Version 1.8.1: A lot of changes

A general theme in my work is the non-reliance on 3rd parties... which includes myself. I have written my IE extension to embed its functionality within the Prosper website as much as possible. The idea being that you really can't tell where Prosper ends and my extension begins. Since LendingStats has essentially gone offline I had already reworked that logic to rely only on Prosper for the Group performance information. I have utilized other 3rd party sites (including me) to help gather additional data and statistics. I'd rather have one point of failure, that being Prosper. As Prosper continues to improve their API I can rely on them more and more.

In this release even more functionality is getting its data solely from Prosper. This means 100% uptime availability and accuracy for the data, unless Prosper is down and then it doesn't matter anyway.

This release affects these areas:
Hot Lists
Favorite Borrowers
Watch States

There is a cost gaining 100% reliability and accuracy of information. Most notably the speed of the '3 day' and '24 hour' hot lists can take between 1 and 2 minutes to complete. In general the hot list is slower than before, but to me it is worth the time to get the latest data and not worry about if the external server is up.

For your favorite borrowers, there are now two sub-menu options, 'active listings' and 'all member listings.' Hopefully the options are self explanatory. Show only active is the default.

For watching states, the dialog that pops up to display your list of state choices used to show the number of listings for that state even before you clicked a state. This is gone. But the upside is once you click a state you will be presented with the first 25 active listings for that state.


Now some new functionality. If you are not using the 'Similar Loans' feature you really should. I use this to educate myself on patterns ... looking for common themes in the loans that eventually go late. One example is the number of bids... most of the time the loans that are late have less than 50 bids. Which is why I added to the Verify Bids link an indicator based on the quality of lender bidding. Another is the frequency in 'bad' groups. The same 6 keep coming up over and over.

But to the change... on the 'Similar Loans' page you will now find a magic wand next to the loan status. Click this magic wand and you will see that loan's status changes over time.

When reviewing an old listing that became a loan, you will find a magic wand next to the text 'Listing became a loan'... in case you haven't guessed, clicking the wand will display the loan's status changes over time.

The 'Similar Loans' page was not showing the same data as the DQ report. This data should now be accurate. Also the list of late loans was not always current. This should also be much improved... typically only 30 minutes behind (improved reliance on Prosper). And there was a bug in calculating if a group had a default loan, which is now fixed.