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
Suggestion -
Would it be possible to include: setting an expiry time on Deals Submitted, in addition to a date?
It would need to be optional of course.
Sometimes we know in advance a deal will expire at say 5pm, or even 7am for example - I believe the current system (with date only) will expire these deals at midnight, many hours later.
Thanks
nismo
try adding the time after the date, such as 2013-07-05 6:56pm, as that's how manually expired deals appear? :)
Yep, that's the way to do it. Of course, there is the issue of which timezone you are in but at least +- 3 hours is better than 23. But perhaps time needs to being part of the UI.
FYI, time expiry was requested in 2010
Thanks for the tip guys, will try that next time with AEST - this covers at least half the population at this time of year.
I'd like the 'last' button on the deals and main page deleted (its kinda useless) or moved a bit further from the 'next' button.
Yes! I've noticed that and recently I went to the last page out of curiosity, there's nothing there - I also went back through the last 5 pages, still nothing! Are they place-holders or archived content? Weird and no point having a last button, as you said, it is of no use.
From the Main OzBargain page, the Last Page links to a blank page (and several before it) eg Page 1001
And from http://www.ozbargain.com.au/deals the Last Page link also takes you to a blank page:
Eg http://www.ozbargain.com.au/deals?page=4214Ah OK. Yes, that's a bug. For mods, the page does shows correctly but not for regular users. I'll file the bug and discuss the last page button.
Yeah "Last" buttons on many pages aren't very useful. It's also somewhat inaccurate because in order to know the page number of the last page, we have to calculate the total number of deals that match the criteria which is relatively computational expensive so we did some "corner-cutting"… But yeah, I don't think "Last" would be needed on front page.
We've rolled out an update this morning that removes the First and Last buttons.
Yay thanks for that, i like.
Suggestion -
When I do the "Search Topic", I found that there is no "Sort" function that allows the user to sort the deal by:
1. Date of publish (newest to oldest)
2. Number of votes (highest to lowest)
3. Number of commentsFor example, when the user search "Udemy", the user might want to check what is the latest offer (say in the last few days) that is still available? (rather than check the deal one by one through the category, etc).
I really like Ozbargain site. :)
that is still available?
In the advanced search dropdown, check the No expired deals
Date of publish (newest to oldest)
In the advanced search dropdown, check the Sort by posting date
Number of votes (highest to lowest)
Requested here.
Number of comments
Interesting. I'll add that to search requests.
For example, when the user search "Udemy", the user might want to check what is the latest offer (say in the last few days) that is still available?
When you search for Udemy, the first result is Related store: Udemy. Clicking the link you are shown all the latest Udemy deals from newest to oldest.
in the search function, it seems that 2 letter words are omitted, but I want to search for all posts containing "TV" :(
Noticed this one a bit more than usual lately.. people submitting a picture through the Uploader as the deal URL because they don't know a picture will be generated automatically. Doubly confusing sometimes because often the proper link isn't included in the main body and it's not uncommon for the store name to be missing too. Perhaps there should be a line on the submit page along the lines of "Only enter an image into the URL/Link field when no direct link to the deal exists, an image will be generated automatically from the link you provide".
Yes! Super annoying.
We have a warning below the field.
Do not have a link to the deal? Click Here to submit a picture or a PDF file.
As well as a warning after a user enters an image:
You have uploaded a file to OzBargain's Media File Uploader.
The Media File Uploader is not needed in the vast majority of cases. The uploader should only be used for scanned images (e.g. catalogues, flyers) and photos (e.g. receipts, pricing displays) when there is no webpage or website that could be linked to instead.
If you are using the link generated by Media File Uploader as the URL for a deal, please complete the Store Domain field if it has not been automatically pre-filled.
Yet still people insert a picture argh.
The way you wrote it is more concise. Maybe we can try that. If that doesn't work next step is 48pt blinking Comic Sans.
Kabigon, We have now changed the message on the submit deal page. Whether or not people read it is another story.
