We are excited to announce that we now have better search functionality for wantlists and tradelists. You can now search wantlist and tradelists – your own as well as other members’ lists. To search your wantlist, make sure that you select your wantlist on the left navigation menu on your dashboard. The type any search terms in the search box above the lists and you can instantly search.

You can also search other member’s wantlists, tradelists and collections by going to their profile page www.zistle.com/username and selecting their wantlist/tradelist or collection and search. This should help make trading a little easier in the future.

We just rolled out a new feature to the Zistle main site! Many of you have asked for a way to annotate cards in your collections, so we added a new view type.  If you are viewing or editing your collection you will now notice a “details” view option is available.  If you select that it will show you your results that look like this:

In addition to being able to edit your collection like the other views, in details view you can add and view notes that you have put on your cards.  If you click “edit note” you will get an input box that you can enter your notes into

If you click save then your note will be attached to that card

So notes will allow you to store information specific to your cards for you to see.  A few things to note about notes:

1. Right now you can only use this view on your own collections
2. If you search while viewing your collection you will search over your notes
3. If you move the quantity of cards to 0 you will lose any notes attached to those cards

Enjoy and if you have any suggestions for improvements we would love to hear them!

After we launched live chat, there were quite a few requests to add a forum. And well, we just can’t say no. There is now a Zistle Forum that you should definitely go and check out. As you might have guessed, this will help facilitate the writing of the style guide as well as give you an opportunity to have longer threads between members. If you want a category added, just let me know. The forum is housed at forum.zistle.com and if you are logged into Zistle, you will be automatically logged into the forum as well.

Private messaging is built into the platform and it is called ‘whispering’. If you want to whisper, simply start a new discussion and type in the user’s name in the appropriate field and only they will be able to see your message.Similarly, when you respond to a thread, you can simply enter in the name (the field will auto-complete so you don’t need to type the whole username) and you are all set.

Chat is still available for you to use. For now, they are different experiences but we will most likely integrate them down the road. As always, we love to hear your feedback on what you like, don’t like, think could be better, etc so don’t be shy!

Live chat, our most requested feature, just came to Zistle and we are very, very excited to offer this feature to our members. Any member logged into Zistle will be able to access Zistle Live Chat to instantly connect with other Zistle members. There will be one main chat room where all members logged in will appear. You can participate in the main conversation or have a private conversation with any individual member in a separate tab. So you can discuss the topic du jour or work out trade details with other members simultaneously. To initiate a private conversation with a member, just click their username and click ‘ private message’.

You will be able to access Zistle Live Chat from your dashboard and the trading homepage. Members who do not log into Zistle chat will not appear in the chat room so you don’t need to opt out if you are not interested in chatting with other members online.

While we have tested the new chat feature, we anticipate that bugs will arise over the next few days. As always, we rely on you to let us know about any issues you encounter. We work hard to get new features to you as quickly as possible and we appreciate your help when we launch a new feature.

See you soon on Zistle Chat!

We all need to show off every once in a while. It’s ok, don’t be modest–especially about your cards. If you want to show off your collection on Zistle, now you can! Anyone can view your entire collection by visiting www.zistle.com/username/collection/sport. Visitors do not need to be logged in to see your collections so you can post a link on your blog or share it with anyone that you want.

When visitors access your collection, they will be able to browse in the same way you do when viewing your collection. Your collections are also now accessible from your dashboard by clicking the sport names in the “My Collections” section. What are you waiting for…go show off already!

We have launched the beta version of our teams functionality to our beta site. With this feature you can add a player’s team to the card when editing your collection, browsing the library, adding a card to the library or flagging a card.

All of the current professional teams for all four sports have been entered as well as a few retired, amateur and college teams. When adding team in list view, click on the “add team” link and type in the team name and it will automatically complete your selection. Click the green add button and the team will be added to that card just like that.

Select Add Team

Type name and click green add icon

If the team you are entering is not in our database, you will receive a prompt to add that team to the library.

You cannot see the team name while you are viewing your collection right now. If you would like to add teams to your cards, go to “edit collection” and select “just my cards” and add teams this way.

You will also note a different layout for editing collection. This was necessary to have enough room to display team info. We look forward to hearing your thoughts about this new layout.

