Things for Cort's to-do list


Website Feedback


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I've made a number of requests at variable levels of reasonableness over the years and since you're now the go-to person for that kind of thing, I thought I might list the things I wish your website did for me. :)

I'd love to have the following features:

  • Ability to preorder PDFs
  • A total of amount spent on order history ("You have 515 orders in your order history worth a total of $x.xx" - even better if I could designate a period of time)
  • A place to hide (if not permanently remove) aliases
  • Probably dreaming here, but I'd love to be able to buy a PFS season as one big PDF.
  • Pathfinder legends subscription
  • Syrinscape subscription (though I've bitten the bullet now, so perhaps that doesnt matter)
  • A more transparent sidecart/preorder/backorder setup. Sometimes it seems like your system spawns an order knowing that one or two items arent going to be available for a while. Admittedly CS can always sort it out for me, but they'd probably prefer that I could do it myself. Personally, I'd like to be able to open up an order and see a list of estimated dates of arrival for each item so I could zip down it manually shifting things back to my sidecart if I dont want to wait (or possibly even cancelling them if they were non-subscription items?).
  • Related to the last, but I'd really like it if the system didnt label things backorders/out of stock/unavailable when I order the last one. In fact, it would be great if it told me precisely that I did have the last copy reserved - so I at least knew not to cancel it!
  • An ability to subscribe to third party products (ie everything from Legendary Games, Wizards of the Coast or whatever). If I had the ability to move things around and cancel stuff as referenced above, this would be awesome.
  • As a slightly less awesome option to the last (and perhaps I can already do this) I'd love a feature where I could mark a list of publishers and go somewhere to see any new products, preorders or otherwise, which have been added to the store since last time I checked (so I could then mark them as "viewed"). I hate learning that something cool has come out and then gone out of stock before I even knew about it. :(
  • I'd like to be able to use DHL or other freight companies (though I understand that doesnt really belong here, I'll include it for completeness).

Hmm...I think there's more, but I can't remember them all at the moment. Nonetheless, if you can make any of those happen, I'd appreciate it. :)

I figure it's possible I can do some of that stuff with wishlists and/or RSS Feeds (or something?) so if anyone dropping by has any idiot-proof instructions on how to fulfill any of those requests already I'd appreciate any suggestions.

Development Manager

/em blanches.

This is actually a very nice list. All I can promise is that I'll make sure they get into our tracking system backlog but I certainly can do that.


Yeah, that's what I meant really. (I don't have high hopes for many of them actually getting implemented).

I wouldn't feel any pressure - when I've requested them previously the posts have generally sunk pretty swiftly - hardly a clamouring of support from other paizonians. :)

Cheers


I don't want to know about total amount spent. Ignorance is bliss there.

I will second Steve's requests for:

*hide/delete aliases. For those pbp characters you are never going to revisit.

*backorder/preorder/sidecart/stock. Estimated dates for everything. An indicator that states there are x amount of copies remaining in the warehouse, once they get so low. I'd like a comprehensive list of what I have pre-ordered without fumbling around the order page, where every other order is crossed out and combined elsewhere. Also the ability to skip subscription items without contacting cs to cancel, and again to resume.

*3rd party subs - yes please, with an option for print or print/pdf combo only.

*comprehensive new product updates - maybe a link on the weekly newsletter that shows a list of ALL the new products to be released next week.


organized wrote:
I don't want to know about total amount spent. Ignorance is bliss there.

Yeah, maybe not automatically displayed, but every now and again I review my expenditure and it's currently a pain to work out what I spent at Paizo last year (or whatever). I'm also vaguely curious as to average order value and proportion of that spent on shipping and so forth - the more automatic counting I can get from the site, the better in my view.

Fair enough it shouldnt be hitting you in the face every time you check your account though. Only if you ask it to. :)

Paizo Employee Chief Technical Officer

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I'll be frank: while we have often discussed third-party subscriptions, they simply raise too many potential customer service issues, as there are too many variables outside our control. Honestly, even offering subscriptions for licensed products (Pathfinder Battles, Pathfinder Comics, Pathfinder Legends) has been challenging. We're committed to continuing those, but don't look for us to expand beyond them anytime soon.


I can understand that. If I could sort of create a "watch list" of publishers, that collected items as they were added to your store, until I removed them or ordered them, that would be a decent substitute.

Paizo Employee Chief Technical Officer

I will note that each publisher page has an RSS feed for "New Products." You can find it by going to that publisher's page (for example, Kobold Press) and looking at the bottom of the left column. (If you don't see one, that publisher probably hasn't released much lately.) And if you just want specific product lines from a company, the same thing applies—there's a separate "New Products" feed for each subsection.


