Option to remove seller ID from lot numbers

[jamescurtin]

What would be the feasibility of adding an option that would allow an auction admin to specify that all lot numbers should be an auto-incrementing integer without a reference to the seller ID?

There would be a few benefits to this:

• For auctions that divide lots into tables based on the last digit of the lot number, there are currently more items on lower numbered tables (based on the fact that many participants may only bring 1-3 items). An auto-incrementing lot number would result in a more even distribution.
• There is currently the potential for confusion for auctions that use re-usable bidder cards (example below). Bidders will always have a manually set number in the range of, for example, 1 to 50. However, if someone registered lots before the auction and were assigned a number in that range, there is the potential for confusion about who brought the items (the person with bidder number 25 is not the same person who registered lots as seller 25). My understanding is that the site will handle this just fine from a tracking/calculation point of view--so it's more user confusion based on lot labels.
  

I think the biggest downside were to be if you wanted to have the seller identified in some way on the lot label, but we already have the functionality to print their actual name, and a lot lookup from the site is also easy enough to do.

What do you think?

[iragm]

This is a good idea, and would be trivial to implement -- I think 3 or 4 lines of code in Lot.save() -- except that this would be a string and lot ordering would still not work (#263).

Generally I think this is probably the direction things should go for all auction anyway, as people often don't want to change bidder numbers because they think that it's somehow tied to the lot number. And of course there's #259

The real question is whether people would complain if the current seller-lot number system went away. Maintaining both system is a pain, it would be a lot easier to just add an int field, change the lot's save method update that, and change any references to custom_lot_number to point to the new field.

[jamescurtin]

Is the primary challenge that migrating from a string to an int for existing lots would cause a lot of hassle/confusion? I wonder if it'd be possible just to do something like this to use a custom function to perform a natural sort on the string field. If that works, it could mean rolling this change out a lot more simply.

The real question is whether people would complain if the current seller-lot number system went away.

Hard for me to say, but I'd imagine not, unless this changed mid-auction and caused confusion. It looks like there's only one ongoing auction right now, and it ends in a few days--if this was a direction you were supportive of going, this could be a good time to do it when there aren't any active auctions given Thanksgiving and holidays.

[iragm]

One of the issues with using Cast and then sorting (apart from regex queries being slow and expensive) is that people can put only text in their custom lot numbers, so there's a ton of edge cases to cover.

I think ripping out the current text field and replacing it with an int field would be only a couple hours of work and can be done in the middle of an auction without causing issues. But if people complain about it and want to be able to revert to the old bidder-dash-lot number system that would more than double the effort needed.

I'll probably have time to work on this sometime between now and the end of the year.

[iragm]

I'm thinking about making lot numbers start at 1000, that way you have (usually), 1 or 2 digit numbers as sell prices, 3 digit bidder numbers, and 4 digit lot numbers. This will make it less likely for the bid recorder to mix them up. Although the lot number isn't something I've ever seen confusion on.