I've created this thread for general day-to-day comments/feedback/suggestions, because I think it's better then having to make a new thread every time you have got something little to ask/say.
Comments / Feedback / Suggestions Thread
JeffreyM on 18/03/2008 - 16:30
closed Comments
You have minimum votes for front page disabled… the new deals block on the front page explicitly exclude the front page deals, which in this case would be almost all the deals.
So my setting there won't affect what I see to the left of that column?
I have that disabled thinking I wont miss anything new being posted on a day to day basis.
I didnt realise that setting was for the New Deals block if thats the case.I also notice that when I am in the settings page the New Deals block there (and here for that matter) shows the latest deals. Are there different settings for each of the New Deals blocks?
Basically the new deals block not show what's on the front page. So if you disable the minimum votes for the front page, you won't get anything meaningful on the new deals block.
If you don't want to miss out on deals, you can disable the minimum votes on the new deals usage, keep the default for front page, and just visit the new deals page to browse all the deals.
just saw an update kick in with the L, P and new Moderator badges, great work, stands out really well imo
They look pretty cool.
Ive been a member of OzB for 6 years! :o
Good work mods/site people!
Another change with the tag is the new "Associated" tag next to the commenter. Employees of store wish to comment but they don't want to be labelled as "Representative".
thank you!
hi, i'm also a member on a skating forum. they have a feature for their posts where you can add a poll to your posts.
so, for example, for tightarses greens pancake deal you could have a poll where people select/vote on what they use a liquid mixer for the dry mix -water, soy milk, regular milk, orange juice, etc. it shows the voting % and number of voters as well.
What do you make your pancake mix with?
o water 35%
o skim free milk 20%
o soy milk 5%
o regular milk 40%
75 votesAdding a poll to the post? We already have it although you do need to set up the poll before the post is published. Adding a poll to the comment? Maybe you can show me where it was done…
just a poll with the post. not with comment. that would be pretty full on.
I must utilise the poll option more. cheers
Hi scotty. Love OzBargain… but hate the orange "NEW" icon that is now plastered over every post/thread. any way I can turn it off? Really distacting, like little orange suns everywhere burning holes in my retina.
how about someway to monitor the stuff we actual buy from posts.
maybe below the add reminder button. have a "I bought this" button.
then in your user profile you can view a page of the deals you bought from.
I buy a lot stuff through deals on this site and would like to keep track of them.
half the time I forget and if something isn't received and I pay by paypal then the "i bought this" page would be an easy enough reminder and a dispute lodged.
sort of like a purchase history.
could be a good way to track the how successful deals are in actuality. though people may not click the button when purchasing or may click it anyway with out purchasing.
yes, maybe expand it to - Want / Have / Had / bought.
different from Something that you currently have as you may have bought that product else where e.g. ebay, and you can track purchases there easily.
"the bought" reflects purchases made solely from the particular deal posted for that product.
if the product is posted in a later deal then the user can hit "have".
Those are actually linked to the products so other deals listing the same product will have want / have / etc tagged as well. If you want to keep track of deals that you have exercised / made purchased, you can create a deal folder and then add that deal into the folder.
you guys think of everything.
I'd love it if there was a rolling top menu bar (that auto hides) so that if I'm reading a long thread I don't have to scroll back to the top to access the menu. Like linkedin for example.
Like the bottom bar does now? I don't like these at all. I like to be in control of what is where on my screen. Personal preference obviously.
Ah yeah just noticed that. That'll be handy in multiple page threads with more new replies.
But yeah, personal preference.
I would love to be able to tag people in posts (as opposed to just mentioning them in the description).
Sometimes I refrain from posting a related or subsequent bargain because I don't want the original poster to think I'm not giving them due credit or that I am stealing their thunder (by 'related or subsequent', I include when another retailer has adjusted their price in response to the original 'bargain' or where the OP has reminded you of a very similar, related bargain/promotion). I notice that a lot of OzBrs get around this by commenting and hoping the OP updates their post (which is great!), but sometimes the OP is AFK or the comment gets buried.
It would be great if someone can just post the new bargain and credit the OP of the other catalyst bargain by tagging them (kind of like a facebook post: Submitted by Steve with Jane. In practice it might look a lot like the "edited by" line that appears when a mod fixes a title). Such a feature might need to be paired with the ability to un-tag oneself (thereby avoiding shenanigans like tagging a mod with hemorrhoid cream or something). It might also contribute to the stats of the tagged user(??).
Personally, I don't care if I get acknowledged for a contribution or not - I'd just like to be able to acknowledge others just in case they do care. Then again, mentioning in the description might be perfectly acceptable and I might be creating a solution for a problem that doesn't exist.
a first line such as " kudos to Animus Furandi for being the wind beneath my wings for this post".
this is established when making the post for the deal.
so you have option boxes for doing this : one for the original inspiring post and one for the original poster?
