Site Forum

First of all, I would like to thank everyone who has made this site a possibility.  It a very valuable resource for hobbyists like myself.

I wanted to bring up a problem (maybe it's just a personal one) that I have with the site.  This has to do with the naming of sets, specifically Refractor or Refractors.  I concentrate on collecting what I affectionately refer to as "Chrono-bows".  For example, collecting every Bowman Chrome Refractor of Mike Trout from each year (2011-2023).  When adding to my wishlist or looking over my collection, I utilize the filtering tool so I can look at specifically that range of cards.

However, there is a discontinuation of doing that as the filter offers me two different values in the "Sets" category... Bowman Chrome - Refractor and Bowman Chrome - Refractors.  The "Refractors" (plural) value shows me the 2011-2013 cards. (Image 1)  And when I change it to "Refractor" (singular), I am shown 2014-2023 cards. (Image 2)

What I want to know is if we can agree on a standard, either they are "Refractor" or "Refractors".  Or an alternate suggestion, but less desirable, would be to have a wildcard on the filter. (i.e. "Refractor*").  However, that would have to be applied for all the colored parallels of a Refractor. (i.e. Blue Refractor*, Red Refractor*, etc.)

I hope what I'm asking is clear enough.  Additionally, I have some edit capabilities on the site and would gladly contribute to making the site more user friendly.  Thank you for your time!

Do you know what Bowman Chrome packaging called them at the time? That's what we should use. 

This comes up every so often. My brain doesn’t like that in some sets the parallel sets are named “Blue Refractors” and other sets are just named “Blue” 

The way I've usually seen them is "Refractors" for a basic refractor parallel and "Refractor" if it follows a color or design (e.g. "Blue Refractor"), but even those are inconsistent. Standardizing either way will take a lot of updates among all sports.

I asked Admin this question years ago, and it's an issue on the site with there being "too many cooks in the kitchen" (crowd-sourcing). Admin's guidance is even if a single card is called "a refractor" or "an autograph", the set's name should be plural ("Refractors", "Autographs", etc.).

Additionally, on a somewhat related note, the site automatically puts a hyphen between the "parent" set's name and the insert/child set's name (e.g., "2023 Topps Chrome - Refractors"). There should be no usage of hyphens in insert set names ("2023 Topps Chrome - Legends - Blue" should be "2023 Topps - Legends Blue"). (We have one member who refuses to follow that guidance even though I have PMed him directly - multiple times.)

While we are here, I've seen both occurrences of the following examples.  What are the rules in these situations?

- [Color] Mosaic vs. Mosaic [Color]

- Framed [Color] vs. [Color] Framed

- Mini [Set Name] vs. [Set Name] Mini

General guidance has been to use the set name then the descriptor, to keep like sets together, otherwise all the "blue" sets wind up together.

Thanks, Dan.  I'll flag/fix as I see them.