I know this is a touchy subject and I don’t know if it can be fixed.
There are over 70,400 “flavors” on the recipe side of the site. Is there a way to work this into a more reasonable reality? I know the site is designed for anyone to add anything… it might be a designed base a person likes and uses, or it may be a personal set of flavors that a person plays with. But things like “!Single Flavor” or “# Single Flavor 3” or “(BF) Oak Barn” imho are just place holders. One possible way of helping to curtail some of this is when adding a new flavor is to have a required manufacture selection box (with the additions of a couple extras like “base” or “personal” or “other” etc) if/when new companies come up, mods can add the newer companies to the list.
In another year there could be 100,00 flavors, many of which will be more duplicates or just non real things, if things don’t get under control. I know it doesn’t really matter… but it would be nice for house cleaning to be setup, I for one would be happy to help cleaning up the listing.
Another helpful thing to keep the flavors on a low is if only mods can add new flavors to the list.
This means that people can write to the mods and ask them to add a flavor of their choice and if the mods find that the flavor is another duplicate they just don’t add it.
Makes it a bit harder for some people but it might be a good thing.
Are there a lot of mods on ELR? Just worry that would be a lot of work for somebody if not lol
Got no clue what so ever. At least it is a way to control what goes into the flavor list and not.
This has been addressed many times and @daath wants to clean it all up, but it’s a fairly large undertaking from my understanding.
An overhaul to the flavor database is on the to-do list, but it is a massive undertaking as Alisa said. In the meantime, feel free to use the dupe checker to suggest duplicate flavors and as often as I’m able I merge dupe flavors into one. 
One of the easiest ways (I Imagine) to make a start is just to set it to how many recipes a flavour is in, starting from Zero, and delete the first 847 pages, that way no recipe would be affected (There are 847 pages of zeroes)
of course that still leaves 1968 pages, but it’s a good start
It’s easy for everyone to chip in! When adding flavors you see the notorious popup. Using the Dupe Checker (link above thanks @JoJo!) you can target obvious offenders (simple typos) like “Strawberyy”. Only recommend items you know are offenders …if in doubt - leave it out.
I work a 14 hour night shift as a security guard to an empty building in a quiet area, I could help.
Incidentally, the dupe checker only works with 2 things spelled the same, IE I cant highlight Straberry while highlighting strawberry as the real thing
I don’t think the problem is the huge list of all flavours (only performance wise on the server maybe).
Set all real flavours. And from a point off, only show them in the suggestion list for flavour stack and recipes.
Also set a flag by default to only search ‘real’ flavours in any list.
Second, ask every user to adjust the flavours in their stack to the real ones. If they state that a flavour they use is not the ‘real’ one, they can choose the ‘real’ flavour and the data of their own flavour gets merged with the real one. (or you set it as a child, where the parent is the real flavour)
If someone has a flavour of their own (fx: home made coffee flavour) they can set this.
New flavours needs voting and needs to be set as ‘new’ and all needed info needs to be included (manufacturer, link to website, etc …). All ‘serious’ mixers will do this, others mainly use existing flavours.
By leaving all ‘duplicated’ as they are, you can still look for any flavour. You will just see a warning that a recipe does not contain a ‘real’ flavour.
but if this is the case then send the user a link to the existing flavor so they know it is out there for their use.
Since there are a couple of wonderful people that are volunteering to help why don’t you or death give them the power to merge the duplicates they find and help cut them down in a slightly faster fasion?
There’s so many things that tie into this that’s is bordering on insane. It’s already controlled chaos. Very well controlled I might add.
We all have some leeway to tailor things to our needs, add as needed, and maintain a large semblance of organization.
While there are definitely aspects that I would like to see different, I don’t want to lose what we currently have. Or have it more strictly limited.
I’ve already lost some flavors in the past thanks to mergers (along with notes etc), and while I know and appreciate that it was done with the “cohesiveness of the resource” in mind, honestly, it’s frustrating. I didn’t have those notes anywhere else. Given that happened fairly early in, that’s part of why I stopped putting notes in there as a regular thing, and only do it once in a blue moon now.
