Talk Nats Ticket Exchange

A number of Talk Nats commenters (as well as writers) are season ticket owners.

In the comments for #Nats stay home for Cardinals: Leake and Gio Gonzalez to start, Drazthegr8 mentioned the idea of the Talk Nats community creating a way to share tickets. Basically the idea is to allow those Season Ticket holders to list tickets that are part of their plan that they can’t use in order to sell them to others (or perhaps trade). Draz created a initial Google Docs spreadsheet for that purpose and DonH made a few updates to make it easier to review what is available.The following image is a screen shot of a very preliminary Work in Progress (WIP) of the Google Spreadsheet.

Click on the image to open up the spreadsheet. Note however that it is a WIP and so you may encounter errors or strange results if someone is working on updating it.

The basic idea is that each user would have a tab (aka a Worksheet) that follows a fixed format and that would include a listing of the games/tickets that they would like to make available. That tab could also include other information (details TBD). That data is consolidated dynamically into a hidden worksheet which is then used to create the pivot table seen in the above screenshot.

For those of you unfamiliar with pivot tables, they provide a nice summary and allow you to drill down to the detail by hitting the +/- sign icons. So in the above table, the default would be to have everything except Date collapsed. You could then use the +/- to see the sections, rows and owner for available tickets.

There are still lots of details to be worked out. Just a short list:

1. How are new worksheets added. Adding them to the worksheet is simple – someone just needs to have edit access so they can enter data. But how do we know who to give access to?
2. Plus someone has to update the hidden tab and the pivot table filter (based on how things stand now) to include new worksheets in the summary.
3. How do folks who want to exchange tickets get in touch with each other? Putting emails on a public Google doc is an open invitation to spammers.
4. How do we arrange for payment. PayPal is a great option, but there is a PayPal fee.
5. Are there any legal issues (e.g.,. scalping) about selling tickets. Our assumption is that tickets sold at cost do not cause any issues.
6. We are also thinking that allowing for folks to create worksheets that contain a list of games they would like tickets for might be a good idea as well.
7. and so on, and so on.

So at this point, we welcome your comments and suggestions.

And, in particular, if anyone has expertise in creating/updating Google spreadsheets, please let us know by commenting to that effect. We could really use your help!

Post WBC USA vs. Columbia Update

Some updates since the original posting:

1. Thanks to Sec 3, My Sofa for pointing out no PayPal fee for certain types of transfers between two PayPal accounts.
2. On the topic of using PayPal, still need to consider how to make that info available, but making it difficult for spammers to harvest it. Maybe an image?
3. One of the issues with consolidating the data is assuming a reasonable limit on how many rows of data a user would have. This may become moot if someone with more experience that me (DonH) can help with the query functions that consolidates the worksheets).
4. Perhaps we could create Google Group (or a pinned post) for ticket exchange discussions?
5. Allow folks to copy a worksheet and enter their data is easy. What is not so easy is getting that included in the consolidated (hidden) worksheet. Again perhaps someone with more skills/experience with Google Spreadsheets can make this moot.
   1. A blank template worksheet/tab has been created along with some instructions.
   2. In order to edit you need to be added to the list of allowed editors by an admin.