Scott_Schechter

We recognize this as a challenging area for many collectors, especially given that experience is the best way to judge the originality of color on Indian Cents. This is made doubly challenging because early dates, middle dates and later dates naturally have different appearances. And some dates, like the 1883, have very distinct color, essentially unique to that date.

Since the grading of Indian Cents requires that NGC designate a color – red, red brown or brown – we indentify coins as Altered Color when they have undergone some treatment to appear redder than they would otherwise be. The color of the coin itself is the most effective means to identify this treatment, but luster may be impaired as well. The hues of altered coins are readily identifiably to NGC graders and usually just jump out as being off-color.

The best thing to do is to look as many coins in person as you can. Often a copper coin of artificial color will be described as being “too orange” or “too pink,” but of course these are relative terms that presume knowledge of the natural color of a coinage issue. Looking at high-grade red coins in NGC holders will show you good color.

Revenant, we're looking at making another tweak to the Custom Set display that will address your issue. I'll PM you with the timeframe and details later today. Regards, Scott

-If I am viewing page 2 or 3 of my registry sete, and view the contents of any set, when i hit the back button it takes me to page 1, not the page that I was previously viewing.

That is annoying! We're looking into some fixes for this.

Hi Tim:

We made a couple of changes to the display of Custom Sets last week. Now the Owner Comments are shown in the main list view of your Set. I hope this will allow you to display information in the way that you want.

We looked at hundreds and hundreds of sets before we elected to merge the information in Slot Comments into Owner Comments. It turns out that very few members were using both fields, and almost always a coin description was put into the Slot Comment field. I don’t have the exact stats with me but it was something like fewer then 10% of all Signature Sets had both fields occupied, and fewer than 5% of the actual slots.

If there is a particular way you’d like to show your Sets, let me know by PM or posting here. We’ll try to figure out a way to a make this work for you.

Regards,

Scott

Hi gherrmann44,

We're addressing the HTML description conflicts as this has been reported. No issues had been identified previously with the Contact Member form, so I'll have this looked at right away.

We really did design the Collection Manager to be a complete solution and there are some very neat features coming that build on the basic controls and reports that are now live. I do appreciate your positive feedback.

Regards,

Scott

I know the "Signature sets" were limited to 150 coins, that is why we had to break the set up to a PART A, B, and C. Are you now saying that we can have them ALL in one set? It would be great if we could.

 

Tim

Yes, these sets can be merged into one set. The process of doing this is quick, too. You can select the set from left slider menu in the the Collection Manager and the select all the coins in the set using the All link. Then hit the Add to Custom Set button at the bottom of the screen and choose the set you want to add them to.

You may have to spend a bit of time to sort them properly, which is always a challenge in a very large set.

Also, this doesn't delete the old sets, so they will be displayed until you either delete them or hide them from public view.

In the owners comments column we had the CONECA die numbers and in the slot name we had the date (mint mark) so anyone looking at the set from the public page could see which variety it was.

 

Under the new “Custom Set”, these columns are not there and anyone looking at the set will not be able to make out what it is all about.

 

Sorry for the rant,

Tim

 

EDITED TO ADD: If you can increase the number of items to view on a page from 10 to 50, why not have it the way it used to me - the whole set just like you do on the "Competitive Sets".

We looked at hundreds of Signature Sets. The truth is that most people didn't use both Slot Comments and Owner's Description and no two users used them the same way. I like the way that you were using them, but the concept wasn't widely understood.

Your slot comments are now in the first part of your Owner's comments which will be visible after the modification. We'll do this in the best way to allow the set owner to make an attractive presentation of his coins. And we'll do it very soon.

Signature Sets were limited to 150 items, and Custom Sets do not have a limit. That's why we needed to introduce some pagination. We also want sets to load in a way that offers good performance, and sending info about 50 items means that the page load will be quick. It might make sense for us to have a view all option or allow the viewer to set the number of rows, but the default will be 50.