Yep, just an option box. To tag other users. It would have the same effect as your hyperlinking I guess.
This is the situation where I think it would be useful: http://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/114270
I never posted the cheaper Videopro price because I didn't want it to be a $1 f u to the original poster. The cheaper price wasn't incorporated into the original post though. Wouldn't it be swell if someone could post the cheaper video pro price, but tag the OP from the Sony Direct post? (This is just an example).
But like I said, it may be a solution for a problem that doesn't exist.
Small bug(?) I noticed: When counting up time since my comment was added, it went straight from 57, 58, 59 seconds to 2 minutes. Is it meant to do that, or should that go to 1 minute?
Yeah we round-up on the minute level. Might need to change that. The time shown is approximate anyway.
Dear scotty,
Could your username when you hover over 'My Account' be hyper-linked to your user profile, so you can view it quickly please?
Also, would still really love an option to restrict searches to terms just in the title's of posts…
Thanks, Tom
This is not so much a needed feature now, but could definitely make a difference in the future, depending on which direction OzB takes.
Local only deals. If the grocery store down the street is clearing out bananas for 50c, thats a good deal for me, but is of no interest to someone 500km away or even 50km away. Likewise a managers special from IGA in WA is something that I have no need for. If we could set our location in the user profile, and set a radius of interest, it would make looking through deals much faster. One way you could display it is to use the same method you use for deleted posts, where there's only a title and its greyed out. Not sure how tricky this would be on the backend, and no doubt you've already thought of it, but I wanted to add my vote for it. A few times I've seen things, but they've been niche products and very local only, so I didn't want to clog up the deal feed.
It would also be cool if you could set more than one location for local awareness. For instance if your work in the city, but live in the outer suburbs, get local awareness for both locations.
I never liked the grey ing of negged comments. Especially if a comment has just one neg. perhaps only start greeting it at 3 negs.
A century badge for every 100 deals?
I know this is absolutely tiny, but the wiki is out of date with regards to the following:
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/wiki/help:deal_posting_guidelin…
In the "Starting Etiquette" section, the 1st post icon is out of date, as it was recently changed to the "L" plate.
Yeah, it's probably the least useful suggestion ever, but it's kinda bugging me.
Thanks. That part of doco is fixed.
When did the grid display option for the site get rolled out? It looks pretty nice.
Only criticism is how there's no deal description underneath each post.new display is terrible.
is there an option to change back to old style.
There is a button at the top of the page that says Grid and List. You can pick your preference.
i disagree - grid makes the site much more efficient
Yup, looks great! Congrats on the new look. Also good to see there is an option for the old layout.
Actually the beta was rolled out by accident. Sorry about that — there are still issues the need to be ironed out but accidentally rolled out the code that I had in development. I will push out what's available later this week, but default to the old List style with optional Grid layout.
if you need me to test feel free to holla
I never quite got how a single website could be a full time, but after 6 pages of user feature requests adding on to your own todo list which must be quite extensive, now I can't see how you have the time to do any of it :P So, thanks for all the hard work.
That said, I have my own trash to dump ontop of the pile.
Mobile phone app with upload to a live website photofeed
Okay, so you're out and about at the local shopping centre, and you see a tag for dishclothes, was $3 now $1. Is it a good deal? You don't know, you're no dish cloth expert. Even if it is a deal, is it bargain? Is it national or just a local special? In any case, you're seeing a movie in 10min, so you don't have the time to create a post. Before you would try and remember to post later, but likely forget it. But now you have an app on your phone just for this. You take out your phone, open the ozbargain app and snap the a photo. The app uploads the photo to the ozbargain website. Registered users who are a little bored can access the live photo feed from the menu bar, and one of them sees the dishcloth photo, googles a bit, finds it is a bargain, submits it as a deal.I see the trickiest part in getting the user to install the app. You could solve that by only allowing access to the photostream to people who have installed the app, but thats not a perfect solution. I think this is a good way to harness the power of the lower classes of ozb so to speak. Right now a fair portion of the deals are coming from the top 10 posters, people like tightarse, eastern culture, tonester and ofcourse you scotty. Many of them find the deals just through their awesome organizational skills, and are happy to share, but however easy it is to share its not zero, and they're not being paid. They're running on the fumes of being at the top. I imagine after a while it starts to wear on them, and they start looking for a way out. We've already seen that happen to theearth.
Hell of a lot of work to do it, but I see this as the best way of both spreading around the work load and increasing amount of in store deals posted.
