Hacked

The site was down for a few days last week because of an exploit on some code I was running on another domain which leaked over onto gun-deals.  Everything (mostly) has been fixed and nothing at all was lost in the database.  In making sure nothing like that happens again (exploits jumping from site to site), I’ve changed my hosting plan to a more expensive one.  So, there is definitely a need to break even on the site now.  I’ve removed the ads because they slowed page load times.  Any suggestions on how to monetize just to break even without alienating users, taking away features, or losing the unbiased nature of the site?

Site/code updates are going to be slow the next couple months.  The weather broke and despite this being a passion of mine and my pet project, it’s just a hobby site.  Flagged deals and new deals will always be taken care of quickly, just new features will slow.

Please donate to keep my wife from questioning my sanity.

Some notes

Nothing new to report for big site updates.  As always, deals get flagged and taken care of ASAP.  Prices are changing rapidly on everything, so it’s hard to keep up.  If you see an out-of-date deal, flag it.  I check every flag manually to ensure the site stays as accurate as can be.  So far, the flag counter is up to 1,621 with 1,771 deal and price corrections.

Quick feature

Added a little mouseover after the cost per round so you can compare to all average (on front page and backordered) deals which match the caliber of the deal.  It’s not extremely useful if you’re comparing cheap Wolf ammo to tracers (in the case of .223), but I think it’s useful enough to be added.  Enjoy.  Here’s a screenshot:

More ratings

Coupons now have ratings with them.  Not sure if the rating means “hey, this is a good, valuable coupon”, or “hey, this coupon works”, but rate them however you wish.

More

Start your rating! Everywhere you see stars, please click and rate. Every deal, every vendor, and soon, every FFL in the FFL finder will have a star rater on it. When you rate, the stars are disabled so you can’t vote again on that particular deal, vendor, or FFL. Otherwise, every visitor (registered or not) is free to rate everything. Help to make this site the best gun and ammo site on the ‘net.

Jumping around

New feature all over the site to come. It’s just easier to write all the backend code manually, so it’ll be a bit before it’s functional and ready. Finally, a web-ish 2.0 rating system for every deal, FFL, vendor, and whatever needs to be rated on the site. Should be full of AJAX goodness for ease of use.

(Whoops, ignore the “delete img” link, it’s an admin-only thing.)

Some things done

Backend and frontend changes to the grain count and bullet type system. The ammo grid now contains 2 sortable columns for grains and bullet type and the descriptions are now a compound of these fields. So all new submissions will have these values filled (if known) and I’m working on filling in the old deals correctly. The popular calibers are coming first, they’ll all be filled in eventually. I know a bunch of people have requested this, so hopefully it will be a useful addition. Enjoy!

Closer

Getting closer to adding grain count and bullet type to the ammo grid (grain count is there now, but the backend is now connected to the submission system). Thanks to 10gauge and q-gunner from The AK Forum for helping me along.  In a few days, these fields will be active for everyone, then registered users can remove what they don’t care about.  Everything is a work in progress….

If you notice any bugs that stick around for more than a few hours, please report them.  I don’t test new changes and “bleeding edge” stuff on the main site, so really there should be nothing screwy with anything on the production pages.

More

The new graphics pushed the “deal ratings” off the deal pages.  They were pretty useless, so I’ll start work on a better system to give deals a star rating system.

Updates

Finally moved the new deal graphics onto some new pages, such as the display deal page, expired deals, and vendor deals. Some new graphics on the site as well, something that stands out and is easier to find. Any bugs in any updates can be reported in the comments here.

Now, onto money. I put 2 ads on the site (which I manually approve every one so nothing bad gets by with sound or flash)–which will end up paying for the bandwidth and hosting on the site. I put the donate link back up if you want to donate toward site giveaways, sticker production, fun stuff, etc. All money goes back into the site.  As you can tell, I put lots (read–LOTS) of hours into the site–for the fun of it.  I don’t care about the money.  I’d like to not pay for the site out of pocket and I’ve succeeded in that.  Other than that, I’ve also succeeded to make about $0.03/hr as a PHP programmer =)

I noticed on a few pageloads it looked like the ads slowed the site down a little. If anyone else sees this and comments, then the ads are gone. I don’t want something like ads slowing the site down (at least with the current ad provider). If you want to block ads, register and there’s an option to uncheck them, or use AdBlock for Firefox (you are running Firefox, right??).