If OzBargain has been quiet over the last 2 days — I am not surprised. I wasn’t really into video games since the original Team Fortress days fragging your university buddies on 33.6kbps modem, but just by observing the top gaming related deals on OzBargain I can tell that Diablo III is the hottest thing at the moment, and many probably haven’t slept since the game was released yesterday.

The new tagging feature on OzBargain allows moderators to flag some tags as “products”. For those who are still thinking of buying the game, here is the Diablo III page on OzBargain where you can find out what deals have been posted with this product. Notably,

• Diablo III for $58 at BigW, although it would be difficult to find a BigW that still got a copy. Do use that to price match at JB Hi-Fi or DickSmith.
• Blizzard Honoring GAME Payments for Diablo 3, for those who pre-ordered from GAME.com.au that went into administration on Monday.

Have fun!

The usefulness of Bookmarks has been historically undervalued. It helps to expand the ever so limited human memory and has rescued many who suffered from occasional forgetfulness. It guards the treasures for its owner to go back to. It comes in various forms and shapes — I usually just use my business card because no one seems to be interested in them. On the web browsers it usually fashions in the shape of glowing star. And now OzBargain also comes with its own bookmarks for you to keep track the bargains, although we gave it a pretty pragmatic name — Add to Folders.

The problem we are trying to solve here is simple. OzBargain has lots of bargains posted every single day, and often people want to keep track the deals they are interested in — not necessarily something they want to give +1 to, but just want to organise them into folders so they can do research on them later. Well, you can always use your browser’s bookmarks/favourites — but let me show you how an integrated solution from inside OzBargain can do much more.

First of all, how do I add a deal into my bookmark folder? Here is a step by step instruction.

You start from the deal page. For example, you ran out of hard drive space (again), and you are looking for some large external drives. You came across this Seagate Expansion deal from Amazon and you wish to bookmark it for comparison later.

Assume that you have logged into OzBargain, you shall see the option Add to Folder stuck in between “Add Reminder” and “Hide from Listing” (both neat features which hopefully we’ll introduce later).

Click on “Add to Folders” to bring up the menu. You’ll see that each account has one default bookmark folder named “Bookmark”. If you wish to file the current deal there, you can just click on the checkbox next to it.

However we are in the process of doing some research on cheap external hard drives. We want to create a new folder — call it “Big drives for research” for example. You’ll need to hit the “Create New Folder” link in the menu, which would let you fill in the name for the new folder. Click on “Create” button when you have finished. You have now filed this deal into your shining new folder!

Note that each deal can be filed into multiple folders, and each folder can store multiple deals (no upper limit currently). You then go around trying to find all other big drives and bookmark them…

To access your folders, it would be a Tab inside your account profile page. Alternatively, you can quickly access your list of folders from the “My Account” dropdown menu.

There you have it! A list of multi-terabyte external hard drives ready to be assessed!

There are other things you can do with your bookmark folders. For example

• You wish to share your folder with your friends who do not have an OzBargain account or share it on Facebook. All the folders are created as Private, i.e. only the owner of the folder can see the list. If you wish to share with those outside of OzBargain, you will need to click on Preference to change the settings for your folder.

  Change Sharing to “Public” would let anyone to access your folder — feel free to pass on the URL to your friends!

• You also like to sort it in the reverse order of votes (from highest to lowest) to help you decide which deal is the best. Change Sorting to “Votes”, and then click on “Save” to update your folder’s settings.

  

• You then realise that one of the deals you’ve bookmarked has since expired. There is no point to keep expired deals in your “To Buy” folders, is there? You can remove all expired deals from your folder by clicking on “Preference”, “Operations” tab and then “Clear Expired” button.

  Gone! Now only the deals that are still active remain.

There are many uses for “Add to Folders” just like there are many reasons you leave a bookmark in a book. For example, I am keeping a bookmark of something that I bought (shared with other OzBargain users only). Or a wish list/crave list? Or you are trying to compile your very own pizza coupon list?

Feel free to share with us what you use the new bookmark folders for, and give us some feedback on where we can improve.

Went in to restart the PHP processes (where kill -9 was required). That brought the site up for 15 minutes before it died again.

Anyway. According to our web hosting provider (where OzBargain runs on a single 4GB instance of Linux Cloud server), that they were having some issues with maintenance last night. It’s still on their hands now and at the moment we (OzBargain) can’t do anything about it.

Will update this space when there’s a solution.

Update 9:40AM AEST: Server just gets rebooted. There might still have some issues but the site is running for now.

Update 10:15AM AEST: I think everything should be operational now. We are manually sending out the daily newsletter that missed its 7AM run.

Hello

I purchased earings for my wife for Christmas following a “bargain” on your website for Cudo.com.au

The fact is after 1 month, the item is still not received. Apparently I am not the only customer to whom that happened, a few other people are in the same situation.

So I strongly suggest that you take care with the ads on your website as your responsibility could be involved too.

Emphasis mine. Probably referred to this offer here and this forum discussion. With most inquiries I usually just reply saying that OzBargain is just an online community for shoppers to discuss bargains, and they should really contact the merchants directly (in this case, Cudo.com.au).

However, as deal postings can sometimes be seen as “ads on your website” (although that was just one community member sharing a deal he/she found interesting), thus the visitor concluded that “OzBargain is in some way responsible”. IANAL but can that really be the case? “Common sense” says no, especially over a deal that wasn’t well received in the first place. However we live in a land that often defies common sense…

• It lists out all the deals, and usually only the last 10 deals posted (where we get ~50 deals posted a day).
• Only deals, and OzBargain is more than just a list of deals.
• Not much you can do with turning the look and feel.

So for the last couple of months we have been developing our own in-house email newsletter solution, which moocher announced in August. If you do not have an account on OzBargain (what?!!!), you can still sign up to the new OzBargain newsletter from the front page — the sign up box is on the right hand side under Subscribe to Our Daily Newsletter. However if you are a logged in user, you can go to Settings – newsletter for more fine tuning.

You get:

• Top deals posted over the last 24 hours.
• New forum posts
• New comments in your commented posts (registered users only)
• Deal reminders (registered user only)

Delivery started at 7AM Sydney time every morning so you can check out some of the best deals before work :)

It is still not as flexible and useful as our Facebook page yet. Moreover Google+ has been pretty vacuum currently — great place to post something guaranteeing no one is going to see it. But anyway, I am a Google fanboi so here we have it, and we’ll figure out what to do with it… Later.

Here is SmartCompany’s list of Australia’s best independent online-only retailers in alphabetical order. Our list includes market leaders, established players and some rising stars. But all are setting the pace in a dynamic sector.

Some are well-known names on OzBargain — CatchOfTheDay, DealsDirect, Kogan, etc. Some have never been listed — OKme.com.au?