Another year of OzBargain. Please use this post to submit feedbacks and request features. Again, no guarantee that requests will be responded or implemented, and often feature requests can take months to be pushed out, when there are other issues blocking them.
Here are similar posts in the past: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, and 2018.
What is and isn't a targeted deal isn't always clear, we need moderators to make that decision based on information available at the time and reports. Some examples here.
a green shading on deals and forum threads if you have got an alert (not to stop alerts though)
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When searching a term (I usually use mobile browser) - is there a way to show how many votes it got / sort by upvotes for a specified period?
Yes that's planned (from request from last year).
This has been pushed out this morning.
Thanks Scotty!!
edit Just tested, works as intended, placed for easy viewing 10/10.
Hi scotty, can you advise how to access this feature? I've been waiting for this one for years. I'm still only seeing sort by relevance, post date & last comment.
Sorry, only votes on mobile search page has been implemented. Number of votes isn't indexed so doing a sort would result in sorting in database which is not feasible at the moment.
@scotty: Damn, was so excited to see this. Will this be investigated further or is it back to the backlog?
@iinot: This is not trivial due to the size of the data set that needs to be transmitted between our search server (sphinx) and our database. For now, we won't put any time on it.
@scotty: I've tried checking the feature for "Sort by" on mobile search page but I'm still only able to see the relevance, post date & last comment as the only options. When you were responding to Jimothy did you mean the specific period feature or the sorting as well?
Been a few months since the notification change and I'm still not a fan of it. Can we have the option to revert this? https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/717029
No.
Not sure if it's viable or not, but it would be helpful to have a 'X OzBer is typing…' message when viewing a competition thread's comments section, especially one with referral links. Somewhere near the 'Comment as X' section so it's clearly visible.
It's annoying to be entering a comp, copy your referral into the comments section of that comp, press post, and then have to delete it as someone else entered the comp same time as you, but a second or two earlier. You wouldn't know this until you posted your comment and the page refreshes. I get this wouldn't work too well for deal and forum posts as it'll be too high traffic, but generally comp threads are less quiet. Thanks
Can we vote on original forum posts. There are some good forum postings which deserve to be recognised for they public service in the same way a deal gets voted.
We currently don't have plans for forum votes. What does a +1 mean for a forum post? It's already ambiguous for deals (good price? good product? favourite brand?) and what does "being recognised" mean for a forum post? There would be people voting +1 for LOL which might not be what we wanted.
Maybe an "reaction" system similar to Facebook or HotUKDeals or the old Slashdot comments, where people can give different reactions (like, informative, funny, etc).
I agree. Probably reactions would be a better reflection. Similar to reviews/comments in few other forums. If the post/answer was helpful.
The ability to be able to remove positive votes in the same way that negative votes are able to be removed (8 downvotes on a comment removes the user's neg) OR removing the neg vote remove ability. If the neg is valid (and it has to be to even be submitted it requires a comment, where positive votes dont) it should stand regardless of the opinions of the upvoters.
It doesn't seem fair that a fair and valid negative vote can be removed because a bunch of people dont like that opinion/reason and but an invalid or retaliatory upvote gets to stay even if the comment is inflammatory and negged to oblivion.
There is a way for the community to remove neg votes, and this can be used to turn a post with numerous issues and neg votes into only positive votes and burying the negative votes. The gate should either swing both ways (removal of any vote after 8 comment downvotes) OR it shouldn't swing at all (no amount of comment voting should remove a users post vote.)
It doesn't seem fair that if you neg vote, you have to make a comment and justify why the neg vote, and can have that stripped off you, no matter how valid it is because of other users "opinions"… but you can make an upvote without a comment and for any reason, valid or not, or you can basically say "Only upvoting to piss off the neggers" and these votes cannot be removed in the same way.
Good idea. Also you don't even have to open up a post if you want to upvote, which means those members would not see a comment about a cheaper alternative, & that commenter may choose not to neg the deal either.
