I was going to post this last night, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to stop weeping after that heartbreaking Twins loss at Yankee Stadium. After regrouping, I am ready to share some pretty cool milestones. Even if the Twins can’t beat the Yankees and leave 17 men on base, at least Zistle is still going strong.

Milestone #1 : Shoeboxlegends reaches 1 million contribution points!

Ok, this is a little crazy. I mean 1,000,000–that is six full zeros. And this happened a while ago because his current points are actually at 1,121,489. I am not sure how we should award this type of dedication. Your own custom status? Good work Shoebox, you are an inspiration to card scanners everywhere.

It is also to take a moment to say thank you to everyone who contributes to Zistle. You many not have 1,000,000 points but you still make a huge impact on Zistle.

Milestone #2 : Zistle reaches 600,000 cards

Over the past few months, we have over doubled the Zistle library. We are growing little by little. We are working on some tools that will help make it easier to add cards more quickly. We realize how much work everyone puts in to add these cards and you are doing a great job.

Milestone #3: Zistle has 50,000 user-added images

This is really the milestone that is crazy to us. I mean that is A LOT of images. That isn’t the total amount of images grant you – just the ones added by our users. As we continue to grow in membership, we are starting to get really great photo coverage.

Hey Zistle Peeps! We hope everything is going well. We wanted to share this video from Packs to the People before it hits the shelves. As always, we enjoy their fresh approach to Box Breaks. Enjoy.

Hey Zistlers. I want to say thank you for continuing to contribute to the site and give your feedback. It is extremely helpful for us and we always love hearing from you. Some of your questions and concerns have gone unanswered on Get Satisfaction–the site we use to track ideas and questions. I have recently combed through the topics and responded to many of your ideas/problems so if you haven’t heard from me in a while, please check it out.

Also, there have been many excellent ideas shared through the feedback tool. If you haven’t checked out what people are saying, it might be a good time to peruse the ideas and let us know your thoughts. It can be hard to justify adding a feature if only one person is asking for it. Even just indicating which ideas you really like can be extremely helpful for us in determining the next feature to add. Keep telling us what you think. We are listening!

Hey everyone. It has been a while since you have heard from us–unless you are one of the few who sends us an occasional email. If you were worried, we are still here and still working.

We have some bugs that we are trying to figure out right now. People with over 15K cards in their collection may notice some performance issues. Thanks for your patience while we work on it. If you are having issues, it would help us immensely if you could let us know about it.

I want to take a second to give a big huge THANK YOU to all of our members who have been adding cards with some amazing scans. You guys rock. I also want to welcome all of our new members. Thanks to DKrill’s recent endorsement on Saints of the Cheap Seats, we have seen a big increase in membership. Thanks DKrill!

If you are interested in helping us grow this great community of people, we have made a little banner ad that you can download and add to your blog or webpage. If you put up an ad, you are a friend of Zistle and we will happily add you to our list of friends.

If you have ideas or suggestions, send your feedback through our feedback link or leave a comment on the blog. Also, all members should feel welcome to reach me directly at ashley@zistle.com with any praise, questions, complaints or concerns.

Hey Zistlers. Andrew from “Packs to the People” emailed us and asked for our help promoting his video “Manhunt Break”. They entered a creative contest a while back and it turned in to a sponsored gig from Upper Deck and they are trying to get the word out. We are always willing to help collectors who are doing new things in the hobby. This is definitely not your typical box break video. This is an 08-09 O-Pee-Chee Premiere Hockey Break but they have others from other sports on the way. Check it out and if you have a youtube account, let them know what you think.

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!

This is the first in a series of posts that will begin addressing issues in creating a Zistle Style Guide. The Zistle Style Guide will be a collaborative project in Zistle members will reach consenus regarding naming conventions and categorizing that will be used for the Zistle Library. Before I delve into this post, I want to make the point that there are many different naming practices that exist–thereby creating the confusion in the first place. This discussion is not to decide what is the “right” way but what is the best way for Zistle and its members. I am aware that some of you are quite passionate about your views and I ask you to think about what is the best for everyone–not your personal preferences.Thanks in advance for your participation and enthusiasm.

