you to find Beckett members and Marketplace dealers so you can quickly and easily start trades or sales. The program will use your HAVES in Organize to find buyers or traders; will use your WANTS in Organize to find sellers and traders; and will place them all on this one page for easy viewing.

3. New Item Detail pages will now incorporate more links for you to take action on a card. You will be able to:
Add to Organize
Submit Data Corrections - COMING SOON
Watch This Item - COMING SOON
Share This Item
Appraise This Card through Beckett Certified Appraisal
Grade This Card through Beckett Grading Services
View BGS Registries through Beckett Graded Registry

4. New Marketplace Product Detail pages will include a more streamlined view of the card, price, Beckett value (if you have an Online Price Guide), dealer stats, and card attributes. It will also create links to related items from the Marketplace dealer, or from all dealers on the Marketplace, broken out by player, set, and team.

5. New Marketplace Homepage will offer easier links to browse and search for your favorite collectibles. Pages will stay up-to-date with:
Newly Released products
Newly Added items to the Marketplace
On Sale items
Featured items
Presell items

6. Beckett Preferred
Many of you may recall a product we offered several years ago, Beckett Preferred. It included an Online Price Guide subscription, a magazine subscription, and a Beckett Grading Services gift certificate. We are reinstating the program and making it even better. Beckett Preferred will now include:
- a one year Total Access Online Price Guide subscription;
- one year subscriptions to Beckett Baseball, Beckett Basketball, Beckett Football, and Beckett Hockey and Beckett Sports Card Monthly
- two free Beckett Certified Appraisals at the 5-day turnaround timeframe
- $100 gift certificate to Beckett Grading Services

We hope you like the changes you are seeing on beckett.com and are starting to experience better performance. We would still like to hear from you -- your comments, suggestions, recommendations -- so please feel free to drop us a line at customerservice@beckett.com, or respond to any of our Site Suggestion threads on the Beckett forums.

Thank you for collecting on Beckett!

Sincerely,
Bill Sutherland
Chief Hobby Operations Officer

[wavytiger1975]

I'm crossing my fingers.

Everything sounds good except the database purge, if the card exists it should be in the database.

[ricky williams 34]

I'm crossing my fingers.

Everything sounds good except the database purge, if the card exists it should be in the database.

I don't get that they're purging the database of cards, they're purging members/non-members Organize folders of items that haven't been modified from 0 haves and 0 wants in over two years. That should help tremendously.

[tkaplan]

That is correct. We are not purging the database, but purging records from Organize that do not appear to be part of an actively managed collection, e.g. items that have a 0 quantity for Haves and Wants, and haven't been edited/managed within the past 2 years. We hope this makes sense in regard to what we hope to accomplish with this project to improve performance.

[gabbotabbot]

What about the "SORT" issues? Once again, no mention of this long standing problem!!!!!!!

A LETTER TO OUR MEMBERS

Last month, we provided you with an action list of items that we felt would improve the performance on beckett.com. It included changes to Organize, which is a leading contributor to slow page loads and general website issues. We would like to share our accomplishments to date, as well as what we have planned for the future.

Our Accomplishments:

1. We have altered the functionality of the Calculate button. If you have a collection which contains over 100,000 items, and you do not have a Total Access or single sport Online Price Guide (OPG) subscription, you will receive a message that your calculated value will be available the following morning at 9:00am (central time). We were able to optimize performance for Total Access and single sport Online Price Guide subscriptions, but unfortunately not for player subscriptions. That is why those with a player subscription will have this brief delay in viewing collection values.

2. We have optimized many images on the website that due to their size and/or formatting were creating slow page loads.

3. We have removed many nonessential files loading in the site that were creating performance issues.

4. We have cached frequently loaded files on the website to improve the loading time of the homepage, product landing pages, and other pages.

Tasks in Process:

1. We will remove all items from members' TRASH folders. This will take place over a two to three day period early next week. We will perform this change during off hours to minimize any impact on the website.

2. We will alter the functionality in the TRASH folder. If you have over 50,000 items in TRASH and click the EMPTY TRASH button, you will receive a message that the items will be deleted by 9:00am (central time). We are nearly done with testing, so we will implement this change soon.

3. As part of our website improvement project, we will perform a large clean-up operation. We have found that there are over 49,000,000 items in Organize that do not currently include any HAVE or WANT quantities, and that have not had any action taken on them in the past two years. This is a large number of items creating a strain on the database every day. Based upon our data, it appears these items are not actively being worked on by members and may not actually part of a collection since there are no quantities. Over a two day period beginning early Monday morning, May 27th, we will remove these items from Organize. We will perform this change during off hours to minimize any impact on the website.

