Alert Function For Items In Stock.

Im sure this has been brought up before, but I cant find any discusion on it.

Is it possible to be notified via a web app, toolbar, feed, etc when an item comes in to stock?

Thanks.

While it would be very nice, I consider it too much of an advantage against people who can't access the website for some reason.

Being able to use this website is already a good advantage over people who can't.

I also heard some people say they could put options like this for premium user(if they would institute it for money to cover bandwidth). But I think as soon as they would start "making money" with this website they might have SE come after them. Like they came after that bot because it was making money on the back of SE. Maybe I am wrong, though.

I don't think it'd be able to alert you the second someone puts something up on AH.. I've noticed a 15-30 min or so delay between the time I put something up on AH or buy something off it, and when it actually shows up here.

I'd vote for that mode though..

Yea, it takes about 20 minutes (if I remember rightly) for FFXIAH to do a full scan of the AH history. Because of this there is always some delay before sales or listings show up.

It is also why some sales of fast moving items get missed.

It should be a premium service, if you pay for subscription (to help with running the website) you can input your phone number and it will text you when stock of your choice is in :D

What about those of us who don't have a cell phone ;/, you know not EVERYONE has one <_< (don't want/need one neither)

Tell em to stop playin on console.

I'm sure this is the big issue and why it will never happen. This site, while acting as a form of windower coding, really doesn't break any of the ToS. It provides a free and fair service that is in no way profitable. Well, aside from ads that are to keep the site up...but they're not making money off of SE. it's google.

Pretty sure the ToS states you can't profit off of SE...so running an AH bot scanner and charging people to send them notifications can be considered an "RMT" activity and punishable by legal action. I doubt SE would waste their time on something making like $200 a month off of a ridiculously rich corp but hey. I'm sure the admins would rather avoid the risk of a court date and shutting down their site as opposed to keeping it open and letting a few people down.

ZOMG there is a stack of beehive chips on the AH!

>>Sorry PT I gots to go, I just got a text
<<WFT?
>>Sorry I dont have time to find a replacement since I am the PT ldr but... Kthxbaiˆˆ
<<Lets B-list this mofo and post a warning on FFXIAH.COM.

See where this would be going? Not to mention the amount of hours it would take a buncha hours to build the whole text thingy into the system then develop the bot program to run it.BG would have to make another section to add onto its gimped/confused/wtf/ffxiah.comtxtwhores..

Wouldnt it be easy enough to somehow write a script to follow a webpage, and notify the user if anything on the page changes?

Could also be done by adding Slices to allow IE to show when the number of items in stock changes.

would help for certain items that are NEVER up thou

But i can see people getting pissy about it

That is what's known as scraping and I doubt it would be all that popular with the admins here because it increases their server load [cost] while decreasing their pageviews [revenue]. It would be a short time before they noticed this happening and either asked you to stop or just blocked your access outright.

Similar ideas, the common thread being a FFXIAH API, have been shot down several times in the past, and I don't imagine that they'll ever be reconsidered.

If it were up to me to implement I would add a hook at the end of the scanning process for an item [if it is in stock] to check if there are any pending notifications and send them out. To decrease the extra load notifications would only be permitted for items that have a sales history [no point monitoring currency, etc] and a sales rate slower than, for example, 5 per day. [no need to notify for crystals]

isnt it kindof the same as http://www.ffxiah.com/forum/?topic_id=1792 ?

Figured out how to monitor the In Stock # via a small application.

would be nice

The text for the stock is only green when it is in stock, when it is out of stock searching for that string will fail because it will be red. You might want to parse out everything between the <tr></tr> tags and go from there, it would be a great exercise in regular expressions. You could also parse the whole page as XML and figure out how to get your value that way. Also, by issuing an HTTP HEAD command instead of a GET you can check to see if the page has been updated since the last check by comparing the 'Expires:' headers before requesting the full page. It may not look it, but just the source of a small-looking page is still ~15kB.

I don't imagine that simply doing the project for yourself would pose a problem with the admins, so long as you don't accidentally DDoS the server with a haywire test. :P The area for concern is if you should choose to release your code to others, thereby affecting their bottom line as I've said above. Once you begin contemplating that you should most certainly seek their permission before proceeding.

Cuz FFXIAH uses JQuery and delivers all data in JavaScript parsing the site is really rather easy. Not hard to create a shellscript using curl to fetch and parse everything.

This site does make it's money off advertisements obviously. They don't care if a few people do this but if everyone bypassed the web page they would probably start loosing revenue.

Just a guess.

Well this was asked for once before and jaerik said:

Which makes alot of sense, hope this helps.

+1

Worst. Necro. Ever.

No idea what a Necro is ^^

But sorry for the "+1". I'm used to other dev-forums where a reply with a "+1" means that you like the suggestion. If a suggestion gets 5 x +1 the featur will be implemented.

Worst. Necro. Ever.[/quote]
No idea what a Necro is ^^

[/quote]


when a thread has been dead and someone posts- necro bump- bringing it back from the dead.

Use the rating system for that, there is a score for each post, at the top right hand corner, if you go to the OP and click the +, it will go up one obviously.