The Undermine Journal - Tracking AH prices

Post by Erorus

Hey folks,

I've started work on a project called The Undermine Journal. It tracks the price of almost all items in the Auction House once an hour. This allows for up-to-the-hour pricing information, along with neat statistics on item price and availability history. Plus, you can search for and view seller activity, to see when your competition post auctions, and what sorts of things they post.

The site is in alpha right now, meaning chunks of it still aren't near complete, only a few realms are supported so far, and things may break or change drastically during development. Still, check it out; any feedback is appreciated, and you can post it here or contact me via the email address on the site.

I'm not asking for any money or page hits (the site doesn't even have any ads) but I'm just making this resource known to the Wowhead community. Thanks for any feedback. :)

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Mods, I looked over the advertising guidelines and I'm pretty sure I'm in the clear.

If you're advertising a service that's irrelevant to WoW players, you're out.
If you're advertising a service that's against WoW's Terms of Use, you're out.
If you're advertising a service with multiple posts, you're out.
If your first post is an advertisement, you're out.
If your posts are obviously designed for no purpose other than to get the advertisement in your signature in front of as many people as possible, you're out.
If you're a regular who has taken the time to get to know the other forum goers and become a respected part of the community, who maintains a resource that is relevant and helpful to WoW players and doesn't violate WoW's terms of use, then advertising that resource in a single, appropriately located thread is probably okay.

(##RESPBREAK##)8##DELIM##Gnub##DELIM##Looks ok enough :)

Post by Wildhorn

Normally, you send a mail to wowhead staff to ask them if you can post an advertise. Not advertise first.

On topic: How do you do it? You have some kind of "bot" browsing the AH (either via game or remote) once per hour on certain realms to get prices?
Would be nice to know if it is US or EU realms...
Also, here some suggestions:
- Change the background to a newspaper (wow style) texture.
- Change that purple background to black or something darker please.

Post by RottweilerCP

That is a great site. I would have to assume you're using the online AH to get your data. Obviously botting in the game is illegal. One thing I found when searching on glyphs, where you have that note at the bottom:

* Note: This item has a component that is a common quality ink. Since inks are rarely bought and sold by scribes, the ink cost shown is the lowest cost per ink of making a stack of from available herbs, then trading with Jessica Sellers if necessary.

Great note btw, but that Ink of the Sea actually links to Wowhead and not your site. Maybe that's on purpose, but I feel that any item link you can track on your site should link to your site. You already have it so that the item name on the summary page links to wowhead which is great. Again, I really like the site and it looks like you put quite a lot of thought into it.

I would also like to know if the realms are US or UK. If you could add US Galakrond Alliance I would probably use it daily.

Edit: Holy Crap! I just found the Inscription News tab and I'm loving it! What tool are you using to graph this data, it's beautiful? Granted I haven't used any similar tool since college so maybe it's actually crap, but I like it. Is there any way to make the Load button have a press effect. The way it is right now I could see a lot of people pushing it multiple times thinking it wasn't pressed because of the delay. Also, I guess you don't have too much control, but that Q1 2001-Q4 2014 is pretty confusing.

Post by TheReal

You ARE scanning with a ~~bot~~ looping script through the remote auction house, right?

Post by Erorus

How do you do it? You have some kind of "bot" browsing the AH (either via game or remote) once per hour on certain realms to get prices?
I wrote a script that goes through the Armory AH interface. Wasn't much of a leap for me, since I've been running Quick Armory for years. :)

Would be nice to know if it is US or EU realms...
Yeah, my bad. US realms only. I made it a bit more clear on the front page just now.

Also, here some suggestions:
- Change the background to a newspaper (wow style) texture.
- Change that purple background to black or something darker please.

Thanks for your ideas. :) The layout's fairly grayscale.. by purple do you mean the color under the line graphs on the top of the item page? I'll futz with it a bit.

Great note btw, but that Ink of the Sea actually links to Wowhead and not your site. Maybe that's on purpose, but I feel that any item link you can track on your site should link to your site.That particular link was intentional. I may make it a bit more clear and link it directly to the currency for tab, just to show that ink swaps for all other common inks. The "Ink of the Sea" link in the table just above it does go to its page on The Undermine Journal.

What tool are you using to graph this data? ... Also, I guess you don't have too much control, but that Q1 2001-Q4 2014 is pretty confusing.

Yeah, I'm using Google Visualizations and Google Gadgets for the charts, and that motionchart really is limited with respect to time. The smallest granularity it has is by day, so that's why I have that workaround with the years/quarters. I don't like the workaround much, either, so I'm still trying to figure a way to make it clearer without losing that chart's data resolution of 4x a day.

Thanks for your comments!

Post by Wildhorn

By purple (which now is grey, on a different computer), I means the background under the "newspaper" background (the unused space).
Basically, there is too much light color for gamers dark-area used eyes :P

Post by RottweilerCP

That makes sense about the Ink of the sea link. Of course it's Google, they're amazing. So, any chance of getting Galakrond Alliance up there?