4. We are in the process of rebuilding the structure of Organize in the database which would handle large data queries from our Beckett members. Because of the complicated nature of Organize, it will take around two more weeks before it can be handed over to the testing team. Once done, we will rebuild the search engine indexing and add new hardware. We can continue with this step once we have our other steps completed.

As we are improving website stability, we are also exploring new features and re-designs to make your experience on Beckett even better. You may recognize a couple of these projects. They will be available this year!

Future Projects:

1. C2C Selling
This is a long awaited addition to beckett.com. It will incorporate selling and trading between Beckett members. This new feature will be called C2C Xchange.

2. Matchmaker
Matchmaker will be a new and improved way for you to find Beckett members and Marketplace dealers so you can quickly and easily start trades or sales. The program will use your HAVES in Organize to find buyers or traders; will use your WANTS in Organize to find sellers and traders; and will place them all on this one page for easy viewing.

3. New Item Detail pages will now incorporate more links for you to take action on a card. You will be able to:
Add to Organize
Submit Data Corrections - COMING SOON
Watch This Item - COMING SOON
Share This Item
Appraise This Card through Beckett Certified Appraisal
Grade This Card through Beckett Grading Services
View BGS Registries through Beckett Graded Registry

4. New Marketplace Product Detail pages will include a more streamlined view of the card, price, Beckett value (if you have an Online Price Guide), dealer stats, and card attributes. It will also create links to related items from the Marketplace dealer, or from all dealers on the Marketplace, broken out by player, set, and team.

5. New Marketplace Homepage will offer easier links to browse and search for your favorite collectibles. Pages will stay up-to-date with:
Newly Released products
Newly Added items to the Marketplace
On Sale items
Featured items
Presell items

6. Beckett Preferred
Many of you may recall a product we offered several years ago, Beckett Preferred. It included an Online Price Guide subscription, a magazine subscription, and a Beckett Grading Services gift certificate. We are reinstating the program and making it even better. Beckett Preferred will now include:
- a one year Total Access Online Price Guide subscription;
- one year subscriptions to Beckett Baseball, Beckett Basketball, Beckett Football, and Beckett Hockey and Beckett Sports Card Monthly
- two free Beckett Certified Appraisals at the 5-day turnaround timeframe
- $100 gift certificate to Beckett Grading Services

We hope you like the changes you are seeing on beckett.com and are starting to experience better performance. We would still like to hear from you -- your comments, suggestions, recommendations -- so please feel free to drop us a line at customerservice@beckett.com, or respond to any of our Site Suggestion threads on the Beckett forums.

Thank you for collecting on Beckett!

Sincerely,
Bill Sutherland
Chief Hobby Operations Officer

[wavytiger1975]

I don't get that they're purging the database of cards, they're purging members/non-members Organize folders of items that haven't been modified from 0 haves and 0 wants in over two years. That should help tremendously.

Oh ok

I would eliminate all organize items of anyone who hasn't been active in two years not just inactive items with zeros in two years. Honestly, I would go much further than that. Six months of no activity should delete your organize and make you start over if you come back (exception obviously would be someone who is paying for the service). If this is truly one of the reasons for poor performance then catering to your paying and/or active members should be priority.

---

What about the "SORT" issues? Once again, no mention of this long standing problem!!!!!!!

Could be under this one possibly, but yea sorting would be nice.

4. We are in the process of rebuilding the structure of Organize in the database which would handle large data queries from our Beckett members. Because of the complicated nature of Organize, it will take around two more weeks before it can be handed over to the testing team. Once done, we will rebuild the search engine indexing and add new hardware. We can continue with this step once we have our other steps completed.

I also dislike that some sets were renamed by Beckett to make it shorter. Like ultra instead of fleer ultra, finest instead of topps finest and absolute instead of playoff absolute or panini absolute. If we are going to do this then do this for all products that are not the base product. I want all panini products to have a panini header in the title.

[koolkellygirl]

I prefer the shorter title but hope/wish it was across the board. I prefer to type Finest, instead of topps finest, etc...JMO and the purging thing sounds great. I keep having to go back through my organize and delete the ones I USED to have, even though they state 0, they remain in my org after a trade and I hate it!

[jheringa09]

Messages: I still can't select multiple messages to delete. I have to click and select one by one still... I'm using Chrome.

[pingbling23]

i have all jordan, lebron, and kobe cards i dont have added in my org with a value of 1 in the trade for column. there are 0's in the haves and wants (dont even have the wants column anymore since its useless) column. please tell me these wont be deleted from my org.

[jacobystealshome]

Messages: I still can't select multiple messages to delete. I have to click and select one by one still... I'm using Chrome.

just go here. it's the link called "empty folders"

http://www.beckett.com/forums/private.php?action=empty