Pricing (Scripts and Notes)

[woogerboy21]

So far the best I can come up with to hide prices is something that would rotate the pricing hashes on a fairly regular bases using a generated seed and associating the hashes with image files for prices. But if you have something that will OCR the prices any type of hashing is useless. I've never dealt with any OCR technology. It sounds interesting.

[wilmheath]

Typically if I posted this somewhere else I would get flamed and probably called a few names.

Frankly speaking, we have our rights to parse your site any way we like. It's a public info, available for all Internet users. Looks like your site is the only one who tries to obscure the prices. Believe me, it's worthless. It took a little time for woogerboy21 to write the parsing script. Every good programmer can replicate his work in several hours. You're using hashes, but same prices have same hashes. Too easy to create a hash-price table. I'd recommend you to change the scheme so hashes for same price but for different cards are different (or just add the salt to the hash so the hashes will change dayly). Even so give me several days and I'll write a simple OCR program to read the prices from the pictures itself. Everything is worthless...
Nevertheless, I respect your complain. This script won't be included in MA distribution and won't be posted on my forum. But everything is worthless... Script is already goes to public.

I agree it is not illegal and unless your killing my bandwidth(possible DOS) there is little I can do. There is however another guy that is actually reselling my pricelist to his customers and that is illegal from what my lawyer has told me. We tried to hunt the guy down but he lives in Turkey so we gave up once we found that out. I know that no matter what I do there will be ways around it but I would like to at least make it as difficult as possible without making any noticible change for the customers browsing the site.

[wilmheath]

So far the best I can come up with to hide prices is something that would rotate the pricing hashes on a fairly regular bases using a generated seed and associating the hashes with image files for prices. But if you have something that will OCR the prices any type of hashing is useless. I've never dealt with any OCR technology. It sounds interesting.

Yeah a few people have used OCR and I used to block their ip address's but then they started switching to the TOR network and rotating out IP address's every 2 reads. The OCR really does kill my bandwidth and is not something I want people doing on my site.

What are you all's ties to mtgmintcard? I noticed he advertises on here.

[woogerboy21]

What are you all's ties to mtgmintcard? I noticed he advertises on here.

I have none, yippee!, im just a plain old user contributor. Come to think of it I never noticed most the adds before the MA application started supporting pricing. Maybe I was just oblivious before that. However one thing I would like to point out is they have a mobile version of there site and it has come in handy many times when wanting to look up a price on the go and of the few suggestions I would make to any site owner is a mobile site would be something to look into.

I agree it is not illegal and unless your killing my bandwidth(possible DOS) there is little I can do

Yea im pretty sure what I've done isnt illegal in any way. Its public information. Im suprised someone is actually trying to sell the pricing information to others. Its FREE! Also one quick suggestion would be to turn the ability for users to view source off on your webpages (if possible not exactly sure how your generating your code.) This would eliminate most the simpletons from actually getting to your hash information by any old regular web browser.

[woogerboy21]

Alright all you startcitygames lovers. I added some love to that script in the 16a release. I didn't deam it enough changes to make a completly new version but now you should be able to collect pre-order prices during new set releases. I knew this was a problem and wasnt about to set special cases for all new sets but ended up fixing it with a fairly simply routine. The update 16a's ONLY change from 16 is the pre-order price catching in the startcitygames scripts so if you dont use the site done worry about the download.

[Goblin Hero]

But if you have something that will OCR the prices any type of hashing is useless.

I do not have anything. I'm just saying it's quite easy (at least for skilled programmer) to write simple OCR program.

What are you all's ties to mtgmintcard? I noticed he advertises on here.

He's our partner and I'm being sponsored. Contact me if you're interested.

would like to at least make it as difficult as possible without making any noticible change for the customers browsing the site

Rotate the hash values. Try to add some noise/rotation to the generated price pictures to break OCR. Use flash/java applets to retrieve and display the prices.

[Goblin Hero]

MA 1.1.8 is out. Now with price update date stamp.
woogerboy21, I've changed the SetID for SOM, so you should update the scripts (sry )

[woogerboy21]

MA 1.1.8 is out. Now with price update date stamp.
woogerboy21, I've changed the SetID for SOM, so you should update the scripts (sry )

Its ok, I just downloaded the update and was going to post a fyi for everyone. Im working on getting the multilanguage coding structure worked into every script so since Im hitting them all up anyways ill update that as well

Thanks.

[woogerboy21]

Alright new release of the pricing scripts. Check the release notes for all details but basicly I updated all scripts for the SOM setid change in the DB. Added the Duel Deck Elspeth vs. Tezz. Added the multilanguage support as well as set selection ability. Currently pricing scripts are set to apply located prices to all languages and will collect data for all supported sets in script but this can be changed by changing variables with-in the scripts. If/When GH gets around to updating the price manager page for set selection or language selection for pricing information the scripts should be ready

Oh and one more thing, for version 1.8 of the pricing scripts to apply prices correctly to the SOM and DD Elspeth sets you must be running application version 1.1.8. Any prior versions will not apply prices correctly to those sets!

[woogerboy21]

Updated initial post with possible workarounds for the recent requests about having price manager run in the background. Check it out

[Mr.C]

How long should it take to update? I'm trying to update using TCPPlayerLow, but it seems to hang right at the beginning. I'm on a Q6600, Win7 Ultimate N, 4GB RAM, around 10Mbps download. It's been there for 10 minutes or so. When I tried it on the last version of MagicAlbum (M11 Update), It hung on Magic2011. Now it just hangs at the start of the progress bar.

Any ideas?

[Mr.C]

Just an update, the problem seems restricted to TCGPlayerLow. The Avg works fine, it just finished really quick.

I haven't read through the code, but is it perhaps because some low prices are listed as 'N/A' instead of 0.00? A parsing error, perhaps?

Edit: Tested TCGPlayerHigh, and it runs. And the same prices that have N/A on them for Low have them for high too. I'll try cp'ing the code from high to low and changing the cpr variable, maybe there's a missing comma somewhere :p

Edit2: Tested all versions of TCGPlayerLow, none worked. I tried debugging the script, but the last time I took any programming course was 2002. So I'm quite rusty.

[Mr.C]

Ok, so I let the script run. Took about 8 or 9 hours, but it finished fine. No idea as to why it would take that long.

[woogerboy21]

Ok, so I let the script run. Took about 8 or 9 hours, but it finished fine. No idea as to why it would take that long.

9 hours for the low script?

[Mr.C]

Ok, so I let the script run. Took about 8 or 9 hours, but it finished fine. No idea as to why it would take that long.

9 hours for the low script?

Correct. It worked, but took an obscene amount of time.