So I built it as per my fellow forum friends requested but I foresee inherent flaws in it and wanted to voice my concern.
The biggest concern I have is individual testing of putatives and MX series. I know we have shipped out numerous of the new MX series and many users have received the putatives and experimones and yet I do not see posts about them. As a researcher I find it bothersome and difficult to have to search through a journal to find results on MX??? or TA? or P??.
I’d rather see individual threads on the individualized testing. I believe it adds value to the forum. I’m concerned that users will be left out of the next round of advanced orders because there will be no posts about them that are visible. I’m OK with it if you guys are though.
How about a testing results forum with moderator-initiated threads on each new product released for testing? It would certainly make finding experiences on a certain product easier than doing a search and reviewing everything that comes up.
I like gone with the wind’s idea. If there was a “head thread” for each product, it would be a cinch to find other peoples experiences.
probably better than individual journals in the long run, however there are certain things like mixes and general insights that might work better in journals.
I agree with SteveO on this which is why I dont have a journal. While the journals are great ways to report and talk about your mixing experiments. Testing new products or advanced should have its own thread with the mix or putative number in the title. This makes it easy for Jasmin to compile information on that one product.
GW also has a good idea with having seperate sections on the forum but there are a great many products and this would make the forum huge and hard to manage. Plus once people do there intial testing they tend to start mixing with other products so there would be alot of crossing over.
I suggest just posting a sticky in the intro or store section about the rules of testing advanced products. Add to those rules that your intitial testing of the product has to be in its own thread in either the mens or the ladies sections. Also your testing post must be explicit with all the information required in the post. May as well mention the rule on newbies testing consumer products first as well.
SteveO I do think one of the reasons that you are not seeing alot of test results right now is because we are coming up on the holidays and things get hectic for alot of people. I know I am holding off on testing till after the holiday because I cant give the product the level of attention I want to.
maybe for better results for research purposes, this forum can have official threads regarding results of certain mixes..
that way, people can try counter everything else all in one thread, with people putting in their test results..
separate threads for every mix test for every tester gets confusing, shouldn’t it? or maybe u work better that way.
However, for original combos cooked up by fellow testers, they then should have a lone thread, that way, if someone tests on it, and finds usefulness, they can add posts to the thread.
edit : oh i see that the “individual thread” idea have already been suggested. i second it then!
I guess I think of it differently. I tend to follow the adventures of a person and add information I’ve gleaned from them to my personal repertoire of pheros. The separate posts are useful for when you’re getting started with a particular phero and want to get some ideas or figure out if you want to order the stuff.
You really can’t have it both ways without somebody re-entering things, so somebody should make the call…most likely the content writer.
Taters personal preference is the journaling approach, mostly because it lets everyone see what I’ve learned and figure out why/how I learned it rather than just pieces of information that I may no longer think are true and that don’t have real context.
For finding information about a particular phero, I would prefer an improved search engine.
I second what Tisha said as well, during the holiday time many might spend it with there families which might mean no chance to go out and run different signatures on the rest of the world. This is the case for me as the holiday season is hectic in general. As soon as I’m back to my usual “testing grounds” the fun will begin.
True but your looking at it from a sales point of view and this is a research forum. The adventures of one dosnt help with the research of products its the results of the whole group that give them a indication as to what a mix can do.
Right now its easy to find information on 1 product with the search engine. I just type in the mix number and click on posts and there you go. For reports you would just type in the mix number and click on threads instead of posts and all the test results for that product come up as long as the person put the mx number in there thread title. When a journal pops up in my search i usualy skip over those because it just takes to long to find the info I am looking for. Not saying they are not fun to red though.
I do like GW’s ideal but I would scale it down to maybe 2 extra areas. One for “Test results of Putatives” and one for “Test results of test mixes” and have these forums be the place where we report our official findings. This way it will make it easier for the user to find and also make it easy for me and steveO to move threads around to the correct location.
I find now when looking for the effects of one specific product on various users in the forum it is hard to find this information. Take for example if I search “Instant Sexiness” or “Turn up the Heat” I get every post that has the word “Instant” in it and “turn” and “up” and “the” and “heat”. This makes it hard to find peoples experiences with the specific product. It is a LITTLE easier to find posts for the Mx products. However you still have to sift through peoples reccomendations and random discussions not necessarily pertaining to experience and tests done with the product.
If the search engine could be changed a bit that may help. Otherwise seperating people’s experiences from other product question and comments may help.
I’d like to be able to create custom searches such as show me all posts containing P83 by any user who has been here for > 1 year or by the following specific users.
Although some of the time one is in examine every tidbit mode, usually the return on attention and time is much greater if one can filter by poster.
I would also like to see a best post collection - many of the earlier gems are a little lost for new users unless they go back and read messages one by one.
I love GWTW’s idea. Infact I had implemented a similar idea in a pheromone forum prototype which some of you might have seen (link is in my blog). I think that is the best way to collect all information about a single product at one place.
It’s a crime if those get lost as newer threads appear and even if a new user searches for that mix/putative visionary’s posts might appear in 2nd and 3rd page and the searcher might not get there before losing interest.
So I think Pheroquirk’s idea of best posts is also worthwhile. Infact this could be a separate section where only moderators could add threads and posting is not allowed. Unlike a sticky which is an open thread and just takes up lot of space on the top and have many user posts just thanking the original creator, this will be for keeps.
Journals, blogs and individual user threads are great for the user to keep track of his own progress or for other people to keep track of that user’s progress but the information about individual products tend to get lost easily.
What about official threads for the new mixes - maybe even pinned for a certain time - where everyone posts his/her experiences with this new MX? At least for something like an ‘introduction phase’ - say the first 3 or 4 months. People who write journals could simply post a link to the post in their thread dealing with the new product. It would make things very easy to sum up - all information for a new product in one place… After a few months the thread could become unpinned again.
I think everyone’s trying to take all the work out of it. Im oversimplifying, but there are 3 types of users here.
Users who just want to know what to buy and arent willing to read much of anything. They will just post a question asking for advice.
Users who are more than happy to research and find new solutions. I think most of them prefer information in context, and folks like Visionary do a great job of “pre-chewing” this information. Hes like our personal Google engine without the ads ™. These will hunt down every nugget of information in hopes of making a discovery.
Users who are light on research and are mostly following someone else until they get things figured out. This is like me hunting down the Annals of Tacitus, PQ, MHarris and a few others.
Yes, it would be great to have everything on the entire site broken down and cross-referenced by phero, age, time of day and color of shoes, but what about combinations? Do you really want people to -not think- about whats going on with their pheros? Is the purpose of the forum research or recommendation? Encouraging people to -search- for information is what leads to interesting new developments. Look at how often one of us will post a thought, and 5-6 other people will chime in about similar experiences. Also, when there is a P93 thread, for example, arent most of the initial questions attempts to get details on how the hits happened, more context? When you read about someones great new discovery, dont you also go find out what that persons history is by looking for past posts?
Tater thinks the forum isnt really broken and that the journals section just gives a tidy area for collecting everyones journals. But then, Tater will scour the forum for information regardless of where stuff is.
