Cartridgereview.co.uk

[aris]

Anyone seen this site?

 

http://www.cartridgereview.co.uk/

 

A very nice technical resource - in particular, if you want to know info on pellet sizes, weights (lead and steel), and counts for different types of cartridge:

 

http://www.cartridgereview.co.uk/pages/shotSize.aspx

 

 

[Gordon R]

Very useful - thanks.

[figgy]

Looks good and should get a lot better in the future.

 

Figgy

[aris]

I mailed the chap who runs it. He said it will eventually close down as soon as the domain expires due to lack of interest by users.

 

If you feel it is of benefit, or have some ideas, contact him and let him know.

[HDAV]

He could save the hosting cost by putting all the info here

[kiffy]

a fascinating website, one which im sure if promoted would get an interest both from visitors and advertisers... it would be a shame if he closes it as it must have taken a lot of work to create it and taking out the cartridge costs used for test the actual running costs of a website with a .co.uk domain name would be minimal, one that a hobbiest website creater should manage.. that said i'll email him as i can offer webspace if he needs it

[garygreengrass]

Very useful

[aris]

I don't think cost is the issue - it is his belief that there is no interest. I told him that if anything, interest will peak now with the renewed interest in non toxic shot and it's effectiveness. His simulated shot patterns for different loads are quite cool.

[kiffy]

its something that i found in the past as i run a website for my village, theres been a lot of interest but at times getting people to join in is murder... my websites forum in particular is on a virtual standstill at the moment but ive been doing it eight years now and the messages i get from people make it all worthwhile, i really hope he sticks with it.

[wymberley]

I don't think cost is the issue - it is his belief that there is no interest. I told him that if anything, interest will peak now with the renewed interest in non toxic shot and it's effectiveness. His simulated shot patterns for different loads are quite cool.

I would suggest with respect and sympathy for the guy's feelings that he is right - that didn't just take a couple of rainy afternoons to put together. There is too much extraneous information and the space saved by not having it could have freed up areas for more useful detail. The bottom line is 99% of shooters are going to buy what the local RFD sells. What he stocks, provided he's not a complete buffoon and just to go out of business, is precisely what he can sell in his locality and who may just occasionally buy what you want if you threaten to throw his toys out of your cot.

 

People want to know how products perform - although long gone are the days when they were also interested in how they worked. At a glance, the simulated patterns do give an idea of what to expect, and whereas this is not true in every case, perusal reflects that the generator programme appears to fail to take into account the normal (Gaussian) pellet distribution.

 

Having said that, it would be a crying shame if all that effort was to go to waste and cease to be available to those who can make use of some of the information.

Edited December 1, 2013 by wymberley

[aris]

If anyone feels strongly about him keeping the data online, please send him an encouraging note. I did suggest adding a niche forum section to keep the site "sticky" with users. It would certainly be of interest to re-loaders, or anyone looking into new non toxic shot options.

[neutron619]

I would suggest with respect and sympathy for the guy's feelings that he is right - that didn't just take a couple of rainy afternoons to put together. There is too much extraneous information and the space saved by not having it could have freed up areas for more useful detail. The bottom line is 99% of shooters are going to buy what the local RFD sells. What he stocks, provided he's not a complete buffoon and just to go out of business, is precisely what he can sell in his locality and who may just occasionally buy what you want if you threaten to throw his toys out of your cot.

 

People want to know how products perform - although long gone are the days when they were also interested in how they worked. At a glance, the simulated patterns do give an idea of what to expect, and whereas this is not true in every case, perusal reflects that the generator programme appears to fail to take into account the normal (Gaussian) pellet distribution.

 

Having said that, it would be a crying shame if all that effort was to go to waste and cease to be available to those who can make use of some of the information.

 

Hi guys,

 

So I'm the chap who built the website. I'm aware that some of you have sent emails to me through the site's contact form - I'll do my best to reply to them today and I'm flattered that there have been so many supprotive emails from PW members in the last 48 hours or so.

 

I'll describe the situation as I currently see it: I think the poster quoted above is correct when he says that 99% of shooters buy what the local RFD sells, and that they're interested in performance but not function. I have some responses to the rest of what he's said, but they can wait for a moment.

 

To continue, the traffic pattern that I've seen on the website certainly reflects the conclusion above. One notable feature is that most of the hits arrive through Google searches for a particular cartridge - i.e. people are searching for something specific elsewhere and arriving on that particular page, rather than using the site as it was intended, which was to search for and compare cartridges.

