pistonheads classified
10 November 2011, 11:47 AM
#5
i hate it... my car has reverted back to its original price. ive tried to relist it and pay the £9.99, but it still wont load. afetr a phonecall they tell me bare with us...
arrrrrrrrrrrrhhhh!!!!!! i dont mind paying, but at least make the fookin thing work before letting it into public domain......
arrrrrrrrrrrrhhhh!!!!!! i dont mind paying, but at least make the fookin thing work before letting it into public domain......
10 November 2011, 12:02 PM
#6
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Fooking useless.
Put an ad up the day before it changed. Ad still not back so waste of time and money. Can't get an answer out of them and have now threatened to ask my credit card company to refund me as they haven't provided the service I paid for.
Shocking and awful comms. There should be an apology ont he front page right now instead of that p1ss poor article about 'come and have a look at the new classified section' with no bloody ads in it.
GRRRRRR!!!
5t.
Put an ad up the day before it changed. Ad still not back so waste of time and money. Can't get an answer out of them and have now threatened to ask my credit card company to refund me as they haven't provided the service I paid for.
Shocking and awful comms. There should be an apology ont he front page right now instead of that p1ss poor article about 'come and have a look at the new classified section' with no bloody ads in it.
GRRRRRR!!!
5t.
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10 November 2011, 12:34 PM
#8
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I was searching for Mondeo ST's to which 17 were displayed Then, when I narrowed the search to ST220 and £2000-£6000, there were none!
10 November 2011, 01:04 PM
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just got this off their team. Highlighted the good bit but as said, why oh why launch a site that isn't ready? did they not test it?
5t.
Thank you for your email, we apologise for any delay in replying to you but we have a large amount of correspondence to respond to.+-
This time yesterday we were preparing to launch the new look classifieds and tweaked home page, and 22 hours later it's clear the new site is suffering from a few teething issues.
The two main things we are looking at right now are:
1) Performance of the site. It isn't behaving well under load, and is doing some very odd things that we simply didn't see during testing. Before anyone asked, we load tested this significantly beyond the load it would normally hit on our busiest days, so we're scratching our heads about this one. Once resolved the normal site speed will return and search will be faster than ever before.
2) Search indexing - in other words, the fact that you can only see 13,000 cars, despite the fact that there are 95,000 cars in the database. We're currently trying to resolve this one too, as it means you are not seeing the full amount of cars available when you search currently.
If you are an advertiser, all adverts are on the site but due to the above issue you may not be able to see your advert at this time. Once the search issue has been resolved your advert will appear – including any amends or image changes you may have carried out on the old site. The issues we have with search indexing may also affect your ability to log into the advert management centre, once we have fixed this issue will also be resolved.
All private advertisers will be given extensions to their ads, so nobody will lose anything, this update will happen automatically once the site is working at full speed.
Please accept our sincere apologies from the entire PH team. This is as frustrating for us as you because the tech team have been working hard on this for a considerable amount of time in the build up to yesterdays launch.
We appreciate that some will take time to get used to the new look and feel, but we assure you that when the site is performing as it should the search tools work really, really well, and in addition to the new functionality we have been careful to ensure the 'old' way of searching the classifieds is still available a little further down the page.
We'll be updating you during the day on this as soon as we know more so please keep an eye on the forums on PistonHeads.com. We have a very large technical team working on it as I write and, despite some of the comments that have been made about their abilities, they are experts on this stuff and will find a solution very soon.
Thanks for your patience, and thanks for the feedback given so far.
5t.
Thank you for your email, we apologise for any delay in replying to you but we have a large amount of correspondence to respond to.+-
This time yesterday we were preparing to launch the new look classifieds and tweaked home page, and 22 hours later it's clear the new site is suffering from a few teething issues.
The two main things we are looking at right now are:
1) Performance of the site. It isn't behaving well under load, and is doing some very odd things that we simply didn't see during testing. Before anyone asked, we load tested this significantly beyond the load it would normally hit on our busiest days, so we're scratching our heads about this one. Once resolved the normal site speed will return and search will be faster than ever before.
2) Search indexing - in other words, the fact that you can only see 13,000 cars, despite the fact that there are 95,000 cars in the database. We're currently trying to resolve this one too, as it means you are not seeing the full amount of cars available when you search currently.
If you are an advertiser, all adverts are on the site but due to the above issue you may not be able to see your advert at this time. Once the search issue has been resolved your advert will appear – including any amends or image changes you may have carried out on the old site. The issues we have with search indexing may also affect your ability to log into the advert management centre, once we have fixed this issue will also be resolved.
All private advertisers will be given extensions to their ads, so nobody will lose anything, this update will happen automatically once the site is working at full speed.