The end result is a post which looks like a bargain when it's not.
So my suggestion is to remove this - You should only be able to vote positive if you have opened up the post.
Yes, this or the whole valid neg vote with "It's cheaper elsewhere: *link to product*" can be wiped off the post if 8 people deem that they dont like the fact that you even dared neg this deal… Sick of the whole "If it's not for you, then leave/dont vote" or "why bother coming into this post?" gatekeeping mentality.
Neg votes have their place as well, and it should not be up to a bunch of bullies to have the power to remove neg votes that they dont like.
Not going to work on OzBargain.
Originally we want to make voting easier so users can quickly scan through deals and vote on the deals they like. The comment requirement for neg vote was later added because people start jumping up and down when their deals got a neg vote but no one bother to justify. We then have to add neg vote guidelines because people complain about invalid justifications. Auto-revoke from comment votes was later added so mods don't have to review pages of "Invalid use of negative vote" reports.
No, I have no plan to make voting harder or introduce even more rules. We either have to
Either way we'll still get complaints.
In the spirit of not "making voting harder," how about removing the time restrictions on voting on posts and comments older than 30 days? Was there a logic to this? Or is it a technical limitation?
Or how about allowing people to change their vote as many times as they change their mind (not just one vote and one revoke)?
It would work on OzBargain…
The first part makes sense, and I'm not asking to change that aspect of it. That part of it works, the "I like it, I'll give that an upvote" works. I dont even mind having to leave a reason as helpful feedback on negative voted deals… The issue is when groups can band together to remove "valid" neg votes, thus interfering with people who have valid negative votes and can hide issues with retailers when only neg votes are removed by the community.
No, I have no plan to make voting harder or introduce even more rules.
Then make it easier… I am not asking for you to "make it harder" just no revoking of any votes through "comment voting". And the only time mods should be touching a neg vote is if it totally invalid ("Stupid dumb dumb head pizza tasted like garbage" comment on a hair dryer post.)
- No auto-revoke from comment votes, but mods won't handle "Invalid use of neg vote" reports.
I 100% believe this is the right thing to do. Negative votes can be just as important as positive votes and it should not be up to the upvoters/fanbois/trolls to just kill off any negative votes because "If iT'z nOt fOr YoUsE, MoVe oN & DoN't VoTe!!1!!11!".
Just remove the ability for other users to remove negative voting via comment neg bombing…
I wish that bargains had a section for the fineprint which is ignored by the Search Alerts.
e.g. I have an alert for Miele and Dyson products, but I'm constantly getting alerts where there is a statement such as "minimum spend required in one transaction on items excluding Apple, Games Consoles, Telstra & Foxtel Services, Mobile Phone Contracts, Miele & Asko agency products, Dell & Apple".
It would be good if the bargain template had a section for these exclusions that won't show up in searches and Alerts.
It reminds me of the old eBay tactic that sellers use "This is a Ford, NOT a BMW, Lexus, Holden, Unicorn, etc" just to get extra "SEO" hits.
How fast you send out email on configured alerts? I saw some complained that it was 30 mins late.
What kind of alert?
There are other scheduled job once every 5 minutes or once every hour. Many other notifications however are run asynchronously.
Search Alert, I think, the one people create to catch some deals before it ends.
30 minutes is way too long. I'd set this job to execute every 1 minute.
Currently we have almost 65,000 unique search alert queries to execute every 30 minutes. We won't be doing them more frequently.
If you need alerts for specific product, use product subscription instead.
@scotty: 65k unique from all user alerts? The number is not mind blowing. Maybe you're doing it wrong? What about on posting of a new deal, you run it (one deal) through alerts job? It is called event triggered job, as opposed to periodic job.
https://blog.boot.dev/open-source/percolate-queries-elastics…
I don't think your server will blow up. 30 minutes is just too slow, it is a feature not working.
