General Discussion

I have a question about helpbot store:

Since the demise of the MrShop bots, we fr00bs have had no way to create searchable bot-assisted personal stores, but the helpbot store already has a lot of the functionality that MrShop had, with the exception of the in-game and web search feature.  The biggest difficulty is probably the large SQL database requirements as more and more users make user of it.

The way the MrShop used to work was users could drop items into tells to MrShop and it would create a personal shop for that player.  The user could set prices for each item, and remove items from the store as they get bought.  Other people can search all the items that MrShop has and then make purchases person-to-person.  In addition to in-game tells to the MrShop bot, one was also able to search the database via web.

Most of the functionality appears already available to the Helpbot Store.  Are remaining features something that we can add?  I think that would make helpbot store much more useful than only creating cut-and-paste forum content.  Is there a security or practical reason this wasn't implemented already?

That was kinda on the board to be done, but no one got around to it.

But could be added, yes. Not a security issue because there are no passwords required.

Store item by character name, etc.

Thanks for reminding me about this though.

Can the code be made available?  Maybe I can help with this one.

Ok. I don't really remember how MrShop used to work... but let me think if I can remember most of the functionality:

You had to "open a shop" by sending it a tell and then you had to get some kind of confirmation code off the web site.  I never understood why you had to do that.

Once you had a store open, you could add items to your store by dropping item references in a tell command to MrShop and set/change prices for each item.

Other people could look up your store by your name or do a search by items, and MrShop would return all matching items from everyone's store.

You can get a link to the items when you look them up in stores, and there's a "buy this item" link that was a chat command that sends a private tell to the seller indicating that you wanted to by that item.

You can bring up your own store to change prices (mentioned above) or remove items (either because it was sold or because you changed you're mind about selling it).  It was left up to the user to maintain the shop listing, so I guess there was quite a bit of outdated information in the MrShop database.  Perhaps items older than [some amount of time] automatically gets removed from people's shops to keep the number of records down to a manageable size -- or maybe give people a maximum of N [21? like 1 backpack] items that they can put in their shop at any given time?

Llie, remember you can post on the forum now.

There is one function in the store though that not many knows about that I added a while back.

you can do
[DROPPED ITEM] {Price You Want For It}

Then when you generate the list for forumposting the price is already there no need to do things on diffrent places, just do all ingame, and copy paste at forum/store.

Regarding ingame part, In the earlier versions of helpbot before vhabot rewrote the core I had working store ingame *spanks vhab* Then I left for some RL shit and I don't know where that code went. Isn't that hard to add a !store [name] function though, just grab the list of items and output them.

I don't have Visual studio installed atm so I can't do it, but shouldn't be that big problem should take around maybe 20 minutes to do copy pasting some code and changing rights and so.

Hope you had a great new year!

Caught a cold for New Years, but otherwise had a good one. =P

I understand that I can post on forums, but if helpbot store had an in game interface, it would get so much more use.  I would like to request the following features:

Code:

/tell helpbot DROPPED_ITEM [price [quantity]]

Opens a new store if player doesn't already have one.  Adds the item to the store and sets the price and quantity if items if specified.  The more I think about it the more I like the idea of having a limit of 21 "records" for any person's store.  People can sell multiple of the same item (see next feature) the can "stack" things that normally don't stack in AO, but this limits the ability for people to abuse the helpbot store.

Code:

!store stock UID price quantity

Lets you modify the price and quantity of an item in your store.  Price can be a positive integer or "PST".  Setting quantity to a number less than or equal to zero removes the item from your store. Where, UID is an internal unique ID number that helpbot (or MYSQL) assigned this item (not the AO database Item ID).

Code:

!store sold UID

Decrements the quantity value of the item specified by UID by one.  If the quantity reaches zero, the item is removed from the store. 

Code:

!store [show] USERNAME

Displays all items currently being sold by USERNAME.  Would having the command be "store show" be a more consistent way to access helpbot store?  More typing but makes the interface more consistent?

Code:

!store search [QL] SEARCH_STRING

Searches all the items in all the stores on helpbot returns any matches.  Comparison shopping is born!  We shopaholics are happy!

The helpbot store would need a database with the following table structure:

| UID | aodb_itemid | [item_name] | QL | sellername | quantity | price

I don't know if item_name is needed because I don't know how the item lookup would work, but if this was done using SQL, then the !store search command would some kind of "where item_name matches SEARCH_STRING" kind of SQL command.  (I'm sorry, I don't know much SQL).

When displaying search results for people's stores, the standard helpbot/itembot display plus quantity and price:

[picture] clickable_itemref QL price quantity Buy_this_now_clicky

Where the clicky at the end sends a tell to the player who is selling this item.

However if someone were to look up their own store on helpbot: "!store [show] YOUR_OWN_NAME", the listing would put the UID (maybe in parenthesis) at the end of each row instead of the "buy this item" clicky at the end of the listing.  This would allow people to manage the items in their store:

[picture] clickable_itemref QL price quantity  ( UID )

what is lacking is really quanitity didnt think of that one when i did it, shouldnt be to hard to add just copypaste the code for price.

Wonderful.  We froobs have really been stuck since MrShop went away.  You might want to talk to Nat.  He was working on the helpbot store a little while ago.