fantastic_four

Which doesn't tell you how E-Bay differs from ComicLink, a question three of us posed and I was attempting to answer. You paid no attention to the context of my post -- here, this is the quote I was responding to, since you appear to have ignored it the first time:

Ummm...no. Not once did he give a reason ComicLink pending sales are less reliable than E-Bay completed sales, which is what I was doing in my post.

A reason ComicLink pending sales -- or any consignment site's sales when discovered via automated screen-scraping techniques -- would be less reliable than E-Bay actually just occurred to me. When you list something on E-Bay, it's for a limited time, and you pay money to do it. When you list something on a consignment site like ComicLink, it's free, and it could stay up there for months or years. If the seller already sold the book by the time it gets flagged as "Sale pending", or the seller just never responds to the buy request, there is no way that GPA would know that unless Josh told him. The odds of these non-sales happening would definitely be greater on ComicLink than on E-Bay due to the free, unlimited-time listings. I listed a book on Pedigree about 3 years ago that just recently sold...I had forgotten I had even listed it. Heck, I had my old e-mail address registered with Pedigree for over a year of that time it was listed...I just updated it a few weeks ago. For all I know, the book also sold several times before with me failing to respond to it.

Going through all of Josh's listings is probably about 200-400 pages. If the amount of time required to read that many and parse it proves to be like an hour or two, the odds are you can do it less often than once a day, although once a day would obviously give you the best chance of getting 100% of completed sales. Josh's business model usually involves the seller mailing the book to him. In my experience in looking at his site, books stay at "Sale pending" for over a week. I've always assumed he wants it to stay up that long as a sales tool, to parade sales in front of customers. It's possible they just stay for a set period of time, perhaps 2 to 4 weeks, then automatically get de-listed. If you analyzed it a bit, I wouldn't be surprised if you only had to scan the site once a week. I suspect you could have more reliability with this on ComicLink than with E-Bay. On an E-Bay sale, you will never, ever know if it fell through, unless someone tells you and you manually correct it. On ComicLink if it falls through, and it turns out that Josh most often does just un-flag it as Sale Pending, you can automatically determine it.

Agreed. So I don't understand your assertion in your prior post that there's no way to monitor normal ComicLink consignments. Isn't what you just described similar to, or exactly the same as, as what you do for E-Bay?

Not sure why there's no way to automatically collect the normal ComicLink consignments. Here's how a job can do it, and I doubt it's much different than what you're doing for E-Bay: 1) Request the ComicLink search page results with no criteria listed. Loop through the pages. 2) On each page, loop through the items. Look for ones that are "Sale Pending". 3) Look up the ComicLink ID for a Sale Pending item. If you don't already have that one saved, save it now. I don't think Josh's site mechanic has changed much, if at all, since he went to the database-driven version of it. Side note -- it's possible that Josh most often just re-lists items that don't sell through and they keep the same ID. To identify sales that fall through, you could check each item ID against what you have saved, and if you find one that's not "Sale Pending" yet it's present in your own database, that means it used to be marked as sold before, but became available again for whatever reason, so you could delete that one to weed out sales that fall through. Coding time estimate: 1 to 2 days.

How is extracting the potentially unfinalized "Sales Pending" items from ComicLink's listings any different from extracting the potentially unfinalized completed auctions from E-Bay? Either of those two could fall through...so why one but not the other?

Hmm, I just double-checked this, and their direct data interface is free nowadays, as long as you don't hammer their servers. Automatically getting data from EBay now looks pretty easy for developers.

I'm about 98% sure that when GPA first started, they were screen-scraping EBay data. I think that's the only way you COULD have done it back then, as I distinctly recall that EBay wasn't sending sales data to ANYBODY back then...I'm surprised to hear they do it now. I think they may have done the same for Heritage but have no direct knowledge of it; my own analysis of their listing format and ability to search past auctions indicates to me it's more than feasible. George may have just asked Heritage to send him an Excel spreadsheet of completed auction results after each auction, who knows. I dunno what GPA does today for EBay. I know that since 2003, EBay added a direct XML web service interface to query its data, but last time I checked it, you had to pay for that, so screen-scraping could be cheaper. "Screen-scraping" just means writing code to take the raw HTML page and look for common identifiers in the code to extract the title and issue from the auction description, as well as the price and auction end date. I've written such code to scrape E-Bay pages myself...actually doesn't take too long, maybe a day or two. My plan was to write a little program that sent me some kind of active message on Buy-It-Now stuff I'd really be interested in as soon as it hit E-Bay so I could put a buy in within hours, minutes, or seconds of it having been listed. I was inspired by a few really nice Buy-It-Now finds I got shortly after listing, such as an FF #52 CGC 9.6 and FF #11 CGC 8.5 I got...both were pretty dirt-cheap prices. I think I finished the code to do searches and get listing data into database tables in like 4-6 hours, but after futzing with the code to automatically log into and out of E-Bay for a few hours, I got tired of it and gave up. I know it's possible since the sniping web sites do it, but there used to be something weird about E-Bay that made the automated login logic kinda tough. Now that I think about this again...maybe I'll give it another shot! I haven't seen how long Josh keeps the completed auction data on ComicLink up. I just went there a few minutes ago and the data is up there right now and viewable...it looks pretty screen-scrapable to me at first glance. Nice, distinct, easy-to-interpret tabular format.