We also plan to allow you to sort by team while editing but we have not yet built this functionality. We will likely add it in the next few days. If you can, try to add teams to a few cards and let us know what you think. We would like to make this available as soon as possible.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

It is Valentine’s Day which means that most people are thinking about a different type of cardboard–the type that tells loved ones you love them and/or the cardboard boxes that contain chocolates. Not us! We celebrated Valentine’s day early by heading to the local card shop and buying a box of fresh wax for each other. But it doesn’t stop there. All weekend, we are going to be working on cranking out some great new features for our loyal members because we really love you guys. Here is what we have lined up for our weekend of Zistle love.

Teams! As I write this, Josh is building the infrastructure to add teams. The lists will start with current professional teams but you will be able to add old teams, minor league teams, college teams, etc… We think we have come up with a pretty great solution for adding team to a card quickly as well as adding new teams. Just like adding a new set, a new team will have to be approved before users can see it. This has been a popular feature request and we are excited to launch it.

Layout improvements: Adding teams has forced us to reconsider our layout in list view. We are improving the layout to be able to see more cards at a time in gallery view as well as be able to see the team in list view.

Trading! This is a behemoth of a project which we plan to make a huge dent in this weekend. We are working hard to get this functionality to you. We definitely need people to beta test this for us. We’ll let you know as soon as it is live!

Other Bug Fixes/Improvements: You will definitely see some small updates as well. For example, some improvements/changes to adding cards, the ability to flag sets/subsets and the ability to add a box to the box break page.

There has been some confusion over our domains and frankly it is our fault. Initially, we were going to have a private beta site (beta.zistle.com) before our public launch on our main domain. We realized that this was a tad silly as we just wanted collectors to start using the site. So, we decided to go ahead and push everything to our main site www.zistle.com. This should be your main destination when using Zistle.

We will still be using beta.zistle.com to test new features before rolling them out to the new site. We strongly encourage you to check out our beta site to use new features and give us feedback before we launch them to the main site. We have recently received a ton of feedback from our members asking for new features and we’ve definitely heard you! We are already working hard to add new features to the site. For example, Dan from Saints of the Cheap Seats had a great idea  about being able to add entire sets/subsets to your collection (we may have given him carpel tunnel when he added over 2,500 cards to his collection over the past few days). Not only have we started working on building this feature, but Dan will be able to test this feature when it is finished and give his feedback.

At the moment, anyone can log onto the beta site to test new features. All of your data will transfer between the two domains. So if you update your WantList on beta, those changes will also happen on the main site. The only difference is that our beta site will have some additional features that have not been fully vetted (i.e. the site may break on you).

We want our beta site to be a way for our loyal users to test out new features while keeping our main site as bug free and stable as possible.

Breaking a box is one of the most exciting experiences in card collecting. How can you tell? The number of collectors who  share that experience online in card collecting forums, posting on blogs and even videos on YouTube. The reason is obvious–it is fun to share your pulls with others who are also passionate about cards and if you get screwed you want to rant. For readers, it is fun to read/watch, each break is unique, and there is a chance that someone could really get lucky or pull a really rare card.

While it is entertaining, it is also informational and provides unique insight into what breaking a box of a particular brand is really like. We want information on the number of pulls and how good they are. Which is the best box for autos? What about rookies? While individual reviews are helpful, you need to read several to get an accurate picture of how that product is performing. So when we started building our Box Breaks feature, we knew we needed a tool for members to share their box breaks but we also wanted to organize the data so that it would be a useful informational resource.  

In order to achieve this, we created a uniform method to evaluate the pulls from each box. A simple rating system would be too vague to be really useful. So, in addition to a rating, we determined the most important categories for any box: total pulls, autos, relics, parallels, inserts, and duplicates. When members break a box, they enter the cards they pulled from each category and that information is averaged with all other breaks. That information is available to all members and formatted so that you can easily sort by each attribute. So you can see which box has the most rookies, the most autos or which is the highest rated. 

This system accomplishes a few things simultaneously. The most important is that it is a really easy way for anyone to share and track their box breaks. You don’t need a camera or a blog. It also creates an unbiased, aggregated source of information on boxes from the collecting community. Zistle doesn’t sell boxes and we aren’t affiliated with any particular brand so all reviews will be posted. And most importantly, it is a really useful tool for making decisions about boxes based on a variety of attributes. 

We realize that this will not replace the in-depth commentary of your favorite blogger–and we don’t want it to!  We are trying to develop a tool that will be useful to bloggers as well as readers and of course Zistle members. If you would like to be one of the first people to try it out and give us feedback, be sure to sign up for our private beta launching in January at www.zistle.com. We need you!