Site Forum

I just spent the last hour clicking 845 Frank Thomas cards individually to my want list because I have the audacity to be a 2 team collector and several players collector. With these companies releasing so many cards this stupid threshold of 150K is just too low.  If it was a matter of site integrity than I shouldn't be able to add them one at a time once I reach the 150K. I've put in a new feature to raise the number which went ignored. I really am frustrated with this.  Every start of a season sees several 100 new Blackhawk cards with the 50 or so different sets and I've got to click away one at a time. 

I'm not a database guy, but the 150K may not be an artificial limit. This 150K may be because of the limitations of the database technology itself in being able to mass add. Just a thought, like I said, not a DB guy.

But yes, when a 2023 draftee can already have more cards than many HOFs then everything has gone completely insane.

Part of the reason I am stuck in the 80's. I'm not really stuck there but I still prefer to collect early 80's cards.

From what I understand, you can only add 150K at a time, but you can have an infinite number of wants.

I never understood why users want to add so many "wants" that they'll never end up getting. Why not just add the ones you have a shot of potentially collecting at some point?

I agree that it is annoying for those of us with a broad range of PC teams and players. When I re-did my wantlist a few weeks ago, I added all to wantlist with smaller totals first....players, Celtics, Bruins, colleges. Then I took off SN25 and under. Then I added all Red Sox cards. Now when there are new sets I have to add one by one. 

I did consider that maybe the system can only add 150k at once, but I can add 200k+ Red Sox at once so that's not it. It may depend on how the queries run on the database or perhaps a few big adds work, but if the system has too many large requests at once it might crash.

The reasons I add all of the Husker cards are:

1. Just in case someone pulls one of the (I cannot afford cards) and willing to give me a great deal.

2.   For my information about the cards that are out there of my Huskers.  Easier to put on the want list then have to go through all of them when looking at the cards in No Status.   May move the 1/1 to the Do Not Want list.    When/if it is ever approved.

Regarding new cards each year, I find that filters do wonders. Clicking 'Add all...' helps save a lot of time with the clicking.

I'm going to give explaining what I think is going on a shot.

The database needs your want list to be a list of specific cards. For example, it wants a list that specifically includes 2000 Topps card number 55 but not the 2000 Topps card number 55 of the Home Team Advantage subset of cards if you already have that one. So the website has tools that will help you list all of the Frank Thomas cards and will help you add them to your want list as a list of keys to those specific cards. However, at some point in time, it will want to send that list to your browser so that you can see your want list, work with it, and modify it. That list will take up room in the memory set aside for use by your browser. There is a finite amount of that. How much there is depends on the browser you use and the version of the browser you are using (sometimes). Maybe I'll come back to this later, but for practical purposes, you really want some limit on this so you aren't crashing everyone's browser. What I just said will be deeply offensive to someone because with an infinite amount of money and unlimited staff of developers, you can do things that with a limited budget and limited staff need to have a practical limit. If it isn't the browser, it is probably the trade matching. For example, if everyone has a want list with 150,000 cards, I suspect the trade matching would really grind when it is running and just never really get done. I'm not exactly sure what the 150K limit is, for example, I don't know if that is a cap on the number of cards you can have on a want list or a cap on the number of cards you can add to it at one time. In either case, it seems very much like the sort of limit you set that is a sort of compromise between allowing only very limited lists that will not cause site performance any issues but will be unsatisfying to users and infinitely large lists that will kill either the database or the browser.

These sort of compromises need to be made all of the time. It is not at all unusual for one user to want to have larger lists and for someone to have to make a decision on that but at the same time make a guess about whether that will lead to performance issues that will be upsetting to another set of users or possibly even themselves if they don't know that their larger list led to the issue.

Having said all of that . . . that is just my guess. I don't have or want access to the source code for this site, so I don't know specifically what the issue is or exactly why the 150 k limit was set. It is just my guess that this is a best-of-both-worlds sort of compromise that in a perfect world would not need to be set, but in the real world has to be made.

If you have an MBA and just read this, you are very likely furious because something in your education has taught you that computers don't have limits, software developers just say that they do to get out of doing things they don't want to do. Let's agree to disagree.
  

The limit is on mass adding cards to a want list, not on simply adding cards to the want list.

Once a member reaches a want list of about 150K cards, the functionality no longer works. And Admin has said that it's due to the system getting over-burdened when the counts get that high. Not sure if the new server makesa difference for that, but what would be a lot more effective would be adding an item to the New Feature Tracker area or using the "Contact Us" link and selecting "Make a Suggestion" than airing it on the forums. I get that people get frustrated by limitations, but putting these frustrations in the forums doesn't help get them changed. There's only one person who can make that sort of change, and, most likely, he is not reading this thread.

Set/player collecting, while fun, can be a futile endeavor especially since there are so many companies and so many variations of anybody who (we think) is going to play, is playing or has played any of the major sports today.  You will be forever chasing your tail trying to keep up.