Honestly Chops, I do not think there is anything for you to be overly concerned with, as your offering has more features than the others looked at. Also having looked at the administration side of things the other offerings are different, but not necessarily better. Some of the features are easier to use... specifically layouts. But perhaps that is a problem we have, as no one knows how to enhance the basic layout of the website. And if anyone does, they have not come forward. I have looked at the drop in templates on offer at the moment and I can safely say that no-one from our guild like any of them. Perhaps I just ought to learn how to do it?
I've got a few more drop in templates coming (and an incentive program for people to submit more of them). Perhaps when I'm finished with some features I'll make a few more myself, but I'm dreadfully SLOOOOOW with making graphics stuff.
The bank tool from your system is superb, as we use the small file extractor and upload the data into the dkpsystem database, tick the check-box, "Bob's your uncle Fannies your aunt" and it's all displayed for you.... But I gave up WoW over half a year ago now and this tool is not available to LOTRO people. We currently type everything into MS Excel and with some function tools in another column, the worksheet builds the bbcode in order for me to copy and past into a dedicated forum thread. This is not ideal and time consuming. Other offerings allow your to assign people specifically administer the bank and type straight into the database. This would be easier, as the duties of looking after the bank can be shared easily. That said, no one has the importer feature to my knowledge...... So when it comes around the LOTRO it would be sweet.
You CAN actually use it with LOTRO (and all games) now.
Click on the character and then you can click "Edit your Inventory" (or something like that). So it's not an importer, but you CAN specify the inventory of the characters. You can at least use the Guild Bank functionality with that then. If you have further questions on that, let me know.
As for the loot link, its a lovely touch, and not everyone appears to do something like this. The reason we mentioned MMODB, is that the user can submit data themselves, which is good, as it builds a more comprehensive database and a shorter period of time. WarCry.com is very slow, limited in data and somewhat awkward to use. You may have also seen in the thread I pointed you to about using API. I have no idea what this is, but perhaps you could shed a little light on that for me?
An API just stands for "Application Programmer Interface" and that just means it's a way for a programmer to interface a program with someone's service or device. I'm actually going to look into moving the item database over to mmodb for both lotro and vanguard (since the vanguard item links have been broken for over a month - and I'm sorry to all vanguard guilds for that).
The likely outcome of all this is that we will not move to another sight, it was hard enough getting our members to sign up in the first place, so moving I think would be a bad idea. But the discussion is highlighting some points that perhaps you might want to see.
I certainly appreciate the contructive criticism (as I always do anyway).
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It's all in the reflexes.