You've probably already noticed this, but I recently had to make a change to our daily update schedule. For the last several years, it looked like GM released the new window stickers right around 11am EST. So at 11:30am, the site would pull in the new stickers one time and that was it. One update per day, nice and easy. There were occasionally a few stragglers that were released later in the day, but it wasn't enough to bother trying to get as the next days update would grab them.
The window stickers now start getting released around 11am EST, but continue to trickle out throughout the day. So I've changed the approach a bit. The site still start looking for stickers at about 11:30am, then check again every few hours. I slowed down the update process so it will now look more like the site is continuously updating instead of just doing a few updates here and there. We decided on making this a slower, more continuous approach to reduce the load we put on the GM site that generates the window stickers. This is beacuse I don't want C8Tracker to be the reason GM decides to lock that site down in the future. Even though downloading all of the window stickers is perfectly legal, we try to go about it in a way that is ethical and won't cause any distruption to the GM site (and after almost 4 years, there has never been any indication that we are disrupting it.. the response times from the server stay consistent over the course of the updates).
I've been completely rebuilding C8Tracker over the last few weeks. I plan to release the new site sometime over this holiday weekend. Some pages on the existing site probably will get removed. The "Dealer Comparisons" page will probably go away. Traffic to that page has always been low, and because of that I've never really put much effort into updating it... so there is just no point in keep it around. I will eventually have all the different dashboard pages on the new site, but some will likely be missing when it first launches.
There are some new features that will be available at launch, and some coming later.
- Current update status on the home page. It will tell you if an update is currently running, the results of the last update, etc. It will also show the status of the system as a whole, such as if there is an issue with the GM site the generates the window stickers... so no more wondering why the site doens't seem to be updating (spoiler alert: C8Tracker is very reliable, the GM side of things, not so much).
- Dealer Search.. you can now search for the top dealers based on model year and calendar year. So the site can be used to generate data to see what the top dealers were for a given model year, calendar year, or a custom date range.
- Email improvements. A lot of people try to register and simply never receive the emails needed to complete registration. I have switched email services to one with very high reputation, so hopefully this finally fixes that issue.
- Dark mode. If you know, you know. Great change for users who prefer to have their device and websites in dark mode.
Not available at launch, but in the works:
- The older C8 window stickers are no longer available from GM, but as luck would have it, I found I have most of them stored on a USB drive (original idea was to store all of them, but it seemed pointless as it looked like they would always be available from GM, so I didn't end up doing that). I plan to start saving them all and make them available directly on C8Tracker and not just linking to the GM site for them. The PDFs will probably only be available to registered users, I'm thinking I'll have PNG files of them with C8Tracker watermark available to unregistered users. While I'd prefer to not even have registered user accounts or anything hidden being registration, C8Tracker is relentlessly targeted by data scrapers, so I have to take certain measures to protect some of the data from people and their bots who think its acceptible to just beat the hell out of C8Tracker all day to download all the data to republish on their own site without even giving credit to C8Tracker. So, thank those guys for anything being hidden behind registration.
- Rendered photos for all vehicles.
- Direct data access via API. Want C8Tracker data for your own uses? I will never make this easy for data scrapers, but if someone is willing to pay a small monthly fee, I will happily give them direct access to the data with an API.
- Donations accepted. Over the lifetime of C8Tracker, I have gotten a ton of people wanting to donate to the site to help cover the bills and keep it alive. I have always turned down these offers. But at this point, I have reconsidered it. I really hate having to have the site covered in annoying ads to pay the sites bills, so my idea is something like "a donation of $10 will remove the ads from the site for 1 year." So basically, I get some help covering the costs of running this thing, while the user who donated will get a better experience using the site. I have other feature ideas for people who donate.. such as email alerts for when their cars window sticker becomes available. Donations will never be required to see any data, so the site will stay useful to all users.
- I have another big feature in the works that will make C8Tracker useful to an entirely new audience. It's coming later this year. I'm not ready to announce it yet. It's only as useful as the data, so I need to spend a few months collecting data so its useful at launch.