 

The traffic pattern clearly shows that rather than looking for a cartridge by function (i.e. "what can I get with 30g of #5 for less than £250 per thousand?") they're looking for reviews of the cartridge brands of which they're already aware ("what do people think of Gamebore Black Gold?"). The fact that the site remains largely devoid of the user data I had hoped to collect and isn't being used in the "comparatory" way I had hoped to encourage means that users aren't staying long on the site. In turn, this doesn't give me much of a chance to tempt them into leaving the review data which would in turn be helpful to others.

 

In short, the proportion of shotgun shooters who are interested enough in ballistics to want to either reload or study the area for it's own sake just isn't big enough to attract the kind of interest which would allow me to justify continuing to attempt the (monumental) task of adding the remaining cartridges to the site, or keeping thousands of prices up to date. It's just too much work for the reward and there are other things (like shooting!) that I want to do with my time. If I had some help or enough traffic to generate some advertising revenue to make it pay for itself, maybe it would be different.

 

Hopefully that explains why I'd planned to let it quietly die when the webspace / domain subscriptions ran out.

 

To respond to the points made by the poster above:

 

I'm not sure what you were referring to as "extraneous information" but there is a lot on the screen, no doubt. I'd also be interested to know what you might have meant by "more useful detail" - if I do decide to do anything with the site, adding the information that people actually want is probably a good way of getting a bit of traffic!

 

Regarding the pattern modelling: the model does indeed use a Gaussian distribution to model the distribution of the pellets in the pattern. The model places the pellet impact marks using a distibution appropriate to each choking (see below) but assumes that once they have left the barrel, their vector is constant (i.e. they fly in a straight line).

 

A (non-exhaustive) list of factors the model takes into account: supersonic-subsonic transition; pellet material composition; pellet size; initial pellet velocity (to a degree); choke effect (but not choke constriction).

Those it doesn't account for: pellet shape (assumed spherical); barrel diameter / shot column size (see below); wad type (effect incalculable).

 

The most important point to note about how the model works is that it is gun / cartridge / choke independent. My starting point for the model was simply: "just because the manufacturer puts 'Full' on their choke, doesn't mean that it'll put 70% of the pellets inside a 30" circle at 40 yards with my gun / cartridge combination". It was never going to be possible to model every cartridge in every gun through every choke.

 

Instead, what I did was to start from the opposite end of the logic. The model says that "Full choke performance is any choke which will put 70% of the pellets from the cartridge fired into the 30" circle at 40 yards". It ignores the detail of whether the choke in the users gun that gives that performance is labelled "F" or "IM" or "IC"(!) and answers the simpler question "what would full choke performance with this cartridge look like?" (This means that I don't have to take into account the actual diameter of the barrel from which the shot came, or how long the shot column was in the cartridge.)

 

The model, therefore, knows what these theoretical choke performances are and uses the appropriate Gaussian distribution for the selected level of performance. It is possible (though I haven't enabled it to save on complexity) to model chokes with non-standard performance - a blunderbuss for example: 4% of the available shot within a 30" circle at 10m! (I exaggerate.) It is up to the user of the website to go out and test their chokes to see which of the modelled performances best approximates their actual gun / cartridge / choke. I've done my best to explain this all in the panels of the same name that appear when you click the "Explanation" buttons in the top-right of the red boxes.

 

Hopefully that's all reasonably clear.

 

This is a huge post, so I'll leave it there for now. If any of you want to post here or email me with suggestions about what should happen to the site, I'm happy to discuss that. If anything is to be retained, I expect a cut-down version of the site, probably containing the tools and perhaps a queryable database might be the way to go, but I'd appreciate hearing your thoughts.

 

Thanks,

 

Adam (of Cartridge Review).

[TIGHTCHOKE]

Well done Adam, keep up the good work.

[aris]

Adam,

 

Thanks for popping by :-) I would hate to see all your hard work be erased due to lack of interest - hence my post here. Perhaps there is too little interest in what is basically a niche subject in a niche sport. I think there could well be a market for your website though. Have you considered joining up with another larger shooting website (CartridgeWatch?) - or turning your site into a price comparison site for cartridges and other shooting gear? As for advertising - Google Adwords cost nothing to implement - have you considered that?

 

Having a look through the site - I didn't see anywhere a user could make a contribution. Perhaps to take the load off of yourself, you could make the site more of a wiki-style where users could add data on different cartridge types.