Cool, we'll see :)
The only reason I use the "my account" button is to Hit the "comments" and "voted" tabs to check up On discussions I'm interested in. I find the "recent activity" feature useless as it doesn't show if the thread has new comments.
Id like if either the recent activity had a bracket showing number of new comments (like the voted page does) , or preferably that the "recent activity" was replaced with comments page and votes page together so I don't have to click to a further screen to see those. Sorry to spamRecent Activities is what your account has done/achieved so the activities are around you.
When you hover over "My Account", "comments" should be the first item in the drop down menu. Just click on that to bring you to the comments page.
Is there a way to order new comments if there is more than 1 that appears in a thread? If i click on the little icon in my profile relating to new comments on a thread, it only takes me to the most recent one. If there isn't a way to order it, could this be done?
Thank you.
There's a comment navigation bar at the bottom of the screen (when you are in the comments section). You can then go to the next / previous new comment by clicking on the buttons.
I've been blind to it all this time! thank you scotty
There are some funky characters showing up in the Freebies RSS feed. Any chance you guys can have a look?
It seems to be Loreal offer, they don't show up when I copy and paste the section into here but in Notepad++ they show up as ETX in a black box. They made my RSS feed app blow up :(
Cheers!
What app are you using? No issues with Firefox/Feedly.
Writing one for Windows Phone 8, bad error handling on my part but the characters render the the feed useless.
I'll try transcoding it to a different character set tonight, but wanted to let you know.We stated UTF8 in both the RSS XML and the HTTP header. Might want to try that.
Sounds like you are assuming 1 byte per character. UTF8 is really good. You should always try to support it.
There is a bug where on a very poor connection with many dropped packets posts are made twice. Normally this is then picked up by the duplicate post detection, but in extreme cases (happened to me just now) both posts will go through.
Just FYI this bug is still present.
This is a totally optional suggestion. How about a reward for those who consistently post great deals? I know there are badges, but how about some small real money prize? I find it commendable that people like WNK and easternculture devote a lot of time to find and share great deals. Maybe a prize for the user that can get the most deals on the front page per month? Or maybe increase the threshold to 50 votes if 20 is too low. Maybe another one for the most popular deal of the month. Or maybe there can be a polling system to determine it. Hopefully this doesn't result in an influx of crappy deals.
It's just a way of saying thanks to those who post good deals and encourage people to find more. It only has to be like $75-$100 per prize. That's my thoughts anyway.I like this idea in principle, but I don't think this would help practically. It's like telling the kid who loves to play the violin that he will get paid for it now. The kid starts despising playing for cash, and thinks of it more as a chore, as opposed to a hobby.
So by the same token, you'll get an influx of undesirables trying to 'advertise' a deal (convincing people its a good deal) as opposed to genuinely believing so. Which equals more garbage posts to sift through.
Yep, I see what you mean, it could lead to more garbage deals, but has the potential to also result in useful deals. Or, it might stay around the same. Even if it doesn't change the amount of deals, the main reason for the suggestion is for the reward. It's just a thought, of course. It could go on trial for just a month, to see what would happen.
Also, the analogy you provided isn't quite the same as this scenario. It's more like giving a small reward to a person who voluntarily helps his local community out (maybe he helps hand out posters). The reward isn't high such that he could make a living out of it, but just a small reward from the community to acknowledge their appreciation.
If Scotty can fine-tune a way to stop people abusing this, I'd be interested. Otherwise, if there are too many loopholes, this suggestion probably won't be as useful.
@ PC,
Totally agree, and a perfect example too. Anyone interested in the psychology behind this should consider reading the book Drive by Dan Pink, or listen to this Ted Talk .@ BP, Totally agree that you want to reward them, I guess you could PM them to say thanks - I know they appreciate this, or use the referral links where possible.
My experience is, whenever there's something that can result financial gain, it's going to turn nasty soon. Affiliate / referral links here on OzBargain? At the end we have to create a new system to throttle this kind of post as for a while we have Vitacost referral posts multiple times a day.
