Here is some stuff we have been working on. Most of these are features/bugs that Zistle members have specifically suggested or requested. We added back to features from the old zistle site that people missed - Main Set appearing on top and Adding Team in list view. We want you to know that we really do listen and implement your ideas on Zistle so keep the ideas/suggestions coming.

Main Set now appears on top and is automatically created for new sets

These were feature on Zistle before we rebuilt the site and they are finally back. Rather than having to scroll down to the middle of the long list of subsets, Main Set will automatically appear on the top rather than in alphabetical order. Also, if you are creating a new set, you no longer have to create the Main Set subset – it is automatically done for you.

Add team easily in list view

This is another feature that existed on the old Zistle and is back by popular demand. We have made it easier to quickly add team to a card in list view. In case you are new to the site – here is how it works.

In list view, when a team has not been assigned a blue ‘add team’ link will appear in the team column. If you click the link, a text box will appear where you can begin typing any part of the team name and it will auto-populate a list of matching teams.

Simply select the team from the drop-down list and just like that you have added the team. If you make a mistake and select the wrong team, you will need to flag the card in order to change it.

Making Bulk Import Cards a little more user friendly

One of our major new features for the latest release of Zistle was adding a way for users to mass import cards into the Zistle library. This was a pretty big feature for us and one that we have been talking about for a long time. I was recently trying to fix some issues with Bowman Chrome and realized that we could make importing cards a lot more user-friendly.

The first thing that we did is made the formatting guidelines for importing cards appear in a new tab rather than opening in the pop-up. If you had a question about how to format your CSV file, the link for formatting guidelines would open in the pop-up. It didn’t fit very well and to go back to the import page, the user had to close the window and start all over again. What a pain! Now, if you want to double check the formatting before importing your cards, the guidleines will display in a new tab and you can easily go back and import the cards.

Which brings us to our second improvement: Zistle will now auto-populate the year, set and subset that you are currently viewing when you are importing cards. Before, if you were adding cards to 2010 Topps Main Set and decided to bulk import, you would have to add that information again. Now that information will automatically appear although you can change it if you are not on the right subset.

One thing I noticed while I was importing cards was that occasionally I would forget to add the file before clicking submit. I would get an error and the wondow would close. What happened? Did the site break? Nope – I just forgot to add the file. I would have to click import cards again, enter in the subset again and do it all over again. Now if you forget to add the file, red text will appear notifying you that a file must be selected to continue. Whew – much easier.

Our hope is that we can give you regular updates on what we are working on behind the scenes to make Zistle. I know we can disappear sometimes working on the site and you won’t hear from us for several weeks and it isn’t always bovious what we are working on. We know you want to hear from us more often and we are working on that. Thanks for being a part of Zistle and helping us make it better.

Set experts is one of the features that we are most excited about with the recent release. This feature allows users to moderate individual sets, validate cards and moderate flagged cards. We are working on how to make this feature a little more obvious – but we thought we would get you started with a quick tutorial on how to become a set expert.

1. Go the Library Tab and search for the set that you would like to moderate. In the screenshot below, I have searched for 2008 Upper Deck and I have a list of all 2008 Upper Deck Sets.

2. Select the set that you would like to moderate from the search results. In this example, I have selected Upper Deck 2008 and I have been directed to the set directory page. On this page, I can search within the set, select different subsets and report any problems. On the upper right hand page, it will also show the set expert and give you the option to volunteer to help.

3. Select ‘volunteer to help’ and a pop-up will appear where you can add a few comments on why you want to become a set expert (this is optional). Josh and I will receive a notification of your request.

4. When your request has been approved, you will receive a message in your inbox notifying you that you are now a set expert. You will also see a Set Expert Panel on your dashboard where you will now see any flags for that set, new cards added to that set and any issues reported.

Congratulations! Now you are a set expert. Your power is endless!

Hi Zistlers! Thanks again to those of you that have taken the time to give us feedback over the past few weeks. We have been working hard to make sure that we address all of your concerns, suggestions and issues with the new site. We appreciate you using our new feedback tool and helping us track our progress.

We have had a lot of bugs and we appreciate your patience as we fix them. The good news is that we have not had anyone report that they could not access their collections or received error messages while trying to view their Wantlist. Our first priority was to make sure that the site could work for everyone – even if you had a massive collection. If you are having issues – please let us know.

Import/Export

The mass import/export has been working well and we are very excited that you have been trying it out. We have increased our user created cards in the database by 30% – with over 30,000 cards added to the site since we re-launched. That means in a year and a half of user submissions, users added 100,000 cards compared to 30,000 in that last few weeks. That’s pretty amazing! Thanks to jmurph8081 who has been busy importing and completing several sets as well as becoming our first set expert and taking the lead on the contributor leaderboard.

