check this out !@!!!!!

[Mike Wilbanks]

Gave the site a look-over, speaking from purely a technical point-of-view and as someone who buys & sells on other auction sites, I would very much like to see the following features added as I've found they're very useful:
- You need a better search function. Ideally when creating a listing the seller could enter individual data elements such as species, sex, age, base morph(s), price, etc. Users should have an easy way to filter on these, and just as easily be able to filter out certain values. As an example, if I'm looking at hypos or pieds, and don't want to see hets, give me a way to exclude those animals from my search. Similarly if I want to see two-gene animals with Mojave but not Spider, that would be great.
- As a seller I want to be able to block certain bidders from bidding, both based on overall feedback (e.g. no one rated D or less), and specifically by username (because some people's reputations precede them).
- Auction sites run differently and users may be used to certain policies. As an example, eBay permits sellers to cancel a bid, GunBoker.com does not. I don't care either way which you choose, but be warned that bidders used to eBay's policies will be in for a nasty shock if bids can't be retracted.
- Get a valid CC from all registrants before they can bid as it helps keep scammers away. There's a reason scammers abound on ArmsList but not GunBroker.

All good advice and I appreciate the feedback. As for sellers, we have a "pay to play" setup so a seller has to give us a credit card or paypal before they can list an animal for sale. This should keep out most of the spam unless they want to pay to list it. Also, people just trying to mess with the site will be reluctant to give us good payment info just to cause trouble. At least we will know who all the sellers really are. As for scammers, a buyer has to do the same due diligence as they would on any site. Fauna BOI is full of people who slipped through the radar and I'm not sure how we can cut that out except to deal with people that have built reputations for delivering and ban people as they come up.

Bids cannot be retracted and we are on a simple bidding engine. So, unlike the proxy engine a bidder will most likely have to make several "mistakes" to successfully win an auction. This means if you bid $200, then $200 is your bid unlike Ebay where it continues to bid up to your max. We decided to go this way because I want active participation. As a bidder, I would prefer to know someone is sitting at a computer bidding against me, not just a proxy engine outbidding me. That frustrates me about ebay, but again they have different goals than I do. We will ban bidders as necessary and the admin can delete a bid if necessary. For example someone emailed me and told me they live in Europe and accidentally bid on a US only sellers auction. They did not read the description and assumed it was mine. I retracted their bid for them. It is unlikely that a single bid would ever win anyway. We had these same abilities in the FB environment and these same problems. We just banned the trouble makers and deleted the mistake bids on FB so I guess there will be no fixing every problem.

I am going to add a couple of things to the search like sex, for instance. If you do the advanced search, I think you can narrow it down from there, but I will look at some of the search features. As I said, I really appreciate the feedback as it will help us develop the site into a place people will love to use.