@nuker: 65k unique queries — that means for every new item added to the index, it has to be scanned 65k times by the search backend (which is not Elastic btw) when triggered asynchronously. Assuming 10ms each that's still more than 10 CPU minutes. The task can be easily parallelised but I don't have servers lying around just to process search alerts.
The "solution" you linked to only solves the problem "getting alerts for the content I care about", but we are building something to solve the problem for thousands of users at the same time. It's a bit different.
@scotty: The cost of adding Elastic server, dedicated to this task is ~$500. Any old, used 3GHz+, 32GB RAM box will be enough. You'll feel good fixing this, believe me :) It is the core feature of this site. Im shutting up now :)
What kind of alerts do you have configured, out of curiosity? Especially which kinds are time sensitive?
@Grazz989: Watches atm, before it was SSDs. Some deals expire in minutes. Like this for example, https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/749824, first OOS comment was in 8 minutes. PS5 deals were quick too.
Can we have a mandatory “used” tag on second hand stuff?
Apologies if this is the wrong space - but wasn't there a feature a while back where you could tune your deals feed by what topics you were interested in? Is that still a thing?
If yes, then how do I get to it? If not, why not?
You can customise your front page to show the deals you're interested in by prioritising/deprioritising categories, tags, title tags, etc. You can see the settings under settings -> deals.
Thanks! I guess I was just a bit blind when I looked haha.
How about sorting comments by number of votes (rather than by first come, first served)?
On a node page you can click on the 3-dot menu at the bottom of the page & "Show Most Voted Comments"
Hi,
I got an idea to help with people posting more deals of quality using competition / draw as an incentive.
There should be something like a point system where posting deals:
-> Deals over 10 likes you get 20 points
-> Deals over 50 likes gets 100 points
—> Deals over 100 likes gets 500 points
There can be a scoreboard tally of top weekly / monthly deal posters.
If you hit the minimum amount weekly eg. 500 points you can get an entry into a weekly draw to win a prize.
If you hit the minimum amount monthly eg. 2000 points you can get entry into a monthly big prize.
This gives people more incentive to post quality deals and share good deals.
Can also be points for liked posts, forum posts ect.
Just an idea to float around so we more deals of quality, quantity and see who's the top weekly and monthly posters based on points.
Great idea - will you fund the weekly prizes?
It's time to unleash ozbargain ai.
Dealbot will win everything.
Scotty already pays four or five members $150 each every month.
What Twix already said above. We try to change things up every month so it's not the same person winning prizes month after month.
We're not looking to gamify deal posting or turn it into a competition, doing so just encourages users to be nasty to each other and in some cases do dodgy things that we also have to police. For e.g I have some seen people ask their friends / families to create accounts to vote up just their deals and then downvote the "opposing" users or leaving negative comments to attempt to sabotage others' deals.
We're not looking to gamify deal posting or turn it into a competition, doing so just encourages users to be nasty to each other
Admittedly the member of the month does turn it into a competition if you're rewarding people for most popular deal or highest vote average. I think you already know of examples.
From what I can tell the "popular deal" award has gone to completely different people in 2022?
TeddyBear - Jan
tightarse - Feb
March — no award given for this criteria this month because we found other interesting criteria to give awards on
His_Holiness - April
herysoe - May
dealbot - June
tightarse (again) & Tarapara July
MiaSanMia - August
arkosh - September
T-man - October
FERRANDz - Nov
@scrimshaw: In that case I'd say 2022 is obviously a progressive year. I think my statement may be more accurate in previous years. Anyway I think sometimes being at the other end (like any business) you don't always see how things are perceived by the community.
how things are perceived by the community
I doubt there's universal perception across the community…
@randomusername2017: Duhhhh. No one suggested there was.
Rather in general it's not uncommon for management to not see how their workers perceive different things and everyone is different.