Brands vs. Sets

While it may seem obvious, I think it is important to distinguish the difference between a brand and a set and the implications for Zistle. A brand is the name of the Card Manufacturer: Topps, Upper Deck, Razor, Donruss, etc. On Zistle, sets are the actual sets released by a manufacturer. So Topps is a set in addition to Topps Heritage. Topps Heritage is not a subset of Topps. There are a few reasons for this but the most important reason is parallel sets and categorization. Most sets include multiple subsets (parallels, inserts, autos, relics) often with the same numbers (parallels). If we do not have subsets, it becomes impossible to sort these cards correctly. A good rule of thumb is that if you can buy a pack of it, it is a set. If you can’t buy a pack of it, it is a subset of another set. There are exceptions and often there are inserts from other sets in many sets. These are admittedly more difficult to classify and requires a second post. I think most people agree on this topic, however, if anyone has any ideas for how to deal with sets that fall outside of the conditions listed above or if anyone has any additional comments, please share them.

Main Set vs. Subsets

In my personal opinion, this is one of the most difficult issues to resolve and I am extremely interested in what people think about this topic. The main set is another way of saying “base set” or “base cards”. Normally these cards are numbered numerically and have no particular distinguishing attributes (i.e. 1-400). Parallel cards should be categorized as a subset. Insert cards should also be categorized as a subset unless they belong to a different set.

Again, outside of a few exceptions, there seems to be general consensus on this topic. The one problem we need to resolve is when a card is in the normal numbering system but it is distinct from the base card design. For example, Season Highlights in Upper Deck occur in the normal numbering system, but they are obviously different in design from the regular base card. On one hand, if you take them out of the main set, there appears to be a hole in the numbering and can often lead to duplicates. However, if you don’t make them a subset, there is a loss of some detail. Some members have kept them in the main set, but added the title of the card, so that they can be searched. While this keeps the detail, some card names are often too long.Your thoughts on this are most appreciated.

Specific Sets: Bowman, Upper Deck, Topps

There are a few sets that I would like to address specifically and ask for help from the Zistle community on how to deal with these sets.

Bowman- Bowman released two products pre-2008– Bowman and Bowman Chrome. Within those sets, there are the draft cards as well- Bowman Draft and Bowman Chrome Draft. Both of the sets have multiple subsets. Because of this, Zistle lists them as four separate sets: Bowman, Bowman Draft, Bowman Chrome and Bowman Chrome Draft. Are there any thoughts on this? Is this a good solution or do you find it confusing?  In 2008, Bowman started releasing a Draft Pick and Prospects set which may have solved this problem going forward but I would love to hear your thoughts pre-2008.

Topps/Upper Deck–Series 1 and Series 2- Both Topps and Upper Deck release their main product in two distinct releases, Series 1 and Series 2. Currently, Zistle lists both Topps and Upper Deck as one product and puts those two sets together. While it diminishes some confusion, the carda are technically labeled distinctly by their respective series and often contain different subsets. Is it better to have one big Upper Deck/Topps set or better to distinguish them as separate sets?

I am going to start some discussions in the Zistle Forum about the above mentioned topics so you can join the discussion there or leave a comment on this post. Of course, feel free to start your own discussion thread about any issues that you feel need to be resolved. Thanks everyone for contributing to this!

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!

The time has come for a style guide. We cannot wait any longer. While approving the flagged cards this evening, I noticed that there are some flagging wars over how to label a card. We need come to a consensus on a few things so that we don’t have people wasting their time flagging endlessly. As we continue to grow, it is important that we have guidelines to help our database to be as accurate as possible.

Since I anticipate this will be a little messy, I am going to be writing a series of  posts about issues that I am seeing over and over again. Please, Please, PLEASE help us by giving feedback in our comments so that we can come to some consensus over these issues. As we reach decisions, I will be adding them to the Zistle Style Guide which will be housed on the Zistle site.

Here is the first list of topics: determining what is a set and what is a subset, the number of a card, multiplayer cards, short prints, team checklists, and named cards (different from payer name), and unnumbered cards.

Please let me know in the comments if you have other suggestions for additional topics. I know there are others out there so just let me know. I am working on the set/subset post now and it should be ready soon. Thanks for participating and I am looking forward to seeing how this works.

Hey everyone. Our apologies for not being very responsive the last week or so. We just moved from Seattle to Minneapolis and we are just now getting settled in. Thanks so much for your patience and understanding.

We have had problems getting our internet up and running consistently so it will take us some time before we can get any updates out. We have been reading your feedback and trying to approve cards as fast as we can–you guys have been busy. We would love to hear from you about what you think should be included in the next release either on our feedback page or by email (ashley@zistle.com). We have a lot of projects coming up but if you think we need something right away, please let us know.