There was an internet outage that caused the IAB to be down for the last day or two. It is resolved now.

Over 500 users registered!

It's been a year since I looked at the IAB code size, so I looked again.

As of today, there are now 34,000 lines of code.

Using the same estimator as last time, over 20,000 person-hours would normally be spent on a project this size. (My current guess is about 2000 hours spent of my time on the current codebase).

When in a storefront, and you click on (for instance) KD Rares, you will see alternate printings of KD rares as well. This includes full bleeds, alt arts, or things reprinted in banzai edition.

You can click on Hide Alternate Printings to suppress this feature.

Google checkout is now supported by the IAB system if the seller has a google checkout account.

Over 300 users registered!

There was a problem where the set categories were not working right in internet explorer. It has been fixed now.

Change 1:
Let's say you used the quick search for "kd rare". Before it would find anything from KD or any rare card. Now it will require all words by default (override this by including a * at the end of one of he words).
It will also match words starting with what you list if you don't use stars yourself.

Change 2:
Now if you do a search at the top level of one of the games (if you have a game selected, but not any particular store), it will show all inventory items that match that search for every store in one list.
This way, you can have this kind of flow:

1. Go to IAB
2. Click L5R (or whatever)
3. Search for: "flash"
4. Get list of flash of steels (or any flash card) in all stores

The shopping cart was found to have a major bug today. The bug didn't allow you to add stuff to your cart under the right circumstances. This is fixed now.

If you see a bug like this, Contact Us so we can fix the problem quickly.

Our town has been mostly without power for 3 days now, and it's unclear how long I'll be out of power (right now I have IAB up on a generator, but probably only for a couple hours before I need to have the generator heating my house again).

More news as I have it, but not having electricity is not very fun.

Update: 12/16/2007 We have power again. It has been a rough last couple of days, but we are finally back up!

Storefronts have been added in the last week. As part of the addition of storefronts, there is now automatic shipping calculation and an automated checkout system. Let us know if there are any problems or questions with the new features!

There are now 200 registered users!

As of today (november 8, 2007), there are 22000 lines of code in the IAB. There is over 2 years of coding time to get there (Plus a large amount of planning before that). I estimate well over 1500 hours have been spent at this time (maybe more.. I wasn't keeping track). This represents over $50,000USD of my time spent.

Using the COCOMO II estimation tools available, for this size of project, it estimates over 12000 hours would normally be spent for a project of this size. If you calculate a standard rate of $35/hr, this comes to over $435,000USD value for the IAB codebase.

Stores are almost done.. Just a few remaining touches. And I have over 150 items on my TODO list, so wow!

(I occasionally like to look at these numbers to see how much work I've actually done).

If you are sending cards that can fit in a single toploader, the envelope maker can print off an envelope on regular paper that you can fold yourself and have a nice protected card with a good address.

To see the envelope maker in action, Click Here.

For more information, Click Here

We had a day of problems when a local backhoe chopped a fiber connection. In repairing the fiber, some other problems were caused as well. It all seems back up as of now.

Templates to repeat common tasks and change the look of your auctions in general have been added.

Also added is a relister.

These are both for paid accounts.

There was a problem inside the phone company, and there was some amount of downtime. Everything is working normally now, so it should all be ok.

Next sunday at 2:00am CST (GMT -6), a new daylight savings time change will happen.

This is the first daylight saving change following some new US changes with how daylight savings is handled, so I am not completely sure if there are any bugs out there that will affect the IAB.

If anything does affect the IAB, what will happen is that auctions after the time change will close one hour earlier than you might expect. So for auctions ending next sunday or after, be sure to not wait until the last hour to bid.

Again, I don't expect this to be a problem, but just in case something does happen, you should be aware.

Over 100 users have signed up as of today. 8 have registered as sellers

Well, I didn't expect any outage from the speed increase, but there was a little bit of sporadic outages as I was fighting with the new network equipment to get it working. It is all working now and the network speed is a lot faster than before.

Sometime Monday the 5th, IAB is going to get a network upgrade that doubles it's speed. We don't expect any major outages, but there might be some short one minute blips as the change happens.

I found when I uploaded the new IAB code to the server, advanced searching broke. I'm working on fixing it. Simple searching is still working (just put in stuff you want to search for in the upper right corner) - FIXED

The Imperial Auction Block has been completely rewritten with a lot of great new features. Let us know if you have any suggestions.

I'm going to get this done soon! I know I've been saying for the last few years I was working on it, but I've pretty much put 100% in the last few months to get IAB up and going again with a LOT nicer system than the old one.