bill
  
 
| | #1 posted November 18, 2007 at 11:27am (EDT) |
GameTZ.com Newsletter
#33
GameTZ has been around for over 10 years now!
Contents
o 10 Years of Trading
o Change to Allow Insignificant Trades
o Improving Amazon Links
o Secret Santa
o Personal Message System
o Printing Packing Slips
o Search Tips
o Avatar Notes
o GameTZ in EGM
o 10 Years of Trading
Well, it's a little hard to nail down exactly when Game Trading Zone began, but we've over the ten year mark for sure. The first trade was reported on October 21, 1997. Though, many trades had been done before there was even a way to make a record of one. If we go way back, we've even tracked down a post made to USENET about "UGTZ" (GameTZ's old name) on December 23, 1996. So, we're probably more like 11 years old, if you count that.
Anyway, we're old, really old and we've survived for a long time now. So, that makes us officially awesome. There are whole bunch of us who've been around this site for many years now. For me, and quite of few other people, it has been an important part of our day-to-day life for a long time now. We've built something significant and it's here to stay. *sniff* OK, I'm tearing up so I'm going to move on now...
o Change to Allow Insignificant Trades
I've decided to remove the long-standing rule we've had against reporting insignificant trades. From now on, we will allow people to use the trading system to report various kinds of "insignificant" trades. For example, the following are now allowed:
- virtual trades -- This means it's OK to report trades for stuff that can be exchanged on-line like coupon codes, computer files or other non-physical goods. For example, selling XBox Live subscription codes.
- low value items -- In the past, we've tried to enforce a lower limit on the value of stuff being traded. That limit was about $5. Now, there will be no lower limit.
- cash for cash trades -- What we mean here are trades in which cash-like stuff is being exchanged. For example, if you were to sell someone some of your GameTZ Subscription time, you can now use the trading system for that.
- PayPal loans (a form of the above) -- These have become fairly common and we recognize that having a trade report to keep track of these is pretty useful.
- trades made in-person -- We used to not allow people to report trades they made with a friend or people that lived nearby because nothing was mailed. Now, we're going to allow these.
- gifts - We recognize that in a community like we have, people are often gracious enough to simply send someone else an item for free. You can now use the trade system for this too.
Yes, this is a fairly controversial change. We had some heated discussion over this in the Site_Feedback forum last month. Our reason for enforcing this rule for the past few years was over concern that trades remain meaningful so that the reputation system would have a solid footing. But, over the years, seeing moderators delete many of these "insignificant" trades, it just felt wrong to be blocking these trades when in almost every case the trade was made in good faith by respectable traders.
One of the issues that kept coming up in the discussion was that we didn't all agree on what should be considered insignificant. So, ultimately I came around to the decision that we should allow
everything, and let people decide for themselves by checking someone's trade list, if they feel some of their trades shouldn't count.
Given that game and other media is being distributed in new ways and it's unclear what the future will hold, we'd like to have GameTZ's trading system be able to adapt and be as flexible as possible.
The moderators will still be monitoring trades and if we find people faking trades or making many minor trades in order to fabricate a good reputation, we will take action. So, let us know if you find someone who is doing something suspicious with their trades.
Also, it's worth mentioning that if you're one of the many people who had a trade deleted over the past few years because it was insignificant: I'm sorry, but, we can't and wont be restoring that for
you. That happened under the rules as they were, this change is from now on only.
o Improving Amazon Links
In the last couple months I've been working behind the scenes to improve the Amazon linking on the site. Hopefully, some of you have noticed this. We're trying to get more items in our database linked to amazon product pages, accurately. It's a long, tedious process to add and verify these links. So, it's going to be months before we've covered most of what we have. Then, it will be an on-going process to keep it up to date as well. For many obscure listings, we may never get time to add the linkage.
These links provide value in a few different ways. You'll see these Amazon links on your user page listing, in search results, and on your My Items page. One of the main values of these links is to provide extra info about the item in question. Amazon has a great database of product information, including images, long descriptions and mini-reviews.
For traders, it's often key to know what something is worth. So, in search results and on your My Items page, the Amazon price is shown. One of the recent improvements has been better, more accurate prices that are more up-to-date. If you look fast, you may notice the prices sometimes change after the page loads, on-the-fly! That's because the site just did a quick look-up of the price to update it. Market prices change all the time, so this should give us more accuracy.
