Ability to subscribe to specific topics

Lvegitto on 27/11/2011 - 20:09

Hi there,

First time poster so thought I would start with a feature suggestion.

I normally tend to be a 'mindful' consumer and in fact hardly ever buy things. When I do, I tend to be topic oriented. What I mean by this, is that I tend to have a 'need' to buy a specific type of item. For example, when I'm upgrading my home office, I look for deals for "monitors", "office chairs", "ram", etc. Subscribing to a "Computing" category is nice, but I find I get too much spam and it's difficult to me to find what I'm looking for quickly.

This also works for me outside of "Computing". For example, when I'm looking to buy some new clothes and It's usually 1 or 2 specific items I'm looking for (e.g. "jeans" or "business shirts") I tend to try and filter out all the "Apparel" deals for those items only.

I neat way that this could work, is if I could create a "search filter" that I then subscribe to. OzBargain would then need to perform a query against my search pattern, maybe do some analysis work (e.g. check the condition of those posts, votes it has, etc) and then send me an Email feed :)

Not sure how many others are the same, but I'm sure there are plenty (c'mon, I'm not that special). Would love to see this feature. What do you guys think?

Cheers

Site Discussion

Comments

  • scotty on 27/11/2011 - 22:25

    Hi vegitto — thanks for the suggestion.

    Currently you can use tags for some specific topics. For example

    You can add /feed to the end of the URL to get the RSS feed which you can subscribe to. The only problem is that deals are not tagged "correctly" to make them helpful. Well, we will need to come up with a proper guideline on how to properly tag/categorise deals so they are consistent, and may allow the community to "re-tag" deals that are not following the guideline.

    Another frequently requested question is to be alerted when a new deals appears within a certain topic. For example, email me when a new "laptop" deal is submitted (or reach a certain threshold). We'll probably look into implement something like that next year.

  • vegitto on 28/11/2011 - 11:10

    Awesome, thanks for that tip scotty. Making use of it now. Is there anyway to prevent my feed from showing expired deals by any chance? ;)

    I think some guidelines about tagging would definitely be useful or perhaps make it work similar to the StackOverflow site? User created taxonomy seems to work well when there is a competing interest at stake (e.g. posting a question on StackOverflow with a bad tag may make your question unseen).

    • scotty on 28/11/2011 - 11:36

      That works with the scale of StackOverflow when people are listening to specific tags. On OzBargain however, most people are watching the front page so the incentive is not really there. Moreover, the incentive seems to be for the merchants to create random irrelevant tags to get people's attentions.

      We would open up community re-tagging so hopefully things get more organised with the power of the crowd :)

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