We hope that more of you will become set experts and help us build the Zistle database and moderate the library. I will be writing a post later about how set expert works and how you can give jmurph8081 a run for his money in the top spot.

Thanks for your patience during the launch and our subsequent absence. The launch took a lot longer than we expected and there were some bugs that we had not anticipated. As a result, we did not have as much time as we would have liked to test and make sure that everything was working properly. A huge THANK YOU to those of you who have taken the time to use the new site and give us feedback. Josh will be working full time this week on getting bugs fixed so if there is something that isn’t working or you have a question – please use our new feedback tool. You can access by using the link on the side of your browser – see below.

Please give us your feedback using the side link

We are using Tender as our new feedback and FAQ tool. Not only will this be the way that Zistle users can report bugs and other issues, it will serve as an area where we can cumulatively add to the knowledge base for new users. If and when possible, it is really helpful to us to report one problem at a time rather than a laundry list of issues in one thread. Then we can say: “hooray! We fixed this problem!” and then we can move on to the next one. It also helps other users identify individual problems and then add to the discussion if they are also experiencing it. That being said, we sincerely appreciate the feedback and your help finding the bugs. It is ultimately our job to make sure that everything is working and we appreciate any and all help.

Over the next few days, I will be responding to some of your questions and suggestions on the blog as well as in the help and support section. I will also be addressing some of the features that did not make it into this release and how we plan to continue to work on the site moving forward.

We want to thank you again for your feedback, support and patience as we made this change over to the new platform. It was definitely not as smooth as we wanted it to be and we will be working hard over the next few weeks to rapidly fix bugs and make sure that the site is running smothly. The current version of Zistle is certainly not the last. Now that we have made this transition, we will be able to make updates more quickly in addition to being able to accommodate users with hundreds of thousands of cards.

This launch paved the way for all of the features that we have been planning for the last year. We are so excited to be on this new platform and to make Zistle what we know it can be.

The Zistle live chat has become a pretty lonely place. The idea has been tossed around by several Zistlers to set up at least one time during the week when people would go online and chat. I saw now is as good of a time as any to get something started. So this Sunday night while the football game is on, we are going to have an official chat session on Zistle. People can organize trades, mingle and get to know newbies. Join in anytime. If you have a blog, please spread the word. One note is that you need to have a Zistle account to access chat so if you mention it to others please let them know. This should be fun. See you Sunday.

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!

UPDATE 4/24: Thanks for your patience while we finalized wrestling. It is now up and available for you to enjoy.

UPDATE 4/23 : This has been disabled for the moment as we are working out some details regarding the content.  We’ll update again when we know what the final verdict is here.

It was time to add another sport to Zistle. While racing may seem like the obvious next addition, there were a stack of WCW cards in our collection that forced us to add wrestling. Wrestling cards are purely amazing if you love bad wax. I mean I am not sure you could find a better example of the most absurd cards ever manufactured. Plus, pro-wrestling from the early 90′s brings back some great memories–so I guess we are being a little selfish. I mean I will just let some of these speak for themselves. There is infinite material but here are some of my favorites.

The honorable former governor of Minnesota aka “The Body”

This guy gives me nightmares. I mean look at that claw manoeuvre

The good old Bushwackers. If there was super glue in your shampoo wouldn’t your hands be stuck to your head rather than some else’s head?

I could do this all day. Oh Andre!

We have to give a big thank you to WrestlingTradingCards.com for supplying the photos. They have been compiling this online collection since 2002 and they are extremely dedicated to the great circus known as professional wrestling. Every card provided by Wrestling Trading Cards has a link to their site so if you are interested in learning more, please check them out.

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!

Zistle’s football library just grew substantially thanks to Mike from Nearmint’s Vintage Football Cards. Mike graciously shared the beautiful scans featured on his reference site the Vintage Football Card Gallery with Zistle and we are extremely excited. I mean you can just see from the image of his site above that these scans are beautiful. If you haven’t checked out the gallery, it is a well-designed site that contains various football sets from 1948-1975 with great images and more information than most sites.

Mike got back into the hobby after a friend got him hooked on 1989 ProSet. After a short time, he started collecting cards from his childhood and in 1999 started selling cards on Ebay.  When Ebay raised thier prices in 2001, Mike launched his own sales site Nearmint Vintage Football Cards and never looked back. TheVintage Football Card Gallery grew from the sales site and 98-99% of the cards in the gallery were at one time in Mike’s own personal collection or sold through his site–meaning that he has spent quite a bit of time with his scanner.

Mike is a true Zistle hero. Not only does he run a fabulous site selling vintage football cards but he has created an amazing resource for vintage football card collectors. We are truly honored that his gallery is now a part of the Zistle library.