You have a chance to speak to the man himself this afternoon.


This Tuesday, March 1st, at 5.30 p.m. (Paris time zone), we would like to invite you to the first English video chat of Delcampe.net!

Lien (http)

You have a chance to speak to the man himself this afternoon.


This Tuesday, March 1st, at 5.30 p.m. (Paris time zone), we would like to invite you to the first English video chat of Delcampe.net!

Lien (http)

I did attend the Meeting. It was a disappointing session in my opinion.

I did submit a relevant question relating to this thread as follows:

"Category Changes: yet another set of Category changes were rolled out at the weekend.
Sellers have asked many times for access to a Tool that will enable them to easily move items to revised Categories. The latest set of changes mean that I will have to reclassify about 4000 listings. This cannot realistically be done one by one. Why does Delcampe refuse to address this issue when the Moderators clearly have a tool?"

This question was not one of those chosen for a response.

I did get one of my other questions responded to (the first one selected in fact) but not actually answered. I may take this up as another thread.

Alan Catherall
[Hoatzinstamps]

Thanks for the feedback.

I arrived back home quite late but did read a few postings about the on-line session on another part of the forum.

It is disappointing that the owner of the site is not directly addressing several major issues concerning the smooth running of the site (particularly categories and their organisation and 'tidying up'). Needless to say I have had absolutely no response to my message to Phillippe the chap in charge of the category revisions and their implementation!

But I have had an offer of assistance from one of the moderating team for which I am very grateful. I did make a start manually shifting items one by one but the sheer magnitude of the task was very demoralising. Hopefully with moderator assistance this will be considerably diminished and it will be a question of tidying up the listings afterwards.

However this still does not address the main problem of what happens when the next round of major revisions rears its head and there are several thousand more items out of place again. The moderators themselves can only have limited time to assist and the task must be monumental and very time consuming for them.

The powers that be at Delcampe must give very serious consideration to providing the necessary tools to make such transitions easier otherwise the site will steadily deteriorate into an unwieldy mess as no one has thousands of hours to fiddle about shifting items around one by one.

One of the moderators kindly stepped in to help me last evening and moved over 3000 listings! This enabled me to step up to addressing the rest ... and I have spent most of today reviewing most of my listings and moving items c3-400. It is a mind numbing task - averaging 1 every 30 seconds!

If you are a conscientious seller you really have to make the changes otherwise you have no choice but to put all future listings where the old ones have been housed.

I have to say that the UK Moderators have been great ... and have tried to take up the issues raised in the Forum with Delcampe management but they too appear to be hitting a brick wall.

Good luck,

Alan Catherall
[Hoatzinstamps]

I shall be communicating your suggestions regarding fine-tuning the new GB (Cols) categories to Delcampe's Categories Team later this evening

I noticed several discrepancies whilst organising your listings which you have also picked up on, and which I agree should be addressed as soon as possible

I am very thankful for the very able assistance of Allan, the Moderator, who very kindly shifted several thousand of my listings into their correct slots last night. The onerous and tedious task of having to do this oneself one by one has disappeared - though I was bemused by the several thousand Emails in my in box telling me about each shift - but that is a small price to pay for such invaluable assistance.

All that is left to do is tidy up a few loose odds and ends - thus pessimism has shifted to optimism again. Many thank again Allan.

Allan's assistance has been OUTSTANDING. Thank you again.

I just hope that Delcampe recognise the efforts of the UK Moderators who are often unsung heroes in trying to bring some order to the rising tide misplaced listings resulting from Category changes.

Please Delcampe find a solution so that we can do our own listing re-classification with out having to rely on the goodwill of the Moderators!

Alan Catherall
[Hoatzinstamps]

I agree with both of you - Allan does a wonderful job.

As to the 1000's of emails - I remember those when the UK postcard categories had been changed. In the very nicest possible way, I used to think: "Oh, he's at it again".

