: I have been working a lot on the database, not least finding my way
: around Carreras - I thought Autavias were complicated!

: It is now possible to enter Autavia, Carrera and Monaco. The other
: Heuer chronos will follow.

You're doing good work!

: Will enough collectors enter their watches?

I think you'll have a massive rush at first, then it will slow down.

: Jeff says he have close to 1000 serial numbers so that alone will
: be a fantastic boost.

Now this gives us a problem. Jeff has the numbers for my watches, but if I enter them too we now have duplicate entries. Which will almost certainly have slight differences. And a lot of your initial entries will be duplicated too. I'll come back to this.

: MikeC made the data into a spreadsheet which might give more
: possibilities and better security.
: But I am no expert and don’t know how you make a spreadsheet
: accessible on the web in a way so that we can all enter data.
: If somebody can do all this and want to take over it is fine with
: me.

My initial idea was to use it to assimilate the various sources of data, sort them into order and then use that as input to Knackhq. But this is not adequate for general public input. Technically Knackhq is a "Content Management System" (CMS). There are many available, some come free with web-hosting packages. A good one will have a proper database behind it and give the owner/manager access to the database's functions to order the data.

For another project I have just added a CMS to my own web/mail domain, and I am looking guiltily at the book on running this CMS that has been on my desk for two weeks still unopened. Give me a week or two and I'll know if the one I'm using is up to the job, I do know it has MySQL behind it and that I get in there with a screwdriver (virtual). I also know that I can split the data into public, restricted and private.

I can also host a mailing-list so that technical traffic about this project could be kept off the normal forum.

Now, duplicates. Some databases come with facilities to de-dupe the data, but as anyone who gets junk-mail duplicated under slightly different names knows they're not perfect. However in this case we're
not dealing with many millions of names and addresses, more like a couple of thousand actual records. It's not a big task to write a program that will sift through that and I can do that if it's needed.

Going to a fancier CMS should also bring better input checking, I've noticed a few glitches in the entries to Knackhq already (for example a serial number should be a number and not have alphabet characters).

: With the KNACK web based software that I use there are a few
: issues:

: They might not stay in business.

They might also use the data hosted there for other purposes. Not saying they do, but that's what Google, Facebook & so on do!

: There is no automatic backup system, but I can manually make a copy
: of the complete “app” now and then. It is also possible to
: export data (Commas (.csv) / Tabs (.txt) / JSON)
: And what if I make a mistake and loses a lot of data?

Backup early, backup often. Backup as text not in any binary or proprietary format. Text compresses beautifully so don't fret about space.

: Price?
: The KNACK cost USD 39,-/month.

I call that expensive. It's 6 times what I pay for web hosting, email, CMS, database, mailing lists -- from an outfit who have a good reputation for customer support and are not bottom-feeders in the ISP business. The difference is that I have to learn the detailed setup of
the CMS, Knack make it easier. However most of my working life since 1973 I had to learn new software from the programmers while they were writing it and then explain it to the documentation people later, so I'm used to operating like this ;-)

A few more things to consider:

If we going to aggregate the data and it takes several people to do it, how do we maintain the confidentiality of the data? Particularly when it was made available to Jeff with restrictions. Will the people who did that accept that Peter and I, for example, are trustworthy? There are only two people who even may be reading this who have met me in person. I used to herd BOFHs, so I am more paranoid about data security than you can imagine if you don't have that background.

This is not going to be just a resource for collectors: it'll help scammers and thieves too. Let's not make their work easier. One thing that's occurred to me is to clearly watermark all photos. That's a piece of cake to do in bulk on a desktop computer, might need some extra software installed to do it for internet input.

More will occur to me as soon as I hit "Post" ;-/

Mike