So, it really isn't that big of a deal and I'm not expecting anyone to work weekends to 'fix' it or anything, but I was wondering about a change in how the current sale API[1] response has changed. Or at least I think it has - I don't look at it much but during this Woot-Off I noticed that the "soldoutpercentage" seems to have been normalized to a single decimal place. If I remember correctly, it would previously show a great deal of precision, like 5+ places. (If I don't remember correctly, feel free to ignore all of this)

I do understand why a change might be made from the excessive precision that we had previously... but it seems to me that 1 place isn't enough, particularly when the percentage bar on the main page does 2 places via the percentage. If the idea behind having the API is to help prevent people from having to come to the main page then it seems that making the main page be more precise than the API would be counterproductive.

Again, not a huge deal - but if someone was messing with that code then it would be nice to at least have 2 places and I honestly wouldn't mind as much as you'll give me .

I suppose a second question is whether or not any additional APIs are out there or even if there are plans for any. Not that there are any I can think of outside access to the comments (read only, of course - though I would take anything)

Thanks for your time and, of course, your wonderful site.

[1] http://api.woot.com/1/sales/current.rss/www.woot.com

The 5 digits of precision let people do some math and figure out our total quantity for a sale. We intentionally don't want that.

One not obvious thing is that you can request:
http://api.woot.com/1/sales/current.rss
to get sales on all of our sites in a single request.

LukeDuff wrote:The 5 digits of precision let people do some math and figure out our total quantity for a sale. We intentionally don't want that.

One not obvious thing is that you can request:
http://api.woot.com/1/sales/current.rss
to get sales on all of our sites in a single request.

Sorry for not getting back until now, but I have had a crazy month...

I agree that 5 digits was far too much, but considering you provide the equivalent of two digits precision in the progress bars on the site themselves, I would think that the same would apply to the RSS/API, but we only seem to get 1 digit. It would seem to encourage people looking for the more precise values to scrape the HTML vs. just using the RSS/API.

Also, that current link is pretty awesome - thanks ;)

Sorry to revive a dead thread, but I wanted to add my vote for two digits of precision (no need for 5).

+1, I agree completely. Sorry to further bump an old thread but I was just starting to look at this stuff again and noticed the drastic reduction of the precision.

I always thought that one of the big reasons for the Programmer's Interface was to encourage those wanting to make third party applications to use it rather than the much heftier main page to mine for their info. With the actual front page having double digit precision, programmers are likely to be tempted to start grabbing that again rather than the lighter API pages, thus defeating the purpose all together.

I also totally understand the reason for limiting the precision and applaud the effort taken there but like the others, I don't understand why the same data readily available on the main page can't be made available in the API.