appreciate all of this
with the trade doc as is, people might get flooded with responses or requests and end up having to pick 1 out of a group, I know some players don't like being in that scenario
what if someone posts asking for something, and player A has the item, but so does player B. There any way we can have a column to put in and say "I got this, PM me when available" so everyone can see it's been claimed, even though the trade transaction is still in queue.
Thoughts?
If in the first scenario, if you mean a bunch of people want a given item, I figure it'll work the same as it would in any other method. First to PM gets the deal. I can't leave it up to the sheet to claim first dibs on the item because it's open to everybody, and thus ripe for abuse by conveniently overwriting somebody else's claim.
In the second scenario where somebody wants something and multiple people want to give them it, then yes, I could put in a field for claiming it. It's not exactly something that you'd have to be concerned about abuse with as I don't think people will fight for the privilege of giving something.
Speaking of names, originally I was going to have the character name listed on the sheet and have it look up the GAF name via the member sheet, and display both. Bonus points would have went to auto-hyperlinking it to the PM page for them, but that's not really possible given GAF runs on numeric UIDs for those functions and not the actual handles.
Anyhow, getting back to the whole claiming aspect, I think I could actually finagle the sheet to allow claims that couldn't be abused. Technically it would involve another (locked) page with a google form reporting to it. The primary trade page would generate a unique identifier for any given trade. A person would enter the trade ID into the form along with their name (and potentially what they're offering) and submit which would lock the offer into the claim page. The primary trade page could then look up the claim page and determine the first offer for something. Nobody (aside from myself) would be able to alter the claim page. I'll have to play with the concept on my prototyping sheet.
Edit: I could actually pre-populate the form with the trade ID via the link to the form. That way you'd just click on the trade link, fill in your name (and whatever else it might end up supporting), submit and done. It'd still lack certain capabilities like being able to retract or modify a claim though. You'd also be capable of filing false claims for other people. Those two limitations combined allow a different sort of manipulation that's not much better than the first unfortunately. Really no fool proof way of doing things that I can think of that doesn't require pass codes / pins, and that's outside of the project scope. At that point you're better off coding a whole trade platform from scratch using a real database. I'll have to mull over the possibilities some more.