Not sure why, but that printing ripple on the bottom edge near the Thing's foot is extremely common on FF #25. I've seen 3 other copies that have it, and my copy has it also.

no WAY!!!!

I've been wondering whether the highly available issues fall into that bi-weekly pattern. In other words, what other issues came out the same week as FF 48, and are they also available in higher-than-normal quantities? Grouping the issues together into their week of release is a much tougher task than grouping them by month.

FF 48 is another example. Bob Storms recounted a tale in the forums of a dealer--Michael Carbonaro, if memory serves--with huge stacks of unread copies of FF 48 at a con. Unless he bought those from the Mile High 2 find, he likely knows the origin of another FF 48 find... Consider these three months in Marvel comics from early 1966: Marvel comics released in January 1966 Marvel comics released in February 1966 Marvel comics released in March 1966 I can't speak for all of those titles and all of those issues because I don't collect most of them, but I can say that there are at least four issues from those months that were undoubtedly warehouse finds based upon available supply--Journey Into Mystery 124, Avengers 24, Spidey 33, and FF 48. Does anyone know of other titles and issues from these months, or adjacent months, which are available in disproportionately high supply? I suspect FF 46 and 47 might have also been present in finds, but the evidence is inconclusive. It's painfully obvious that FF 43 and 45 have never been.

FF 48 was in the Mile High 2 warehouse find, although I don't know how many copies were in it or whether the glut of them on the market came from that find or another one. Spidey 33 was also in Mile High 2 and came out within 2 weeks of FF 48, and it too is available in disproportionately high numbers to the Spidey issues around it. I've seen copies of both of those issues with accompanying Mile High 2 certificates.

Hehe, oh yeah! Thanks for putting it into perspective...that's most people around here, isn't it!

Holy CRAPOLA! Either you've got some real problems, or your priorities are WAAAAYYY out of whack...

Here's one of the only pre-Marvels I own since Magneto is my favorite villain ever because I find his powers to be really cool...took me a long time to find this one in high grade!

Two points: [*]You CAN see the interior cover--just open the book! If your response is "but not while it's in the slab!", then my rebuttal is that grading with the idea that the book will always be left in the slab is not the way it oughtta be done; the entire book should be taken into consideration[*]More importantly, CGC grades based upon the higher-graded cover simply because the book could be transformed into that grade by removing the extra cover. If the outer is a 9.0, and the inner is a 9.6, then the book could easily be made a 9.6 by removing the 9.0.

I knew that viewpoint would find lots of support around here...this forum attracts all the elite loons in the comics collecting community (such as myself). Most high-grade collectors are whacked out of their gourds. Why else would we obsess over defects that are fractions of an inch in size, or even only visible under high magnification?

EXACTLY the lunatic fringe I was referring to! There probably isn't enough time left in the day anyway after you're done stepping over cracks in the sidewalk, storing and cataloguing bottles of your own urine and feces, and all those required bi-hourly anus checks to make sure aliens haven't probed you yet. Gotta keep all those undesirable, invisible bad elements outta your life!

Nah, but it'll change people's perceptions and eliminate some elements of the high-grade lunatic fringe.

That great! Just run collectors off if they don't want to "join the club" and condon questionable and possibly unethical tactics in this hobby. Really great! It's not a matter of condoning it, it's a matter of accepting the things in life you have no control over whatsoever. What he said is accurate--if you don't like pressed books, stop collecting high-grade vintage comics, because it's simply going to happen and there's NOTHING you can do about the professionally-done ones.

Which ones did you get? I bought his #31 and #68.

What is it you have a problem with--ironing (light pressure accompanied by heat and possibly humidity), extreme-force pressing, or both?

You shall now be burned in effigy by three and one-half dozen forum members. Or...WILL YOU DISCLOSE IT?