Castle Paradox

[Robc]

Camdog, At this point it is hard enough to get a critical mass of people who are familiar with a tool to come to the site and vote and/or provide information about it. If I were to break tools into separate entries for every version that would split my voting too much. The way I do it now the users vote for the tool generally and if they choose then they can give a thumbs up or thumbs down to individual versions.

@James/Rya. I kind of like the idea of asking people what they paid for the tool and reporting on that. I could certainly look for anomalies statistically, that would indeed be easy. I doubt that too many people would participate but every entry would be very valuable information.

I want the site to be friendly to tool makers also so I am thinking perhaps that I could use a dual system. First I could report a price as given to me by the tool maker if they choose to provide it. I can also collect and report what users claim the price to be... it could create an incentive for the tool makers to provide me with real price quotes and keep them updated. Saves me the time of digging (or begging) for prices and having to monitor them. If a tool maker keeps me updated as to price then I'll spare them the agony of monitoring the 'statistical price' by shutting down that system... either way indies will be served fairly well I think.

The most expensive tools will still not have any data because I know that part of the negotiation is an agreement not to reveal the price paid... but I was never going to get much price information or data about those tools anyway.

One down side is that prices change over time and I might have to periodically purge older price quotes and I'd have to pay attention to the age of prices provided by toolmakers, but that wouldn't be too hard.

Its not fool proof but I think it has potential. Sweet! Thanks for the ideas!