Originally posted by Zemnmez:

Originally posted by Potato:

The icons loading in afterwards are just an additional inconvenience, because you may not be able to select the game you're looking for, because the icon hasn't loaded yet, so you don't know which icon to click.

You can hover over the icons for tooltips.

Not trying to be rude here, but this is getting crazy.... I feel like you're going to keep suggesting increasingly convoluted workarounds for every issue that anyone mentions

If we're willing to spend this much effort working around the bugs and usability issues, then it's usually quicker to completely avoid TF2OP's built in search.

For example, go to Google and type "site:tf2outpost.com "left 4 dead 2" inurl:search" to try to find an old search that you can re-use, or maybe use Google to search for an existing trade in which you can click on the icon and start the search from there, without using the search interface.

Originally posted by SheeEttin:

So the biggest contributor is the JS?

I think Chrome has JS profiling tools, I'll play around with that a bit.

That's my guess, but I could be wrong

By the way, you'll notice that if you leave the search page open with 'Steam Inventory' selected in the dropdown menu, it appears to download about 65MB of thumbnail/icon images from the Steam content server... eventually.

Yes, they do read the forums. No idea if they're reading this, though.

Originally posted by Zemnmez:

Many people complain about the icons taking a while to load, but it's not a huge issue, because the images load asynchronously- you can start searching as soon as "loading something interesting" has closed, while the images are still loading.

It's nice that they load asynchronously, but that's essential really, because it takes several minutes to download all 65MB of thumbnail icons. But anyway, it's the delay while "loading something interesting" is displayed that is really the main problem for most people, I think.

The icons loading in afterwards are just an additional inconvenience, because you may not be able to select the game you're looking for, because the icon hasn't loaded yet, so you don't know which icon to click.

There are 2 separate issues being discussed here

The backpack view could be slowed down by delays waiting for the Steam APIs to return the data, but this problem should not have any effect on searching for trades. When you set up a search, you're seeing a list of every item that exists for the app that you have selected (like TF2 or Steam), so there's no need to load anyone's inventory.

(There is an API call to get the encoded URLs for thumbnails, etc, but I assume these are cached, or TF2OP would use up its API call quota too fast)

My impression is that the delays in the search interface are a combination of the search interface script running inside your browser being quite resource-intensive, and the need to fetch a really huge set of thumbnails from the steam content server (or check that they're unchanged, anyway). The delays are all in the interface, the search itself is usually really quick. There doesn't seem to be a problem with TF2OP's server.

Maybe if the search interface was faster, we would then start to see problems with the search itself getting slower to return results, because people could search more frequently and stress TF2OP's server more ;)

In Firefox, the search is not only slow, but also locks up my browser until it's done loading the updated icon set. The delay is about 10-20 seconds before it will respond to input again.

I do a lot of searches, so I often use a different browser for TF2OP Steam Inventory searches, and copy the search results URL back into my main browser. So I can do something else while I wait for it.

I'd be happy with some kind of advanced search mode without the nice icons, if that could be faster.

Slowing down the auto-updating of the icons as the user types would also be an improvement, because at the moment, if I type too slow or mistype, it pauses for 15+ seconds to update the list again. I got into the habit of copy pasting the search text, to avoid this, but it doesn't strip leading/trailing spaces on the clientside, so it's easy to screw this up as well.

The search still works fairly well for the other apps, but the list of Steam items is now so long that it's making the search hard to use.

Thanks to Pretendeer and Sneeza for listening to their users

I think TF2OP is literally the only major trading site to throw its weight behind Paypal like this and ban Bitcoin, WebMoney, Amazon, wire transfer, and other payment methods.

All the other popular trading sites allow users to choose whatever payment method they like. It seems that if a site allows any method of real world cash trade, then it allows all of them.

Has there been some kind of major scam using Bitcoins to steal money from traders on TF2OP that we haven't heard about yet? Is that why the rules have been so unexpectedly changed?

Obviously, PayPal has been used to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from traders, and it is still being used to scam people every day, unfortunately. Paypal even charges additional fees to the victims of chargebacks. But there have been zero confirmed cases of bitcoins being used to scam someone in SteamRep reports I've seen (though it is possible, of course).

I know some of the SteamRep admins use Bitcoin, so it's not a problem with them not understanding it, either.

Maybe you forgot to choose 'Strange' quality when you were searching? I guess that should be automatic, but it isn't.

I have to assume that allowing Paypal, but not allowing Bitcoin or Webmoney, is some kind of mistake that will be noticed and fixed soon. Traders are losing thousands of dollars a month from Paypal chargeback fraud.

SteamRep is getting about 300 reports of Paypal fraud every month - and this is supposed to be the safe payment method? I had enough of it and stopped accepting Paypal last year.

Worldwide, the total losses from chargebacks are over $2 billion now. This system is broken, the fees are ridiculous, and merchants are sick of it, that's why more and more of them want to use Bitcoin (and other saner payment methods).

Even Humble Bundle accepts Bitcoin payments now...

Here are some more sites to add to the whitelist. There are also a lot of other forums and image hosting sites that probably should be added

http://teamfortress.com
http://dota2.com
http://wiki.teamfortress.com
http://sourceop.com
http://tf2finance.com
http://trade.tf
http://optf2.com
http://cdr.thebronasium.com
http://dispenser.tf
http://marketplace.tf
https://paypal.com
https://mtgox.com
http://reddit.com
http://minus.com
http://steamgames.com


I'm curious to see if tf2tp and bazaar will get whitelisted :)

Originally posted by Bambuk:

Level search should find only full matching levels, but now if you enter "1", in result page items with levels 10,11, 21 and etc will be highlighted too.

Good news. This bug has just been fixed, as well as the problem I mentioned about getting lots of non-matching items included in the search results.