Of course, the Amazon links are also hooked up to give GameTZ an affiliate commission for products that are purchased from Amazon. So, you may find there are times that it's just easier to buy the game or other item you want directly from Amazon. When you do this, GameTZ makes a small amount of money. So, feel good about that, you're helping the site.
o Secret Santa
Once again, CygnusTM has popped his head up to run the GameTZ Secret Santa. If you've been around GameTZ a while, you'll be familiar with this. CygnusTM has run GameTZ's Secret Santa a number of times in the past with great success.
If you're not familiar with the idea, it's just a fun way for people on the site to exchange small gifts. The sign up information can be found in this forum topic:
http://gametz.com/forum/General/topic/282083.html
The deadline is November 29th. There are over 20 people signed up already.
As always, thank you CygnusTM for running this Secret Santa. It takes a lot of work and planning to pull this off and it's greatly appreciated.
o Personal Message System
Back in mid-August, I added a Personal Message (PM) system to GameTZ. This was an often-requested feature that I had been wanting to do for a long time now and it's nice to finally have it. It's a fairly straight-forward easy to understand feature which doesn't really need much explanation. Messages between users are grouped in to conversations, so back-and-forth discussions are easier to follow.
In these 3 months, there have been over 3,500 conversations with over 13,000 individual messages sent back and forth.
I expect to do more work on the PM system in the future, so if you have any bugs to report or features to request, let me know.
o Printing Packing Slips
Here's a feature that was added recently that you may not have noticed. On any of your trade pages, there is now a new action which allows you to see a summary page for the trade. The link is, "Print Packing Slip". Click this link and the page is shown. From there, in the top right corner is a link for "print this page".
You can use this packing slip to help you keep track of what is being sent to who (especially, if you have multiple packages going out). Also, you can include the slip in the package you send as a helpful reminder to the person receiving the package.
o Search Tips
Here's another GameTZ feature that you may not be aware of. When you search the site, either for items or in the forums, you can use some special syntax to narrow your search down and get better results. These are fairly common (Google has them as well), so you may already be familiar with how they work.
If you are looking for something that is more than one word long (e.g. a phrase), it's often best to put double quotes around it. So, for example, if you were searching the forums for posts that contained the name John Smith, you're better off searching for "John Smith". If you leave off the quotes, you'll find any post with both John and Smith in it, even if the two names are not next to each other (i.e. it would match a post that said, "John Jones, Kate Smith"). So, use double quotes if you need a more exact match.
The other trick is to use the minus sign to exclude words from your search. This is helpful if you're searching for something that is very common and generates too many results. If you know of terms you can exclude from the search, you can narrow things down. So, for example, if you're looking for a game that has the word "star" in it, but you know it's not a Star Wars game, you can search for: star -wars . You can add as many terms as you want so, you could also add -trek ('star -wars -trek') to eliminate all those pesky Star Trek games too.
Finally, you can also use quoting when using the minus syntax, so you can eliminate phrases not just words. For example: "Star Trek" -"Deep Space Nine" should give you Star Trek games while skipping ones with Deep Space Nine in the title.
o Avatar Notes
The third and final obscure feature that you many not have noticed is avatar notes. This is a subscriber-only feature since it only applies to avatars. On the Subscriber Options page, where you can upload an avatar image for the forums, there is an "Avatar Note: " text box. You can fill this in with any text, quote, caption, whatever you like. Click submit and anytime someone hovers their mouse pointer over your avatar, they will see that message. Pretty cool, huh?
o GameTZ in EGM
GameTZ was recently mentioned in Electronic Games Monthly magazine in the "Holiday 2007" issue (it says "Games Overload" on the cover). This issue will be on newsstands Tuesday. We're on page 40, where they listed and compared a number of game trading websites. GameTZ got a favorable review along with Goozex.
GameTZ has been mentioned in magazines before and each time the site got a nice boost in new users shortly after. So, this should be good publicity for us. It also means that we may get a wave of clueless noobs on the site. Please do your best to be patient with them and help show them the ropes. New members means more opportunities for us all to make trades.
Here's a scan of the page from EGM, if you want to see what it says:
http://images.kenyonhill.com/tz/egm.jpg (thanks guncrazy90x)
I'm going to run out and try to pick up a copy myself too. I gotta show this to my mom!
Thank you.
Bill Marrs
Owner Game Trading Zone |
Rules Help 
