Originally posted by skirts:

Auto-bumped trades are spam. Even ignoring the huge amounts of useless offline trades you can't filter out, online status itself isn't much help either. People idle for items or leave the PC on overnight. With manual bumps you can tell people were at the PC very recently and are still interested in the trade. When I add people from autobumps, it often takes ages for them to respond, sometimes they never do or tell me the items are out of stock or whatever.

Autobumping just sucks. That the site owners offer features that are opposed to the site's primary function just to encourage donations is frustrating.

There are a couple of problems here. First, the site is not just for people who want to immediately buy or sell something and cannot wait for that person to come online. There are plenty of people who prefer to choose the best of several offers over time and thus bumping trades gives them more time to be offered on.

This doesn't mean that there couldn't be a 'filter by online' function in search- the problem is that it's just too expensive to check the online status of every user in the search, instead the cached icons shown have to be used, meaning that there's every chance users that are not online will be picked up, and users that are online will not be picked up, each generating their own set of complaints. That said, I still like the idea of being able to filter by online state.

If It's 'slavaged', yes, otherwise, pretty much no.

First- what are MOL points?

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.

Originally posted by Potato:

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 ;)

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.

Originally posted by THE_ART_OF_KILLING:

The Servers are overloaded as simple as that.

Yeah, 3700 users at once I read before, it's mindblowing. If you imagine it as a house, the house is how large?

King of all necros

Originally posted by SheeEttin:

So is it possible to cache the list of games, items, icons, etc.? Updates aren't real-time as it is.

Yes, it should be, and I don't know if they are.

Originally posted by norby89:

Originally posted by Zemnmez's birthday is today:

One of the reasons for that is that it uses the Steamcommunity API and those servers are much slower/more loaded.

Doesn't backpack.tf use the Steamcommunity API? Haven't experienced such problems there.

For Steam Inventory and similar, the APIs are on steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com; for TF2 and other games and steam OpenID auth, the steampowered servers are used, which are much faster.

One of the reasons for that is that it uses the Steamcommunity API and those servers are much slower/more loaded.