[neutron619]

Adam,

 

Thanks for popping by :-) I would hate to see all your hard work be erased due to lack of interest - hence my post here. Perhaps there is too little interest in what is basically a niche subject in a niche sport. I think there could well be a market for your website though. Have you considered joining up with another larger shooting website (CartridgeWatch?) - or turning your site into a price comparison site for cartridges and other shooting gear? As for advertising - Google Adwords cost nothing to implement - have you considered that?

 

Having a look through the site - I didn't see anywhere a user could make a contribution. Perhaps to take the load off of yourself, you could make the site more of a wiki-style where users could add data on different cartridge types.

 

Aris,

 

At this point I'm happy to consider any and all ideas, though with a first child arriving at some point in January, my time for working on it in the immediate future may be limited!

 

It's interesting you mention the price comparison website. What I didn't finish doing above was laying out the ideas I had for developing the site - at this point, I don't think it'll do too much damage if I reveal them now, since even if someone were to steal the idea and start up a rival website, they will still suffer from the fundamental lack of interest people appear to have in choosing cartridges appropriately (as opposed to just buying what's available as discussed).

 

Basically, in an ideal world, the bells and whistles would have drawn people onto the site. They might have left one or two reviews of their favourite cartridges (deliberately made to be possible with as few clicks as possible). Over time, even if each visitor only did a couple of reviews, the averages of all their scores would have been a pretty good guide to what people thought was good, whether for performance, value for money or whatever. That's data which could have been useful to the cartridge companies and might have been enough to get them on board with some advertising or sponsorship in exchange for access to the underlying data.

 

At the same time, to run concurrently with that, I'd been building up a user-specific side of the site which would allow two different kinds of users - RFDs and "ordinary" users - to log on. The RFDs would be able, perhaps in exchange for a few pennies, to upload their price lists to the website, along with their post code, giving a geographic location to work with. Meanwhile, the users would be able to log on, again supplying a post code, with the idea of putting the users in touch with the places that stocked the cartridges they want, which they'd found on the site. Meanwhile, the RFDs would have real time access to what cartridges people were looking for, and what the shooters in their area had reviewed most favourably and be able to adjust their stock accordingly. Getting users to identify and save their three favourite cartridges against their profile would be another way of making this work.

 

Of course, with all of that location data, there would also be the possibility for targeted advertising and a perhaps degree of research into what people were using across the country - BASC might find it helpful to know where best to target their steel shot campaign, for instance.

 

Anyway - those were the possibilities. Lack of interest, time and general human inertia conspired (and probably still do conspire) to make it unlikely to happen, but if anyone wants to volunteer to help get it back on the road, I'm prepared to think about it (though I make no promises).

 

Adam.

Edited December 2, 2013 by neutron619

[wymberley]

Adam,

 

Many thanks for a comprehensive reply. Although there is a set figure, say, 'Y', for a pellet density in a Gaussian pattern for reference purposes usually, in reality it'll fall somewhere between, 'X' and 'Z'. Consequently, I couldn't be sure whether it did apply. I have to say that is the best guide I have ever seen by a Devon mile and the decision to take, " the opposite end of the logic" simply reinforces the fact that it matters not what the choke is nominally bored at but what strikes the pattern plate does.

 

An example of extraneous information would be the details of lead shot and the antimony content. Looking at the two extremes, there is one extra large pellet between the lowest additive table and the highest and for the small pellet the figure is 39. For all practical purposes, the one table for the ubiquitous 3% would have sufficed is the point I was trying to make.

 

With regard to the, "more useful detail", could I take a leaf out of your book and ask, "can that wait for a moment"?

 

Cheers,

Phil

[neutron619]

An example of extraneous information would be the details of lead shot and the antimony content. Looking at the two extremes, there is one extra large pellet between the lowest additive table and the highest and for the small pellet the figure is 39. For all practical purposes, the one table for the ubiquitous 3% would have sufficed is the point I was trying to make.

 

With regard to the, "more useful detail", could I take a leaf out of your book and ask, "can that wait for a moment"?

 

Phil,

 

With regards to the first point, yes - not much in it at all and it would be better to avoid giving the users so many options, I agree. As a lazy developer though, I just told the drop down list to find all the possibilities listed in the database and as there's at least one cartridge of each type I there in there at the moment (perhaps not all visible at this point - you might struggle to find the one packed with 1% antimony lead shot. It doesn't check usefulness or discard anything, in spite of the fact that they're all largely the same. It occurs to me that there's potentially some fun to be had with the model too - I should at least add rock salt and silly putty to the list, though I don't know if I can program random impact "splats" at this point.