If Scotty can fine-tune a way to stop people abusing this
For now I don't think it's worthwhile to do it. It can potentially be a lot of work here for very small amount of gain.
Alright, I totally understand. Just wanted to express my gratitude towards those who take the time to post deals :)
Thinking about the idea, it may work if it were something like reddit gold- where the rewards are user-initiated and provide conveniences such as hiding advertising etc.
Just food for thought.
you can already hide advertising on ozb
Hey, whaddya know, you guys did end up doing something like this in the end ;)
Hey guys,
Would you consider allowing users to sign up to email notifications for tags?
It seems at the moment I can only subscribe to notifications from specific stores/shops.
For instance, I'm after product X, which is tagged appropriately but I don't really care which shop I buy it from.
Does this exist already? I see a "Status: none, want, have, had" against products but not quite sure what this does.
For instance, I'm after product X, which is tagged appropriately
The current problem we have now is that most deals DON'T get tagged appropriately. It's either:
- Didn't include the proper tags (for example, selling iPhone 5 but only tagged "Apple"), or
- Included inappropriate tags (for example, selling iPhone case but tagged "iPhone 5")
Most cases when you see deals are tagged properly it's usually due to laborious work done by the moderators or power users AFTER the deals have been posted. In fact most deals are not tagged properly and at one stage I was thinking of removing the tags completely as I usually have to go through all the deals posted and re-tag them…
"Status: none, want, have, had" against products
Well the intention is to have email notifications on the products that you want. However it is still limited by the tagging. Maybe a delayed email? It won't be that useful in that case.
Delayed is fine by me, but I get what you mean by incorrect tagging by users. I have to do that on my own site as well =\
I guess I'll just stick with checking the RSS feed lol
By the way, I seem to be still subscribed to this thread but didn't seem to get an email notification about your reply yesterday.
Mods,
Can you please implement automatic tagging based on domain names / other keyword identifiers ?Basically it will help in cases where op's forgot to tag the deals or if it's a new op and he doesn't know about it / typo in tag etc.
For Exp>
If the deal link was www.udemy.com > then tag "UDEMY"
If the deal was www.play.google.com> then tag "ANDROID" & / or "GOOGLE"
If the deal had "Samsung S3" in Title > then tag Android.
List can be extended a lot, and would have to be broad / refined over time… and this will make subscriptions by tags more useful as we won't rely on the OP remembering to tag the deals.
Maybe start a separate thread to get suggestions.
Please be familiar with the tagging guidelines first, especially
DO NOT tag the shop that sell the product in your deal. We already have deals by domain therefore there is no need to tag the shop's name.
So yeah, no Udemy tags. When you start typing in tags it should try to list out all the existing tags for auto-complete, and you'll see some categories. For example product tags — Samsung Galaxy S III would have implied tags "Mobile Phone", "Samsung", "Android". We also have alias tags so for example you tagged a deal "Samsung Galaxy S3" it would then be tagged "Samsung Galaxy S III" instead.
Domain -> implied tags is one idea that we have thought of however it does not always work. For example with Android apps there are two "Category" tags (the tags that will appear on the secondary menu at the top) — Android App and Android Game. By just looking at play.google.com domain name would not be able to help us identifying the correct tag.
Thanks Scotty, the guidelines was interesting, and I'd not read it before so thanks for the link.
For example with Android apps there are two "Category" tags (the tags that will appear on the secondary menu at the top) — Android App and Android Game.
For the example you gave how about tagging by the broadest possible group "Android" and when this comes up in an RSS subscription the user can decide what it is by looking at the heading of the deal.
how about keyword searches in title/subject only (and not description/body)?
What happened to the NEXT text button at the bottom of each page ??
Why do sites have to rely on this SMALLEST of page numbers and icons to navigate between pages ? It's actually worse on an iPad or smartphone trying to 'hit' these buttons.
Can't text with NEXT or PREV be enough ??
(I must sdd that I barely use the numbers to jump pages - if you are coming into the 'deals' page for the first time, 'why' would you want to be jumping page numbers ??)