Can I suggest if you know I'm going to be doing your listings by prior agreement, you set up a filter on your email system to divert these notifications into a separate inbox as there's no way to suppress their sending - it's OK if there's just one or two, but it gets a bit wearing after a couple of hundred...

You can switch off "item moved by moderator messages" in your control panel under My Emails. Which is useful if you know beforehand when a moderator is going to attack your listings.

Can I suggest if you know I'm going to be doing your listings by prior agreement, you set up a filter on your email system to divert these notifications into a separate inbox as there's no way to suppress their sending - it's OK if there's just one or two, but it gets a bit wearing after a couple of hundred...

You can switch off "item moved by moderator messages" in your control panel under My Emails. Which is useful if you know beforehand when a moderator is going to attack your listings.

Btw, Allan.

Sorry for not offering to help you with this task, but I know nothing at all about stamps and would probably have made things worse rather than better.

I forgot to add: if anyone else wants help with sorting out their Great Britain (Colonies) listings then do get in touch - I'm happy to help as and when I can except when the cricket highlights are on the telly

Some feedback ....

I've had quite a busy weekend, compared to those in February and I sense that this is in no small measure due to the Category changes you helped me implement. So, thank you again.

I was able to announce the Category changes to my customers, via my newsletter, together with my reasons for not introducing the Bonus Card. The fact that purchases were forthcoming was a good response - and I do believe buyers were able to find what they were looking for more easily.

I really wish Delcampe would enable Sellers to look after their own listings via a Tool ... so that it is easy to react to Category changes and keep the site 'tidy'.

I guess this thread will continue to resurface ... unfortunately.

Alan Catherall
[Hoatzinstamps]

With Delcampe now starting to expand some country categories in the Stamp arena I would recommend that attention is given with some urgency to providing sellers with a tool to move listings into the relevant new category without having to amend each listing. The latter task can be very time consuming if you have lots of items in a country category already.

The danger is that sellers will not have the time or inclination to make the changes leaving a large number of items in 'Unclassified'. This doesn't help the seller of course nor does it improve the image of Delcampe as the categories will become messy.

My plea is for an application that allows a seller to select all his listings in a specific [old] category; mark those that he wishes to move to another category; and then to select the new category. The application then applies all the marked items automatically to the new category. Simple? I would have thought that such a tool might be helpful to Delcampe 'Category Moderators' too.

Is this technically too difficult?

I think such a tool is needed before too many other changes are introduced.

If other sellers feel the same way please add your support.

Thanks,

Alan Catherall
Hoatzinstamps

Well, here I go again ... as if there weren't enough issues arising from the new Store page yet another Stamp Category gets introduced .... and still no tool to make the transition easy. Still Delcampe expects each listing to be modified individually. Come on Delcampe it is about time you stepped up to this issue and provided sellers with a tool to address Category changes. It really is unreasonable to expect us to move loads of items one by one !

I would also raise the fact that separating Commonwealth countries based on a pre and post Colonisiation principle so that they end up in a different part of the web site makes no sense whatsoever! My customers have complained about this to me ... and I have passed on these comments to you. Please take notice and take some sensible action to bring 'pre' and 'post' together in one place!

Alan Catherall
[Hoatzinstamps]

My solution to this would be double index the appropriate categories. As an example Malta - 1964 would be indexed under Great Britain (Colonies) as at present. Under Europe, Malta would have two sub categories Malta - 1964 (pre independence) and Malta 1964 - (post independence).

Just to avoid confusion, there is NO additional category Malta - 1964 (pre independence) remains 20577 but is indexed in two locations.

The whole Stamps category is a right mish mash, a few examples.

St Helena is under Africa but surely as one of the few parts of the Empire that remains under the Crown this should also be in Great Britain (Colonies).

New Hebrides needs to be split to make it easier to find French & British issues.


Great Britain Postmark Collection, over 6000 items, could do with sub categories - a couple come to mind:

Duplex - I for one would be dual listing some of my postcards in the Duplex sub category if that option was available.

Field/Forces Post Offices - A search on FPO resulted in 253 sales being found, there are categories containing far fewer items.