Ahh, cheers. I did wonder if there was already the facility for that. Terms like "RSS feeds" are beyond my understanding (and tend to induce cold sweats) but I'll look into it.

Thanks, vic.


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Vic Wertz wrote:
I'll be frank

Hi Frank!


I have a vague idea what an RSS feed is, but can't believe I never noticed them on the site before. Thanks!


Steve Geddes wrote:

Ahh, cheers. I did wonder if there was already the facility for that. Terms like "RSS feeds" are beyond my understanding (and tend to induce cold sweats) but I'll look into it.

Thanks, vic.

Okay, I've been trying to get these to do what I want and I'm not really having much luck. Could anyone who understands how to use an RSS feed provide any suggestions?

For example - I've gone to the Frog God Games section of the store and found an RSS feed called "paizo.com New products in Swords and Wizardry (0E)" (although that was by trial and error - there were three orange squares identically labelled "RSS" that I had to follow to find out what I was subscribing to. Is that working as intended?)

I've subscribed to that, plus "upcoming products" and "top sellers", by mistake. Now there's a little pulldown menu of subscribed feeds, but they only show if I first navigate to the Frog God Games section, which seems a little redundant.

Is there a way to somehow collect a series of RSS feeds which are "new products" for each of a bunch of publishers that I could access from the paizo.com homepage? If I have to flit around between the dozen or so publishers I'm interested in, it seems as though I may as well not bother with the feeds since they're not really saving much effort/memory work.

Thanks in advance for any help.


Hey Steve. You need a program to collect all the RSS feeds for you. For example, if you use Google Chrome you can add "Feeder" to the toolbar from the Chrome store. Go to this link to and add "RSS Feed Reader" to your toolbar. You'll notice an orange dot with arcs above it.

Now, go to that Frog God Games page again. If you hover over hte 3rd RSS feed you'll see it is for New Products. Click it, then copy the url it takes you to (that page itself will look like code). The URL is this: http://paizo.com/companies/frogGodGames/preorder&xml=atom

Now click the orange button that looks like a dot with arcs above it. Click the + button and paste the URL into the box under add feed. Click search and it should add that feed. Do the same with other RSS feed URLS that you want to subscribe to.

Now, once you've done that if you click the orange dot with the arcs again, you'll see one of the buttons is a box with a number in it (might be 0 to start with). Clicking that box will show you anything the RSS fields pick up that you haven't read yet. So when a new product gets add by Frog God Games, it will show under there as unread.

I hope that helps. Let me know if it doesn't.


Thanks heaps for that. I'm using Internet explorer, but presumably that's got the equivalent program. Explains the missing piece, anyhow - cheers!

What will I need to do given I browse the site on two different computers? Set up the same RSS feed on each? Or will the site itself remember what feeds I'm subscribed to?


If the add-on you put into Internet Explorer is tied to an account, then as long as that add-on is used on the other computer it should be fine.

The website itself isn't really doing anything. The RSS feed is basically a list of products. The add-on or program you use checks it regularly to see if any new products have appeared that you haven't seen yet. So it is the add-on program (RSS Feed Reader in my example) that does all the work. Paizo is just providing the data for the Feed Reader to gather.

Not sure how tied you are to IE, but it works great in Chrome. You can sign into the Chrome broswer itself so that any computer you sign into Chrome on will have all your bookmarks, add-ons, saved passwords, pretty much everything.

EDIT: IE has a list of RSS feed add-ons here:
http://www.iegallery.com/Search?q=RSS


Thanks again. I'm not really tied to anything, except that computing of any description gives me anxiety attacks, so installing something new is a major undertaking. I generally buy a computer with everything I want installed and then make do with those until my next computer.

I'll speak to our IT guy and watch him do it at work. hopefully it'll be easy enough to replicate at home. Cheers. :)

Paizo Employee Chief Technical Officer

Steve Geddes wrote:
...there were three orange squares identically labelled "RSS" that I had to follow to find out what I was subscribing to.

If you hold your mouse over them, you'll get an explanation of each. Usually, they'll be (from left to right) Top Sellers, New Products, and Upcoming Products. If there's a messageboard forum on the page, there's also a fourth, Recent Threads.


Thanks, Vic. I suspect my computer or internet explorer is out of date. When I hover over them, I just get a box labelled "RSS". (Or maybe that feature only works once I've installed the RSS program Hawkmoon referred to above - I'll see once IT have done their thing).

EDIT: Oh wait, there's a kind of web address in the bar at the bottom with "new@atom", "top@atom" and stuff, so yeah I can work that out. Cheers.

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