I think we're addressing your comments pretty directly, and you'll see the results next week.

Hi Tim C:

Thanks for your comments. While the new system is technically odorless, we are keen on eliciting any and all constructive comments that we can. Just so that I understand, what about the current Custom Sets display do you not like? or what did you really like about the old view?

We have received comments about the number of items shown in the main Custom Sets List View. The number of items shown will increase from 10 to 50 next week. We’re also going to make the Owner’s Description visible on the main screen, again in response to the loss of Slot Comments from the main List View.

Regards,

Scott

P.S. Since you can't run two version of Internet Explorer on one PC, there is a still a good workaround if you don't want to upgrade from IE7.

Download Firefox browser: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/

That way you can have a browser that is super speedy with Collectors Society and keep IE7 for other sites. Just a thought.

Hi Zo444:

I just want to comment publicly on the browser issue because this was a major point of consideration during the site development. Everything that we have implemented is fully supported in Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), but, and this is a big "BUT," performance of the site will be much better using Internet Explorer 8 (IE8).

I am not a tech guy so the details were a bit lost on me. For those interested, IE8 has a new -script engine that makes web pages based on JavaScript or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) much faster than in previous versions. Our website new uses a lot of these scripts.

When planning the redesign, we chose the most powerful and best controls that we could. That was the top priority. The language and controls on the new Collectors Society site are without question the best tools available. There was a problem, though. They were slower on IE7. From my point of view, I didn't want to make the website slow for anybody.

To analyze the issue, we looked at web browser usage figures. IE7 was released in 2006 and currently accounts for 14% of all web browsers. IE8 was released in 2009 and accounts for 28% of web browsers. The percentage of Collectors Society users is higher for both IE7 and IE8 than the global average, but the number of Collectors Society members using IE7 is decreasing every month.

I think that it’s hugely obnoxious and invasive to ask someone to update their web browser just to use our website. But at the same time, internet technology is rapidly changing and improving, so we were caught. The software code that we use of course conforms to the current best practices of the industry. It’s simply does not perform optimally on a four-year-old web browser. It works fine, but it is just not as fast as it can be. The great advantage is that an upgrade to IE8 will similarly improve performance on millions of other websites as well.

I do sincerely hope that this at least explains our reasoning to any users of IE7 who do not have the best experience but are hesitant to upgrade.

Regards,

Scott

Augustus - yes, the set categories are being made clickable in a future release.

To add to what Arch has said, we have a couple of tutorial videos online that describe how to add a coin and how to use the Collection Manager grid. You can watch them here:

http://coins.www.collectors-society.com/WCM/Tutorials.aspx

Paul Kiraly 3 -

1. You could have said, "slower than molasses." We're looking into this. Also, Internet Explorer 8 will perform much better than IE7 because of JavaScript issues. This is a recommended upgrade.

2. This enhancement to click a set is coming soon.

3. We're not able to replicate this issue, but we'll keep looking at it.

Buddypal- it is possible to create a privately visible Custom Set that includes both raw and certified coins, but not possible to fill slots in Competitive Sets with raw coins. There is a lot of underlying logic to achieve "slot validation," i.e. making sure that a coin is eligible for a particular slot to then be awarded Registry points which does not work for raw coins.

You can design your own Custom Set that mirrors a Competitive Set's composition, and complete it with raw coins, certified coins and wanted coins (coins you don't yet own) to see the full view of the Set in Collection Manager.

Architecht may have some thoughts on how this can be completed most efficiently or by copying a Custom Set that already exists.

Ohiodimes - Thanks for your comments. There is an Owner Estimate feature that allows you to supply a value in a separate column. It should be live soon.

I've pinned this thread to the top of the forum, and re-named it the official comment thread. (Thank you, Ohiodimes, for letting me take this liberty with your thread.)

If anyone has questions or comments, please post them here.

We're obviously proud of this new tool and we hope you love it. We also want to make the site as good as it can possibly be.