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TradingPaints.com
TradingPaints.com is a website where users that are members of a online SIM called iRacing.com can upload their paint schemes so that others can download and see them in a race. When I was first given the task by Steve Luvender I thought it was a great idea. I think we both however did not expect it to be as big as it has gotten in just a few short months.
TradingPaints.com is a website where users that are members of a online SIM called iRacing.com can upload their paint schemes so that others can download and see them in a race. When I was first given the task by Steve Luvender I thought it was a great idea. I think we both however did not expect it to be as big as it has gotten in just a few short months.
Since being released in January 2010 it has over 2600 registered users 4500 schemes uploaded with those being downloaded over 5 million times! One of the biggest things that Steve wanted was the registration process had to be perfect. After talks we came up with the idea of a verification process through the iRacing forums.
Sure the idea was simple..A user signs up, it checks to make sure the user has not already done it. It then goes to iRacing (on its own) pulls your user info from iRacing (your club etc, nothing private). Then it sends a PM to you on the iRacing forums with a confirmation link. This was the perfect idea and it took a few times to get it going. The first step was making sure iRacing would not care that we were using their forums for verification. They just wanted to make sure we had protection in place for attacks. So what this all results to is when you see someone post a car on TradingPaints.com you know it is that person that is posting it.
One of the things that contributed so much to the success of the system was the downloader. With the downloader I was faced with a new task. We had launched a successful web-interface but we needed a way for users to mass download. So after some talks with Steve I began work on what would be the main tool for TradingPaints.com. Within five days we had a beta up and running and few later it was released.
The initial release of the downloader was a great success but it was not complete by any means. The reason being we wanted to get the first version out and running so people would get more into TradingPaints....and boy did they ever. The first night alone had to have seen over a million downloaded schemes.
Then a week or so later the list part was incorporated into the downloader. Which made it great for leagues to use. We then added a few more features for subscriptions so people can get the files they need. But now the latest version will allow you to have it run on startup and it will do the rest. It requires no interaction after you have downloaded and installed it.
Visit -> http://www.tradingpaints.com