 

Regarding "more useful detail" feel free. I'll look forward to hearing your ideas as and when.

 

Adam.

[neutron619]

Adam.

I have been on your site now 20 mins or so, and just tried to add a review on one of the pages. Apart from the god awful capatcha thing ( sp? ) When I finally got there, it told me I couldn't leave a review. I got a email to confirm, but no review is posted. Am I doing something wrong?

Also, I like it, although is very data heavy for a beginner, one thing I was saddened by is where you can click on similar cartridges, it would also be good to have the price comparison column too.

There is also a bug, it shows 25 on page one and when you click to view page 2 you get a problem page

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.Web.HttpException: The GridView 'CartridgeDataGrid' fired event PageIndexChanging which wasn't handled.

 

Hi JABB,

 

Sorry you've had trouble with the review page. The captcha thing is there because within about a week of the site opening, we had a deluge of spam that filled the database and knocked it offline. I'd rather not be using it, but I'm afraid it's necessary, what with all the bots around the place causing trouble. Did you click the link in the email you were sent? That would have activated the review and let it appear on the site.

 

If I start working on the site again, I'll see if I can add the price comparison column as you ask.

 

Sorry about the bug - haven't been able to copy that myself yet, but can you confirm that this was a list of 25 similar cartridges? Or were you looking at the directory / search / something like that? If you can let me know, I'll see what I can find out.

 

Thanks for taking the time to look at the site,

 

Adam.

[neutron619]

Hi JABB,

 

I can repeat the error with the cartridge you reviewed - I'll look into that at some point soon (I won't have time today, I'm afraid), though I think you just happen to have picked the one cartridge in the database that has more than one page worth of "simillar cartridges"! There aren't that many that list more than about 10 simillar, in fact. Still - will try to get that sorted for you.

 

It's occurred to me that the other "protect against people entering ****" feature of the review system is that any review where free text has been entered has to be looked at before it's published, so I'm guessing that's what you did? It's been so long since I thought about the site that I've forgotten how I built it in many ways, but I think that'll be what the problem is. Will log on to the database shortly and have a look for you.

 

Thanks again for helping to track down the error.

 

Adam.

[neutron619]

Review data should be visible now.

[neutron619]

JABB,

 

I'm happy to talk about hosting options - I'll drop you a PM with my email address in it if you want to propose something. I won't be able to reply this evening as I have to go to a parenting class for my impending firstborn, but I'll try to get back to you tomorrow.

 

I take your points about pictures and bandwidth. The pictures are lacking because, in spite of my efforts to gain the manufacturers permission to use their images, only Gamebore responded to my inquiries. In an ideal world, they would all have done so and the average page would have looked like this one:

 

http://www.cartridgereview.co.uk/pages/cartridge.aspx?cartridgeId=10271

 

The idea was to use the cartridge box designs so that people would be able to recognise the brands in the shops. In that way, it also constitutes a bit of free advertising, which was supposed to persuade the manufacturers to give permission to use their images.

 

As for bandwidth - well - it's hosted by a friend at discounted rates and on a "shoestring" payment from me, so again anything you can do to help will be much appreciated.

 

That said, life has moved on since I gave up on the site about 4-6 months ago and I've filled the time I might otherwise have spent developing the site with other things. Basically, that means if I do take the decision to work on it again, it's going to be a few months (probably end of Q1 next year) before I can devote any significant time to it - between an impending first child (and a wife who won't put up with me being absent for that) and other projects, time is going to be short. I say that in case you have an expectation of the site being resurrected and redesigned on any kind of timescale in exchange for hosting.

 

Thanks,

 

Adam.

[neutron619]

Just wanted to say that I've tried to reply to all the messages I've received, but a couple of the addresses got bounce-backs from the mail servers saying the messages couldn't be delivered. If you have sent me a message through the website but haven't heard back from me, this probably means that you're one of the two whose addresses aren't recognised. If you'd like to send me a PM with your corrected address, I'll be happy to send my responses again.

[sishyplops]

thats a great site, added to favourites

[sandspider]

Just found this, useful site.

[ayano3]

Great site Adam, would you mind if I posted the link on the website I look after for our widfowling club? Keep it going, the stuff you have on there is very interesting to all.