@Clear: Wait, we are workers? Last payment I received was a t-shirt and that was years ago, I’m getting screwed by my irl employer and OzBargain management…
/s
@scrimshaw: tfw when you are the March 2022 winner and a mod says you were not interesting and says your award does not exist :(
Do search alerts with booleans work differently to regular searches?
On 28 Dec I created an alert for the search https://www.ozbargain.com.au/search/node/microsd%20or%20micr… but it hasn't triggered once since then (and still says "Never" for last alert) despite there having been a few deals with those keywords.
I don't think we have proper Boolean operators in the search function. That might be why your search alerts are not triggering.
Going by scott's old comment from 2016, OR wasn't implemented but we do have the ability to exclude keywords.
This means you will need to create two seperate search alerts for MicroSD and MicroSDXC.
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/search/node/option%3Atitleonly%…
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/search/node/option%3Atitleonly%…
Thank you, I'll do that.
Site needs to be heavily updated, the forums looks like something you'd see in the early 90s pre internet era, its ugly and hurts the eyes, go into ANY forum on the internet and its beautiful, easy to make threads, can bold/italic text, subscribe to topic etc this is why people think aussies are uneducated dopes and lagging behind the rest of the world
Why is helping people with RELEVANT products to relevant open threads that need help against the rules? eg i just came from a thread for a university student who wanted to buy a cheap desk, can't even post a link, why? its an australian link, its not spam, why? because it may or may not be an affiliate link? why should that matter? people are not spamming lotto tickets or scams/spams or buying rubber hoses and its relevant i.e a height adjustable desk thats below $300 and helps out a user why not? you should consider changing this rule. I was just at whirlpool aussie website and it points out how little options we have in shopping/discounts in australia, god i wonder why
A lot of words for someone who's only made four comments and zero posts in the five years they've been a member here.
In the early 90s pre-internet era I was using dial-up BBS in 80x24 text mode. The good old days…
can bold/italic text
You can use Markdown syntax. Click on "Formatting Help" at the bottom of the textarea for some quick tips.
subscribe to topic
On OzBargain, you can subscribe to new comments, subscribe to new posts on categories, products, stores, users, create search alerts, etc.
Can't help how some people think of aussies though.
can't even post a link, why
Your last two comments were automatically unpublished because those are Amazon affiliate links. Posting affiliate links on OzBargain is not allowed. It matters because allowing affiliate links really attract spams. We used to allow them 10 years ago but had quite a few issues.
early 90s pre-internet era
Pre-WWW maybe. I would call you an uneducated dope, but then it takes one to know one
Go easy on them Scotty. They're new -ish
@Lizard Spock: With great power comes great responsibility. But sometimes you just have to say what the heck, let’s have some fun…
You can use Markdown syntax. Click on "Formatting Help" at the bottom of the textarea for some quick tips.
A WYSIWYG editor would make it a lot easier for those that aren't too savvy. A Select text and quote button would be advantageous in long threads also.
Such features might embolden jv
Is there a Dark-mode function for the website on Mobile? (Not app)
click on the menu button, my account, dark mode.
Oh there it is. I kept clicking on my account name and looking for it there. Thanks for that
Could we have an option for reminders as emails please? Emails are my main trigger for clicking through to OzB, and it would be great if reminders were available the same way.
Reminders are shown in the daily newsletter.
You can subscribe & customise the newsletter via
My Account - Subscriptions - Newsletter
Thanks Neil, I know it's available in the newsletter, but the signal to noise ratio for me would be very low, and I know I'd end up missing things. If emails can be received for other events like comments and deals, surely adding it for reminders wouldn't be a large change?
REQUEST
< Spoiler Tags >
It's a way, just to scramble or hide some text,
until it's clicked on or unhid, to reveal the text.
It's not absolutely necessary,
but I thought I could ask in here,
as a "nice to have" feature.
When i post a deal, like airpods pro 2, how do i put a link for the product on the top right corner? Is it something mods have to do manually?
