Suggestions

There's plenty of suggestions already about dragon searching options. I agree with a lot of them but I will leave those for their respective suggestion threads. Instead I'd like to propose some additional search features for some other tabs, in particular skins. I'll start there. [size=4][u][b]Skins:[/b][/u][/size] Anyone else find themselves trying to check all the [current] festival's skins on AH and having to either sift through all the coliseum and other cheap skins or having to check the names of each individual skin in another tab, then manually enter each one (sometimes, a few at a time if they have shared words in their name, but still ?10 searches)? It would make it a lot simpler to look for those [if it's all festivals, there'd be very little to sift through among other festivals if you do the generally used ascending price order as very few skins remain that price into the next festival], as well as for people who want to browse festival skins only, either just to see them all or to collect them all. It also provides additional options for filtering skins whose name is contained in other skins (such as "Char" from Flameforger's Festival 2013, the number of skins containing "char" will probably only go up and eventually will include other female mirror skins/accents). [b][size=3][color=Green]Proposal: Allow searching skin [i]descriptions[/i]. That should be relatively easy to code (obviously impossible to know for sure without knowing the back-end stuff, such as how the item data is stored) and accomplishes a lot of the same thing, as well as being able to search for all skins by a particular artist. [For searching all festivals in this case, simply search "201" as all festival skins contain the year and few, if any, other skins do]. This should largely reduce admin load and allow a fair amount of user flexibility.[/color][/size][/b] [b]Alternative Proposal[/b] Add options based on the origin of the skins. This could also help if you find a skin and want to figure out how to obtain one, by putting the name in searching the potential methods until you find it. Without knowing how item data is stored, it's impossible to be sure if this can be done any method other than adding all 10,000+ skins to each list individually, so it probably not practical [and if that's the case, it makes more sense to alter their descriptions and implement the previous method anyways]. However, I am including it here in case the skin data does include obtain method or that can otherwise be easily found on a large scale. Some examples below. [size=1]These could be mixed and matched in a number of ways, but these are some basic suggestions to get the ideas across. Obviously, names and order can be altered as needed. Disclaimer: I very rarely deal in skins outside of festival skins. My knowledge on the full set of possible skins may be lacking and I appreciate any (polite) corrections of missing/duplicate/non-existent/etc. methods.[/size] [quote=Simplified]– Gem Marketplace [self-explanatory, includes both retired and current to reduce update load on the coders. Could be split into "Gem Marketplace" and "Retired Gem Marketplace" if they're willing to do the extra coding for it, but especially in the simplified choice that seems unnecessary] – Coliseum [again, self-explanatory] – Retired Event [includes festival skins, kickstarter, and beta skins. Could be split up into those categories or further, but again this is the simplified option.] – Trading Post [Swipp skins, with the potential for any non-festival Baldwin skins that may later happen.] – Submissions [What most people call "usermade", but it feels wrong to use that term in an official capacity as most of the others are also "usermade" in that they were created by an artist who is not an employed staff of Flight Rising. This is the category I am least familiar with to say more about.][/quote] [quote=Maximal]– Current Gem Marketplace – Past Gem Marketplace – Coliseum – Submissions [aka "usermade", see above for my word choice reasons] – Swipp [Baldwin or other methods that later produce skins not already fitting into one of these categories] – Beta Reward – Kickstarter Reward – Brightshine Jubilee 2013 – Thundercrack Carnival 2013 – Flameforgers Festival 2013 ... – [current or last festival][/quote] [b][size=4][u]Why Mention Other Parts of AH?[/u][/size][/b] The highly observant readers of this post probably noticed the name includes "[/Item]" but is exclusively about skins so far and is wondering why. While this is mostly helpful for skins, it also can apply to at least Apparel and Familiars. Searching for every festival familiar from Brightshine Jubilee 2013 to Greenskeeper Gathering 2014 is easy, they all contain the word "Sprite" (though you get Rainbow Sprite tagging along for the ride). Searching for the familiars from a different set of festivals is not easy to do because their names (while awesome on their own, no disrespect to any individual name choices) are not tied together by a common word or phrase. Searching description for "Elemental Acolyte" would easily find all familiars from the current festival set, but there's no way to do do so by name alone. For apparel, even themed pieces such as armbands have a lot of other apparel to contend with in a search. [Also worth mentioning, Eroded Crystalhide is still missing "2013" in its description. That might need to be fixed for this to work for apparel as intended.] [b]Would this have other uses besides festivals?[/b] I'm sure there are people out there who want to see every item whose description includes a particular word or phrase, but for the most part the answer is no. The combination of this and the much lower quantity of affected items is the primary reason why I am focusing most of this on skins rather than all of AH. Including it elsewhere would be nice, but not as necessary. [b][color=Green]However, it would be nice to include festival year on chests and add the feature to "Other" for the same reason.[/color][/b] Even if the feature is not added [to other], years on chests would be very useful, but I'm not going into that argument here. [b]Please give support, additional suggestions, and constructive criticism![/b] I'm happy to hear any reasons why this doesn't work or is a bad idea to try and fix them. Remember that Suggestions forums rules don't allow posts containing only "support" or "no support" (or a quote containing at most that).

This is a good idea! it'd be nice if you could toggle "Skin" or "Accent" too, although that can be solved by putting it in the search query.