Situation Normal; All Scans Up

What’s up everyone? I thought I’d write a post regarding the latest developments with the site…

1. New scans!

Thanks to the help of a few gracious volunteers, the site is up to date with scans again! Over the past 4 or 5 days, we got about 5,000 new images uploaded and organized on the site for your viewing pleasure.

The new scans come to you courtesy of Martin from Pokemon-Paradijs who supplied me with the images and has given us permission to use them watermark-free (aside from the most recent set). One of my original goals was to have un-watermarked images, and now we’ve got them, which is pretty awesome!

In the future when new sets are released, I’m totally open for people submitting scans if they have access to a scanner. The reason being is that it takes Martin a few weeks from the first prereleases here in the US until he is able to get his scans done. I know most people (including myself) probably don’t want to wait that long, so if you’d like to contribute in the future, that would be great.

2. Rating system is going pretty well!

At first I wasn’t sure how the ratings would work, but so far so good. My hopeful theory was that as more and more people rated the cards, the ratings would even out over time. This seems to be the case for the most part, aside from the random Hoppip comfortably sitting in the 8.5 to 10.0 range.

My goal is for a newer Pokemon player to be able to view cards here, and get a general sense whether or not a card is good from the community rating. If you look at Black & White in order of highest rating first, which you can see here, it’s actually fairly accurate. Not perfect, but surprisingly decent.

3. Comments are good too!

I want to thank coolestman22, Curtis, Vinay Patel, and everyone else for their active discussion the past few days! I think it’s really cool that we’re able to comment on the cards and say whatever about them, whether it be a serious strategy-based question, fond memory, or snide remark regarding a dubious attack name.

Any discussion is cool with me; have fun with it!

I think what I may do in order to promote more discussion is redesign the home page to show a forum-like listing of the cards that have been most recently commented on. Or if not the home page, I could create pseudo-forum pages for different sets, modified legal cards, or whatever.

4. Plans for the Future

As I just alluded to, I think I want to redesign the home page. I’m not exactly sure how I want to change it, but I may just try to make it simpler like the Google home page and just have the big search bar. I’ll take some time to think about it, but if you have any suggestions, please let me know by commenting or e-mailing me.

I also have a list of a few random things I need to fix, like how prices for some cards are whack. I’ll try to take care of that kind of stuff this weekend. If you notice any bugs that could be fixed or improved, let me know.

One thing down the road I’ll try to add is a mobile version of the site. Right now I’m more concerned with getting the web version as complete as possible, then I’ll begin development for all you people with smart phones.

Oh and finally, full-text is something that will be in development for a while. It’s sort of a slow process typing out all the cards. Eventually I’ll enable full-text searching on the site, but for now, if you Google “site:tcgscans.com QUERY” it will work.

For example, here’s a search for Foul Play. Both Zoroarks come up, which is pretty cool. Only modified legal cards have their text typed out so far though. I’ll estimate that by Valentine’s day we’ll be done with the text, but we could be done a lot sooner.

After the text is done, then I’ll maybe work on allowing advanced searching/sorting features, like filtering out all Basic Grass Pokemon that have Free Retreat. That sort of thing.

Anyway, I guess that’s it for today. Thanks for reading and supporting the site!

-Adam