Three weeks in and most of the work this week has gone into quality, not quantity. New tools, a much bigger sovereign reference, fuller charts for free users, and an email digest you can actually configure.
Three new tools on /explore
The Tools strip at the bottom of Explore now has seven cards. Three new ones:
- Coin Catalog Software — the structured side of the product. 20+ fields per coin, mintmark / designer / provenance / catalogue-reference tracking, free-form tags, filterable across the whole collection.
- From Excel to MyCoinage — for collectors still tracking in a spreadsheet. 60-second CSV import, column-by-column mapping, what you keep and what you gain by moving over.
- Coin Collection Value — answers the question every collector asks: what is it actually worth today? Walks through the methodology behind every value on the site and applies it portfolio-wide.
Each page is targeted at a specific search query so the right traffic lands on the right page.
Sovereign guide rebuilt
The Gold Sovereign Values UK reference was getting cited externally, so we put proper time into it. The guide is now around five times longer with:
- Live bullion calculation. Pulled from the current LBMA gold spot and rendered into a per-denomination table (1/4, 1/2, 1, 2 and 5 sovereign).
- Sovereigns by monarch. All eleven reigns from George III 1817 to Charles III, with typical premium ranges for each.
- A proper mintmark section. Sydney (S), Melbourne (M), Perth (P), Bombay (I), Pretoria (SA), Ottawa (C) and London. What each mark means and how it changes value.
- Expanded rare-date table. From six entries to sixteen, with realised hammer-price ranges from Spink, Baldwin's, Noonans and Heritage.
- Authentication and tax. Five home tests for spotting fakes, plus the CGT exemption (HMRC manual CG78308) and the VAT-free investment-gold rule in plain English.
If you spot anything missing, please get in touch.
Coin pages: both sides at once
The hero on every coin page used to be a single image with an obverse/reverse toggle. Both faces are now shown side by side, captioned, with either side clickable for the lightbox. Looks better, reads faster.
Charts: fuller for free users
The price-history chart used to render only the last three sales for free or gated viewers under the sign-up CTA. The blurred backdrop looked empty and undersold the data. The full series now renders for everyone. The upgrade prompt still sits on top of it, but the chart underneath finally looks like the tool it is.
Digest emails: pick your own cadence
The default market digest used to be weekly, no question asked. Some collectors found that too much. The Privacy & Preferences card on /account/settings now has a Market digest frequency dropdown:
- Off — no digests
- Weekly — every Monday
- Monthly — first of the month (the new default)
- Yearly — once a year
If you got a weekly one this week and wished it was less often, switch there.
Better data, quietly
Two cleanup passes worth mentioning:
- Silver and gold proof spot floor. The auto-verifier now denies any silver-proof or gold-proof listing priced below 85% of melt. These were almost always sealed-bag listings of the regular cupro-nickel coin getting wrongly attached to the precious-metal variant. Over eighty such prices have been removed and the data quality on those coin pages is visibly better.
- Coloured 50p cleanup. 780 prices below £15 removed across the 50+ coloured 50p variants in the catalogue. Fifteen pounds matches the Royal Mint's own retail price for a coloured BU pack, which is the realistic floor for a genuine coloured coin.
Both fixes are invisible if you don't look closely, and that is the point. The per-coin price you see should be the right one.
Cleaner URLs across the site
Every coin link now uses /coin/{slug} (the canonical pretty URL) instead of the legacy /coin?slug=... query format. If you have shared a coin page recently the new URLs are nicer to copy and search engines index them properly.
Reporting wrong prices
The flag (⚑) button on every price-history row now actually goes somewhere. Reports land in an admin queue and get reviewed within a day or two. If the flag is correct, the price is removed; if not, it is dismissed. Either way nothing is silent any more.
Smaller things
A few quality-of-life fixes worth flagging:
- Browse filter on /coins no longer surfaces US-style "cents" denominations that crept in via 1961 decimal-pattern coins.
- Mobile footer sat against the left edge on phones — fixed.
- Grading guide had a horizontal-scrolling crossover table on small screens; that now stacks cleanly.
- Explore page had an awkward gap above the stat pills with a slide-in animation that read like a shake; both gone.
- Admin pageviews are no longer counted in Google Analytics, so internal moderation traffic stops polluting the numbers.
What's next
US coverage is the priority for May. The catalogue is strong on British coins and we want it strong on American ones. If you collect US coins and would like to help shape what we add first, please drop by Discord.
— Eleanor