I never quite got how a single website could be a full time…
Indeed. Most people I talked to who work in the web industry are amused how lean we are at OzBargain. At the same time, most my friends who are not in the web industry think I probably don't have much to do. Either way, developing new features isn't the most time consuming part of running this website.
Mobile phone app…
Yes. We are actually quite out of date not having our own app. Most "OzBargain" apps on AppStore or Google Play are created by 3rd parties. I totally hated Java and refuse to buy a Mac to develop for iOS. Actually I'm just procrastinating — app might come sometime.
As of uploading photos, there's actually a way to email the photo to a unique email address and it would be stored under your "files", and then email you back a link where you can just click on it to open OzBargain submission form with photo selected. So on Android you basically just [Share] -> Gmail -> Selected recipient -> Send. Not as good as a real app. I shall move that feature to public beta test.
Hi Mods
Any chance ozbargain forum is compatible with the tapatalk plugin .
Would be nice to be able to browse the forum from tapatalk app
Does Tapatalk support threaded comments?
what community system is the forum built on ?
http://tapatalk.com/activate_tapatalk.php or you could possibly build an API http://tapatalk.com/api.php
The core is an older version of Drupal that's not likely to be compatible with Tapatalk's official module.
One of the issues with Tapatalk seems to be lack of threaded comment support — all "replies" will be linked to OP.
Im not a programmer scotty, so forgive me if this is a silly question :p
Would it be possible to build an API that supports threaded comments
Should be possible (if you are just asking about the possibility). I think it would be Tapatalk's best interest to properly support threaded forums.
How can I hide itunes/the istore/anything apple related from listing? They're in my blocked store lists, and when I go to hide from listing they already have a checkmark in the box, yet they're still showing up on the deals page.
Maybe there should be provided options to block keywords, or categories etc. too.
Hey, just wanted to say I like the new social buttons that were added. Just like on every other site I'll never use them, but they are aesthetically pleasing. Keep up the good work.
Is it possible to have the option of a dark theme for ozb? Would make night viewing much easier on the eyes!
besides my suggestion for a new user profile/dashboard page, how can each of the following searches be combined into a single one?
We don't have a special option to search only the freebies at the moment. However for (3), you can do this:
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/search/node/domain:woolworths.c…
thanks, scotty - domain+tag is useful :) is this tip mentioned anywhere?
will you be enabling freebies to be searched in the future?
also, what did you think about my dashboard page idea? as mentioned there, the current profile page seems to be only useful for checking out other users' recent activities, as opposed to managing one's own
I don't think the tip is mentioned elsewhere. Maybe there would be a more comprehensive help document on the search… one day :) If there's a demand we'll work out adding "freebie" as a search criteria as well.
As of dashboard — yes it is a good idea and it would be something useful for the logged-in members. We'll look into that.
perhaps have a search help box under the advanced search box, like the formatting help one that's under comment/description text boxes?
If there's a demand we'll work out adding "freebie" as a search criteria as well.
surely there's a demand for freebies? :)
also why don't forum topics/thread appear in searches via domains and tags?
eg.
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/deals/booktopia.com.au - https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/129405
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/tag/footwear - https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/114712and is it possible to sort searches - deal or topic/thread - by date of most recent comment?
Is there a way to see recently posted forum topics instead of going to each sub forum and checking??
I heard the newsletter shows new forum topics daily but I don't feel like getting more email.If we have the option can someone let me know? or it would be a great addition so some threads can get a bit more attention. (And/or tweakable i.e mute sub forums: Off topic or other etc)
Currently only on the sidebar that lists the last 10 forum posts, excluding Off-Topic.
how about changing it to 15 as per new deals sidebar given that there seems to be spare space at the moment?
nice - thanks :)
Members having tantrums and asking their posts to be removed is one thing, but having the last title preserved (i.e. the grey "This deal is not published." thingy) on the front page for all time when the OP has edited it to something ridiculous prior to unpublishing is just embarrassing. Not a very professional look for this site.
I'd also argue that if a deal is good that the OP should not be able to have it unpublished in the first place.
I saw it in my inbox and was wondering what it was all about. What the heck happened?
I don't see it on my front page though.
but having the last title preserved (i.e. the grey "This deal is not published." thingy) on the front page for all time when the OP has edited it to something ridiculous prior to unpublishing is just embarrassing. Not a very professional look for this site.
Showing unpublished deals on the front page for logged in users was a recent change in response to a user request.
As for the deal in question, within minutes of the deal being unpublished, all the votes were revoked by a moderator, so the deal should have been removed from the front page from that point on.
Incidentally, most of the positive votes for the deal came within 3 minutes the text was completely changed - which didn't help. In this case we acted as quickly as possible but we didn't stop things in time before the deal got 20 positive votes, and front page emails went out.