Please accept our sincere apologies from the entire PH team. This is as frustrating for us as you because the tech team have been working hard on this for a considerable amount of time in the build up to yesterdays launch.
We appreciate that some will take time to get used to the new look and feel, but we assure you that when the site is performing as it should the search tools work really, really well, and in addition to the new functionality we have been careful to ensure the 'old' way of searching the classifieds is still available a little further down the page.
We'll be updating you during the day on this as soon as we know more so please keep an eye on the forums on PistonHeads.com. We have a very large technical team working on it as I write and, despite some of the comments that have been made about their abilities, they are experts on this stuff and will find a solution very soon.
Thanks for your patience, and thanks for the feedback given so far.
10 November 2011, 01:07 PM
#13
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All they have tried to do is implement a 'smarter' version of the Autotrader search.
How the hell it got to be released in this state I will never know.
How the hell it got to be released in this state I will never know.
12 November 2011, 04:41 PM
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Missed what it was like when they changed it. I think autotrader is far too cluttered and busy. That said, I'm going to advertise my car on it soon. Pistonheads has gone down hill IMHO. When ads were free I used to find that you'd get a good steady flow of interest whenever you tried to sell a car. I've spent £20-odd advertising the Mondeo and had virtually nothing (and, no, it's not priced stupidly). It's far more sell-able than my Impreza's and yet nowt. Makes me wonder if a big chunk of their customer base abandoned them when they started charging.
13 November 2011, 12:04 AM
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Missed what it was like when they changed it. I think autotrader is far too cluttered and busy. That said, I'm going to advertise my car on it soon. Pistonheads has gone down hill IMHO. When ads were free I used to find that you'd get a good steady flow of interest whenever you tried to sell a car. I've spent £20-odd advertising the Mondeo and had virtually nothing (and, no, it's not priced stupidly). It's far more sell-able than my Impreza's and yet nowt. Makes me wonder if a big chunk of their customer base abandoned them when they started charging.
The old classifieds were pretty rubbish, although rubbish as they were the features that it did have worked.
Now it doesnt work but it has more features. Eventually itll be better, although I dont like the look of it. I stopped bothering with Autotrader when the 'new' site became their only option: hopefully PH will fare better...
Simon
13 November 2011, 09:34 AM
#26
Obviously their database experts was not as much of an expert as they thought they were.
Their failing is trying port over a load of existing adverts from the old system, which doesn't have proper category filters, then trying to sort this semi-disorganised database into new category filters that allows a much more searchable database. It will never work as the old system relied too much on the advertisers spelling ability and intiative to use the right words in the description (i.e someone advertsing a 'Scooby Imprezza' - that will never port over properly ).
Personally, knowing how the classifieds were (dis)organaised before I would only ever consider a new clean slate classified - i.e Stop new adverts on the old system with two weeks notice, then switch over to the new system for new adverts only - where everyone will have to create a new advert a fresh in a format that will fit in with the new database filters.
But of course people won't like that either.
13 November 2011, 09:42 AM
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No what they should have done is implement the change in two phases.
Phase one would be all new ads to be created in the new form but written to both the old and new database fields.
After a period of time when no old ads with only the old data were left then they could implement phase two - the new front end.
A standard way of doing something like this and not exactly rocket science!
None of this, however, explains why the thing is so bloody slow when in the new guise.
They basically haven't desgned or indexed the new database properly.
Phase one would be all new ads to be created in the new form but written to both the old and new database fields.
After a period of time when no old ads with only the old data were left then they could implement phase two - the new front end.
A standard way of doing something like this and not exactly rocket science!
None of this, however, explains why the thing is so bloody slow when in the new guise.
They basically haven't desgned or indexed the new database properly.
Last edited by f1_fan; 13 November 2011 at 09:43 AM.
15 November 2011, 05:03 PM
#29
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Yeah but the adverts are all out of date. Mine says it's been up for seven days, it hasn't at all.
I asked them for a refund too, deafening silence. To my mind, they've had such a slagging that people won't be bothering to use it now. Also, an old ad is an old ad so people won;t bother looking now (I wouldn't) proper stitched up.
5t.
I asked them for a refund too, deafening silence. To my mind, they've had such a slagging that people won't be bothering to use it now. Also, an old ad is an old ad so people won;t bother looking now (I wouldn't) proper stitched up.
5t.
15 November 2011, 06:14 PM
#30
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They put the old system back on Saturday 'for the weekend' .... must be a long weekend at Pistonheads.
Yes the ads are in a right mess, they could well have shot themseves in the foot here. Muppets!!!
Yes the ads are in a right mess, they could well have shot themseves in the foot here. Muppets!!!