Anyway .. that's my 2c. Please bring back the TEXT.
I use page numbers extensively in places where I want to look at multiple pages of things, open all the numbers in tabs.
We actually made the pager BIGGER to suit the phones, and in order to still fit it on portrait mode I changed the text next/prev to symbol/icons.
Looks like they just aren't big enough for you. Or the phone is too small.
Phone is a HTC One - and I'm using an iPad - they're quite big enough - but it's the size of one's thumb which makes it harder to press such a small button !
When it comes to navigating thru pages on sites, the 'next / prev' page UI hasn't really improved with site presentations. Granted OzBargain isn't the 'worst' when it comes to the 'numbers' - the worst (locally) IMO is the JB HiFi site - one needs a magnifying glass to find their pages !
Anyway. We'll be rolling out a new build tomorrow morning, and for mobile sites the pager links will be 25% bigger (yes, no price rise either)!
Ahhh, so that's why the 'Autopager' addon (in Firefox) no longer works on this site.
:(
why is Next Page now >| and not just > ?
to me >| means go to end whilst > means next
most websites just use > for next page afaik or have Next >
.
btw again, how about keyword searches in title/subject only (and not description/body)?
>|means forward/next,>>|means to the end.with audio/video players, > means forward, >| means to the end, which i'm guessing might be the notation's origin
with most websites/forums also using > afaik (i've never seen >| except here), why doesn't ozbargain do so as well since it seems standard?
Alright. Maybe I got myself confused. The reference I use is from Font Awesome (the icon fonts we use on OzBargain):
http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icons/#video-playe…
So the icons we are current using are step-forward and step-backward. Might need to find alternatives.
fair enough - my issue, as you might have guessed, is with having | which to me always means to the end :)
how about the directional icons chevron (or maybe caret) left/right, or is that what was being used before (sorry i forget)?
@tonester — icon for the pager is now updated.
thanks :)
I've just noticed in the last couple of days that there seems to be keyword ads (always near the top of the page) randomly appearing in all Ozbargain pages.
e.g. On this page, the words 'optional', 'expired' and 'button' are underlined and have a little arrow pointing up/right next to them. If you hover your mouse over the words a mini popup add appears. Is this something Ozbargain is doing or Firefox?Edit - Found what was causing it. Did a system restore (I'm glad I created a restore point just before I installed the offending program) and the pop-up adds are gone. :)
A few years back there was a change to stop "comment chains", by capping the number of replies (so the indenting didn't get out of hand). Perhaps when replying to the 3rd reply (last indent), it would be good to automatically include @<username> into the text box when you're typing a message
Example: http://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/113727#comment-1549858
I really love OzBargain. But there one thing I think would make it better.
It would be the ability to restrict search terms to the title field of posts.
For example, if I searched 'Asus Laptop', it could return only posts with those terms in title, instead of single comments in other posts which might not be of so much value.
It would greatly help in the efficiency of some searches by avoiding things that are not so useful.
This could perhaps be implemented by a new operator of symbols (like 'term' or ^term^) or another short term (like titleonly:1).
I hope some other think this would be a good idea as well.
Regards, Tom Woodgood idea… I usually use google custom searches since they give greater weight to the title page text..
good idea. you can use the intitle: operator in google. but not exactly sort by date or exclude more general pages…
Have the deal thumbnails/images moved location?
No longer seeing them in Feedly or in the iOS app Big Bargain (been a while, just haven't brought it up).
EDIT: I post this, click on something else and magically they've reappeared in Feedly!
is it just me or has the font changed today to one less readable than before with less letter-spacing?