Showing unpublished deals on the front page for logged in users was a recent change in response to a user request.
I can appreciate this generally, however I don't see any benefit of keeping this type of message on this occasion (it still shows near the top of https://www.ozbargain.com.au/?page=1 as I write this), at least reinstate the original title in the message so it doesn't bring down the tone of the site.
If I'm a new visitor to OzBargain, seeing "…sick to death of (user) screwing with my posts! (Requested by OP)" isn't going to fill me with much optimism and maybe I wouldn't bother visiting the site again, who knows.
Ok I see the problem now. You're seeing it because you've disabled the minimum votes for front page deals. (The default is 20). Thanks for letting me know, I'll edit the title now.
If I'm a new visitor to OzBargain, seeing "…sick to death of (user) screwing with my posts! (Requested by OP)"
They wouldn't have seen it, it's only logged in users who have min votes <=0 for front page that will see it. Anyway the title has been edited now.
Edit: Corrected min votes.
Shouldn't we sticky the the "OzBargain 101s' at the top or make and sticky a topic that indexs and links them if its going to branch out to be a series.
Good idea. Or maybe if we add it to the help page?
Are you talking about the wiki? or in the box on the bottom of Site Discussion?
I have the impression a lot of people don't read the wiki as opposed to the Forums. But as long as it's more visible it's always good.
Oh I see it now, yep that would be a great place to put it.
I suppose since I'm not a new user I tend not to look near the bottom but I'm sure people will.
Is there a way to block all comments of a particular user from appearing? I think this feature would be popular.
any popular user in particular? :)
Just the scourge of this website who are is ruining it for so many. Alas, I'm still waiting on an answer. This wasn't a joke comment/request.
Well. If you are asking "is there a way to block all comments of a particular user", the answer is "no, not at the moment".
However if this feature is able to reduce some of the infightings I've seen, then we'll get that developed as soon as I can :)
Thank you scotty. All our trust is in you. And our sanity too.
Now under the comments you should see a link "hide". Clicking on it allowing you to block / unblock all comments of this commenter.
Hey guys. I would love to see a change in the look and place of the dates of a deal. whether they are moved up to top where the username is so it's easier to see or if they are just bolded would be great :)
I was just going to say someone else suggested that and it has been put on the development list, but realized it was you. It's in the queue.
The search function is down at the moment. Any word of a fix?
Thanks. PEBKAC… I was trying to kill the file system replication process and looks like I killed the wrong one. Fixed now.
Thanks!
In the RSS feeds, is there a field to use to determine if a deal has expired or is out of stock?
It's coming. Under the
<ozb:meta/>tag there will be astartingandexpiryattribute (in ISO 8601 format) if there's expiry date or starting date for this deal. I'll update when it becomes available.Perfect! Looking forward to this. Thanks very much.
The new attributes on the
<ozb:meta/>tag are now live.
I've noticed that deals can once again be posted by seconds old users, has the 24 hour wait to post a deal been done away with or is it broken or has it changed or … ?
We are relaxing it, and experiencing the effect (spam, bad posts, etc). New users won't be blocked for 24 hours unless,
- registered with overseas IP address, or
- IP address has more than one account registered over last 24 hours.
Hi. I have noticed that OzBargain doesn't show up in my Chrome browser new tab page under frequently visited sites not matter how many times I access it. Has anyone else experienced this? It does show up in IE 11. Thanks in advance :-)
[Win7 Home Premium SP1. Chrome: 33.0.1750.117 m]
We need a BACK TO TOP button on the mobile site, asap! My thumb doesn't like scrolling thru many comments
Noted…
Cheers
An "Up arrow" has been added to the comment bar on the mobile site that will scroll all the way to the top.
Idk if its my Windows Phone, but when I click the up arrow it only goes up a little bit
I've noticed arise of people posting their problems albeit either them being in the wrong or wronged in the general bargain sub forum.
Don't you think it would be good to have another sub forum for it? 'Advice and Suggestions', 'Help Me Out?', 'Need Advice' etc
Would love the option to have the newsletters sent out multiple times a day (morning, lunch, evening) instead of selecting just one time frame.
Something I noticed a few days ago that may or may not be working as intended.
When I am logged in and click on the OzBargain logo at the top left of the page.
On the right hand side under,
All of the deals are in the negative.
They are also well out of date, I'll list them and add a link to a page screenshot below.
http://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/97465
http://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/88974
http://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/80105
http://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/70606
http://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/68805
http://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/62237
http://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/62202
http://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/37156
http://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/24952
http://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/16843
The last one you will notice is over 4 years old.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/62192273/OzBargain%20fro…