Need some beta testers for my website: www.riverofguns.com

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I've been working on a website that I think is going to be pretty useful to the gun crowd.

Have you ever wanted to search the classified sections of all the gun forums?

Try this:

http://www.riverofguns.com

I created that site as a search engine for gun forum classifieds. It's currently got about 30,000 entries from 107 topics at 40 forums. That's about a month's worth of collected data. I'm working on getting it up to the 175 topics from the 105 forums I discovered (with the help of some friends over at calguns.net).

Use it to search for the guns and gear you're looking to buy.

There are still some ways to improve it (mainly in search), but it's very usable now.

I need some users to beta test it and provide some feedback. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Feedback to [email protected] would be great - or PM if you're happier with that.

Thanks!
 
Great site!

This site seems very helpful. I will definitely be checking it out more later. I really like the picture too. Is that by any chance the Snake River in Washington State?
 
Great!!!

Please add vaguntrader.com.

It looks better than elitedealseeker.com.

What regular expressions are allowed? One frequent search that I do is: S&W -"40 S&W" since I don't want ammo or non-S&W guns to appear.

Perhaps you could add more gun manufacturer "quick search" links?

Also, can we limit the search to a certain number of days similar to what elitedealseeker.com does?

Additionally, I'd like the engine to PARSE the posts looking for words that would indicate that the item is sold, but the subject hasn't been updated. It would then mark the post as potentially sold. This would save me a lot of time.

The engine should also filter out "Want to Buy" (WTB) into a different section. Those WTB ads really clutter things up.
 
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Nice site but boolean search filter doesn't seem to be working fully yet

example

Robinson and XCR Works properly, gives all results with both Robinson and XCR in the leader line, next query I checked with lower case for sanity checking, all OK.

AR-15.com WTS:Robinson Arms XCR 5.56 & 6.8 combo 01/22/2009
AR-15.com WTS: Robinson Armament XCR 01/11/2009
AR-15.com Robinson XCR .223 Heavies in stock 1/7/09 01/07/2009
AR-15.com WTT: Robinson Armament XCR for Arsenal SLR107UR or Yugo M92 Krink + cash 12/23/2008
AR-15.com FS: Robinson Arms XCR-L w/scope-PICS 12/19/2008
AR-15.com WTS New Robinson Armament XCR and brand new Beta C-drum 12/19/2008

Next query

robinson +xcr -heavies should give all except the 3rd one, it gives the reverse

AR-15.com Robinson XCR .223 Heavies in stock 1/7/09 01/07/2009

Next query (using AND and AND NOT)

robinson and xcr and not heavies gives the same results

AR-15.com Robinson XCR .223 Heavies in stock 1/7/09 01/07/2009

Might want to add Gunbroker in to the searched forum list
 
TEST:

Search: S&W

Results included a holster link (most items sold):

http://glocktalk.com/forums/showthread.php?t=962299

Perhaps the engine should mark the entry with an icon indicating something was sold in the thread. Since these aren't guns, you may want to move it to another bucket. Strings to look at: "sold", "spf", "sold pending funds" and variations.
 
Fantastic idea, actually! Thank you and good luck.

But, this will hack off the guys who painstakingly scour many many sites for the good deals, since their diligence and patience allows them to beat the lazy guys like me who wouldn't do the full search without a website such as yours.
 
Great feedback.

Thanks for the feedback everyone. Just what I was looking for. To answer some of your questions:

@ACBMWM3: banners and links are things I'm looking at. Eventually Google AdSense is going to figure out there are guns and ammo involved with this site and they'll turn off their ads.

If anyone has pointers to gun friendly ad networks, I'd appreciate them.

@crebralfix: I'll take a look at vaguntrader.com and add it, if possible.
The searching is done via MySQL fulltext boolean queries - BUT the queries are scrubbed a bit on the way in, which is why your "+" and "-" queries are not working (you too @everallm). It's basically always doing an "AND" on keywords.

What I'll do is add a link for "Advanced Search" where you can construct valid boolean queries. Also, this would be a good place to let you search WTB items and to search for sold items in order to do price checks.

I should also mention that I'm thinking of moving the search over to Sphinx, which will allow you to do more Google-like searches.

@crebralfix: Any suggestions on what other things you'd like to see in the "quick search"?
Limiting results to a certain number of days is not a problem - just have to figure out the UI.
As far as the filtering of sold items - it's tricky. Working on it. As you note, more parsing is needed.
WTB should be currently filtered out. If you see a post with WTB in the title, it's a bug.

@crebralfix: The forum scraper is my Perl code. Each forum type I support has forum specific code.

@Dr. Tad Hussein Winslow: Well, yeah, it was better when I kept this thing to myself :). But I can only buy so many guns....

The two complaints I hear are "Great! Don't tell anyone else!" and "Great! Now I'll blame you for all the money I'm going to spend".

@Zundfolge: Yes, location is a pain, but I'd like to take a crack at it at some point. There are ways.....

@Fri: It very well might be the Snake River (or Columbia River), but to confess, I got the image from a stock image house and it didn't come with much information. :)
 
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Actually if you just put your state in for the search field you get quite a few listings (around 40). Which is not bad since you're missing the Colorado specific forums.
 
@Zundfolge: thanks for the pointers. I'll see about adding them once I see what forum software they use.

@damien: Thanks - will check those out as well. Gunbroker - that one I'm not so sure about. I've never found a good deal there and dealing with that site and the people who sell there can be a major PITA. Maybe it's just because I'm in California and it's easier for them to say "go away" rather than work with the crappy system.

At any rate, these three sites will require some special coding on my side, so I might not get to them for a while. eBay is worth a shot too, but again, I have to use their API and special case it.
 
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@damien: Thanks - will check those out as well. Gunbroker - that one I'm not so sure about. I've never found a good deal there and dealing with that site and the people who sell there can be a major PITA. Maybe it's just because I'm in California and it's easier for them to say "go away" rather than work with the crappy system.
Click to expand...

I believe you are right on guns, but there have been times that that has been the only place I have found certain types of ammo (.45 Winchester Magnum for example) and sometimes mags and holsters are decent. It all depends on the buyer. Also, deals may get better or worse depending on the economy and the level of stability in the future so who knows what tomorrow may bring.
 
Great site, I have sent the URL to everyone into guns in my address book. Site activity should be up this evening.

Keep up the great work///1
 
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