What OS/browser are you using? Yes there's a slight change in fonts but shouldn't have that much effect. Tested on IE, Chrome & Firefox on Windows 7…
safari macos 10.6 snow leopard :)
i've just checked with firefox - similar appearance - slight but noticeable change
normal text seems not as bad as bold - perhaps just need getting used to it, though i prefer fonts that aren't as cramped
Okay. Mac — which would be using "Helvetica Neue" font but not on Windows. Let me remove that and see how it works for you.
looks better now - did you change the font or have i just become accustomed to it? :)
btw interesting article - http://gigaom.com/2013/07/31/whats-all-the-fuss-about-apple-…
Yeah we went for the hot new font without actually having a fruit device to check how it presented. It's now reverted to just Helvetica on Mac and Arial on Windoze.
bit like designing macbook and ipad cases without either :)
http://www.haul.com.au/_blog/haul_Blog_by_the_dog/post/How_w…
http://www.haul.com.au/_blog/haul_Blog_by_the_dog/post/iPad2…is it still just helvetica on mac?
text today seems crisper and slightly larger than yesterday
Yeah font seems all bold today. Bit harder to read. I'm using Chrome on Windows.
Chrome on Windows too. The fonts should be slightly larger but that's it. Arial 14px on Windows for default body font.
That's not how it looks like on my IE10 screen. Mine looks … normal. :)
I finally worked it out. Chrome was using Helvetica instead of Arial. I had to edit the Chrome custom.css file to use Arial instead. Must have changed since I last updated Chrome.
Not sure if someone has asked before but I think the comments need a last page link/option.
For example on the latest S4 deal from kogan, only the first seven pages of comments where an option to click. You click 7 , then 10, then 13 ect until you get to the last page.
Nothing major just a tiny improvement for the REALLY big discussions.
There talking about the last page for Deals, not comments — i think.
Same piece of code for all the pagers on OzBargain. In this case we'll need to do special cases.
special cases being nodes - individual deals and forum threads - as per http://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/116088#comment-1586970?
also as mentioned there, making "…" into a functioning skip pages button?
thanks for the reply's
it does not seem as easy i first thought it would be.
Nah. Just a bit more work. We'll get that sorted sometime.
Or Just include the direct link for up to 20 pages of discussions, just below as they happen, It's not very common to get such long discussions.
Hi Mods,
Could you please consider Relaxing Posting rules for Well Reputed Store Representatives on a case to case basis, maybe by making a special badge for reps with a certain number of deals upvoted over 25 or something like that.The privileges of such a badge would be the ability to post Upto 4 or 5 deals in a week as long as all the previous deals in that week have achieved more than 20 votes.
This is where the discussion started because Shopping square could not post another deal for the memory cards within the allotted time frame.
SS's price would have been a better deal for all members as compared to the Memory City's deal the day before.
What do you guys think ??
First of all it's ShoppingExpress, not ShoppingSquare (and I know they hate to be mixed up). Secondly see Store Reps posting limit
If the two most recent rep deals made the front page, the limit is increased to 3 deals per week
Which appears to be the case for ShoppingExpress. However they are currently blocked by the 1 post / 24 hours limit, but that means they can post a different deal tomorrow.
Hi Scotty, No worries, and apologies for mixing the SS's.
I did have a look at the Store Reps posting limit before, I was only suggesting to see if you could relax it a bit more for Reps with good reputation on Ozbargain.
Also could you consider creating Badges for store reps whose deals have met certain positive thresholds on average. Perhaps posting rules could be relaxed for those reps. Only suggesting this so it encourages good reps, like SS , Memory City etc to post great deals for members.
Can the last page button be reinstated? It's so annoying going to the last page in long threads.
Yeah we'll do that next week. Current code base is a bit of flux at the moment because we just did some refactoring, but we do aim for the next update towards the end of next week.
First & last page buttons added for the comments pager.
Noticed this morning, that's great :)
Especially for the Lenovo node!
Just wondering if it would be possible to make a notification icon for when someone replies to your comment in a post on the top header of the mobile site?
I use the mobile site for this and reddit for most of the day. With reddit there is a envelope icon in the corner that goes red/orange when someone replies to your comment that you open up and see their comments. With ozbargain I never know if anyone replies to my comments.
Is there a visible notification to say someone has that I don't know about or is this an idea that has been floated but very difficult to bring in?
Thanks!
P. S. I won't know if anyone replies to this without coming back into the thread and finding my comment. Haha.
Good point.