You can current share posts to social media like Facebook etc… I wouldn't ever think of a use case to share to LinkedIn, but if you can add more sharing options, can we have Facebook messenger as one or simply a "copy to clipboard" option?
I enjoy the summary text and short link to share but I regularly have to share to like whatsapp then cut out the text.
TIA
Hi @Hamza23,
Was wondering if you could look into this or provide feedback?
Cheers
Yup I'll be looking at implementing something like that.
Awesome thanks!
When a deal starts in a few days, the number of days is in black rather than white text, making it hard to read. e.g. https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/755471?utm_source=subscrip…
I'm in dark mode & it's white. Dark mode is heaps better.
Yeah I don't use dark mode when reading. The text is black
That will be fixed in the rollout tomorrow.
After giving a deal a +ve vote is there a way to change it to a -ve vote? I have revoked my +ve vote after the deal was unobtainable for me, I'd like to change it to a -ve to highlight the error.
You can only change vote within a minute (before reloading the page). It was this way for people who accidentally pressed the wrong button. If you have changed your mind, the only thing you can do is revoking your vote.
Is there scope in the future to change this behaviour?
For example: give a deal a positive vote because it’s a good price, later decide to change that to a negative because there’s an issue (e.g. merchant refused to refund for a faulty product, merchant sells your private details etc).
This has been raised multiple times in the future and our decision has been no, you can't change votes. If something happens later that causes you to change your mind, just revoke your +1 and then put in your opinion in the comments. A vote for the deal is really not for the users to track how they feel about a deal in an indefinite timeline, but how they feel about the deal at the time of discovery. If a merchant ended up selling your private details, it can be raised in a forum post, or comments in future deals.
A vote for the deal is … for the users to track … how they feel about the deal at the time of discovery.
I'm curious: why is that? Why settle with first impressions instead of more informed judgement?
Any chance of incorporating lowest historical pricing of a product on the product page? Would be nice to have something to compare current deal prices to lowest recorded price similar to what 3 Camels have on the Ozbargain product page.
I could be wrong, but AFAIK OzB's db has no field for prices to do that. I wish I could filter posts by price, but without a field for it (even if a calculated one), that's not possible. All we have to work with are the prices on the title. One possible solution would be to auto-fill a price field with the highest value (preceded by $), so as to filter out shipping costs, etc (that's what I did on a Google sheet I have to emulate C³ for OzB). It's not perfect — when different models are posted together, it would pick the dearer one — but it'd be better than what we have now. And it'd be easy to implement what you're asking.
I may have suggested this before (I can't remember)… How about automatically adding info on each post about pricematch and pricebeat alternatives listed here in a dropdown menu akin to the cashback one?
Now that TopCashBack has launched here in Australia, could their cashback rates be available similar to how Cashrewards, Shopback and Cheddar are on the merchant page at the moment?
If they can contact us and work out an API/endpoint to query their cashback rates…
Could we have a tab like “revisions” and “votes” which shows reports.
This could also show reports that have been resolved along with a resolved reason, to help reduce the amount of duplicate reports mods have to deal with and to also add to the transparency of the reasoning used by the mods.
Similar to the duplicate deal detection, when someone is reporting something for reason X, and a past report for X has been resolved, a prompt could appear with something like “These deal has already been reported for X reason. This past report was marked as resolved with the comment: ‘Something something’. Are you sure this needs to be reported again?”.
Thanks
Can we get bot protection for links?
For example using a specific tag around a link, obfuscates it, so when clicked requires 2 captcha or something..(or to be signed in)
As i see a LOT of udemy courses coupon codes used up quickly and think this is due to bots grabbing the codes in the links and using/reselling them..
Can we add a tag box or similar for targeted deals at time of posting the deal? I guess it doesn’t really matter as mods usually add the tag eventually, usually after 3-5 pings from others saying targeted.