Colnect Welcomes the New Sports Cards Catalog

A much anticipated collectible category is making it's first steps on Colnect. The Sports Cards catalog is now publicly available on Colnect.

1990-91 Wayne Gretzky Score card, from the new Colnect Sports Cards catalog

1990-91 Wayne Gretzky Score card, backside, from the new Colnect Sports Cards catalog 

Sports Cards are a well-established, well-known and popular collectible worldwide and for good reason. Sports are a great device to bring people together both regionally and worldwide, through the admiration of the players, their effort and talent. Collecting is also such a uniting factor, bringing people together through their appreciation of the art and effort of building and maintaining a collection. Sports Cards, therefore, are a natural powerful union and we're glad to have them on Colnect.

2013 Matthew Boyd Select Australia card, from the new Colnect Sports Cards catalog

This category holds, at it's very beginning, 6,454 Sports Cards of 5 Sports, from Seasons raging from 1910 to 2013, from a variety of Brands and including cards with Special Features. With your help that number will grow quickly. Read more on how to make the catalog larger on our Contribution Guidelines.

2012-13 Cameron White SE Products card, from the new Colnect Sports Cards catalog

This category has started at the wonderful and welcome initiative of collectors on the Colnect Forums. You are welcome to read the whole process on the New Sports Cards Category forum thread.

1992 Joe Carter Donruss card, from the new Colnect Sports Cards catalog

The category will be co-coordinated by Dana Levitas [Dana-Levitas] and Graeme Kilpatrick [nzexchange]. Thank you to all those who helped us make this category come true. A special thank you is owed to [neweden], without whom the category would have never come alive.

1990-91 Gary Roberts Score card, from the new Colnect Sports Cards catalog

Your collectible category is not yet on Colnect? Would like to create a new collectible catalog? Read more on how to add More Collectibles, take the reigns and make your suggestion on the New Category Forum.

New: See Collectors' Inventory Notes on Item List

As collectors looking to exchange, trade or just look around, browsing collections of other fellow collectors- you need to look at the exact details of the items, look at the collection itself. Now this has been made easier with the help of Personal Inventory Notes. You can now see the notes made by collectors when browsing their lists.

The new information that appears is the public notes made by the collector of the quantity, condition and any additional free text notes they have added about the item in their collection. Simply go to a collectors page, look at their list and you will notice that new information now appears along the item details, marked in a separated colored box.

Previously, public inventory notes where only available on the single item pages of the catalog, together with all collectors that have this particular item. Now you can also see it on collectors' individual list.

Come take a look, browse some collections, and let us know what you think :)

Bogus Requests From Msnbot/Bing Crawler Resulting in Error 404

Apologies to the collectors on Colnect, this post is a technical post not related to collecting and collectibles.

Recently, we've started seeing a lot of bogus requests from msnbot. These were requests to URLs that never existed on our website and were filling up our error logs. Internet searches have led to nothing which is the reason for this blog post.

Suggested solution: disable msnbot on your robots.txt file and submit a ticket to their support. While it did take them some time to respond, they finally did and the issue has been resolved. We've then removed the block on our robots.txt and for over a week now, everything seems fine.

When asked about the reasons for these problem, the support team provided NO EXPLANATION as to what might have caused the problem:

"Thank you for patiently waiting. The product group have resolved this request but no additional information was provided."

"We are sorry to inform you that we cannot provide any information regarding this. We hope you understand."

Which leads us to believe the reason is a bug in msnbot or an attack on msnbot which messed up URLs between websites.

Here are a few such bogus requests:
[27-Dec-2013 03:48:51 GMT+0] REQUEST[/content/dam/aba/global/global_nav_logo.png] REFERER[]
USER[0] AGENT[msnbot-media/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)] ADDR[65.55.215.33]
[27-Dec-2013 03:49:36 GMT+0]
REQUEST[/bin/dashboard/default-avatar-unknown.png] REFERER[]
USER[0] AGENT[msnbot-media/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)] ADDR[65.55.215.39]
[27-Dec-2013 02:50:38 GMT+0] REQUEST[/enclosure.jpg] REFERER[]
USER[0] AGENT[msnbot-media/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)] ADDR[199.30.20.57]
[27-Dec-2013 02:53:48 GMT+0]
REQUEST[/user_data/packages/ginichi/img/common/btn_en.jpg] REFERER[]
USER[0] AGENT[msnbot-media/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)] ADDR[65.55.215.71]
[27-Dec-2013 02:54:14 GMT+0]
REQUEST[/DesktopModules/CATALooKStore/MakeThumbImage.aspx?fileticket=ikazmqBNAjM%3d&PORTALID=0&W=120&H=120] REFERER[]
USER[0] AGENT[msnbot-media/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)] ADDR[199.30.16.47]
[27-Dec-2013 03:33:21 GMT+0]
REQUEST[/upload/save_image/category/c1177.jpg] REFERER[]
USER[0] AGENT[msnbot-media/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)] ADDR[65.55.215.74]
[27-Dec-2013 03:49:20 GMT+0]
REQUEST[/wvc-1365778711/wordansfiles/images/2013/4/12/186393/186393_340.jpg] REFERER[]
USER[0] AGENT[msnbot-media/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)] ADDR[199.30.16.30]
[27-Dec-2013 03:52:45 GMT+0]
REQUEST[/core/media/media.nl?id=343820&c=337772&h=2fd9dd88833b005b614a] REFERER[]
USER[0] AGENT[msnbot-media/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)] ADDR[199.30.16.14]