Being a technical type of person, I also have strong tendencies towards organization, to the point of possibly bordering on OCD. =P
As a result, I tend to want things in their proper places, be that alphabetical, numerical, sequential, categorically, cross-referenced, or all of the above. That said, I get the frustration with duplicates etc.
But until we have certain options available, I think what we have is pretty good as a whole.
I wish we had:
-
the ability to make flavors private
(so folks like me could create their own layout or flavor format WITHOUT interfering with everyone else’s) -
sorting options!
(this way, we could have the grouping any way we wanted it for starters. Second it would be awesome if we could then click a “sort by vendor” that we have previously keyed in as a user {eg: chosen from a drop-down menu} then be able to add to a retailer’s “cart menu” via check buttons, complete with affiliate links and discounts. -
I’ve already added “custom flavors” for VG, PG, and Nicotine, but I fully expect there will come a day that those notes (and creations) will be wiped off the face of the database. (I created them both to remind myself of what was good or bad about a vendor’s nic etc, as well as provide the info IN THE DATABASE in the hopes that it would save the question being asked in the forums (even one less time).
-
the ability to categorize (or tag) flavors, on the user side. Not pre-defined.
-
grouping for our wishlist
-
notes for our wishlist
-
the ability to put links into our wishlist
Now I realize that there’s a lot of custom coding that would have to be done for the “sorting options” that I mentioned, but can you imagine?!!!
/dare to dream
No more trying to remember who sells what. In what size, etc. daath would become the Hotels.com or Priceline of eliquid supplies!
Anyways… I’ll happily volunteer my time to help cleanup if so desired, but I think there’s other more pressing and underlying infrastructure issues that they’re working on (and have been planning) before we really get too concerned about dupes etc. =)
I agree with most (if not all) of what you’ve said. “IF” someone does start going in and start moving/deleting things in the flavor lists, the notes and everything that the flavor is connected to, should be pushed into the proper flavor.
Not just having someone going in and deleting things. I don’t think a moderator should be house sitting each and every flavor going into the system, you’d just be A. Burning out the moderators who are here to enjoy themselves B. Making the flavor list too troublesome to work with, and C. Hurting what (I think) what most people around here like, the free form atmosphere that we have come to enjoy.
What I’m able to do is simply merge flavors that are duplicates into one flavor (most of the time). When flavors are merged, all notes, recipes, stash, etc. are merged or updated to reflect the change to the correct flavor (nothing is deleted so notes, percentages, SGs put in by individuals remain in tact in their stash). If someone has two flavors in their stash that are merged together, they will wind up with two copies of the merged flavor. I can’t simply delete flavors and I don’t think that’d be the way to go anyway. People take time to put their flavors into their stash and updating them to the right flavors is much nicer than simply deleting their hard work.
Offers to help will have to be given to @daath directly as I have no control over or ability to grant that. I think I’ve got it pretty well covered, though, and in the meantime the best way to help is just to use the dupe checker to make dupe suggestions. I’m able to check and uncheck suggestions but it makes it a lot easier for me as the “search and select” part is done. 
Some tips when suggesting duplicates (Real on left, alts on right):
- TPA = TFA, flavor apprentice, perfumer’s apprentice, TDA, or signature/sig
- Inawera = Ina and INW
- FA = Flavour Art or Flavor Art
- Real Flavors = RF, NWF, Northwest Flavors
- Cap = Capella, Capella Flavor Drops, CFD, Ella’s (sometimes, not Ella’s shortbread or recipe oneshots).
- FW = Flavor West, Vapor Renu
- Flavorah = Flv
- LA = Lorann, Lorann Oils, Lauren
- MF = Medicine Flower, Lotus
- OOO = One on One, 101, 1o1
- If you want to search for something like TPA and TFA you can do T_A
- Searches aren’t case sensitive so TPA, tpa, etc. will all show up.
- The best way I’ve found to search for alt spellings (eg raspberry vs rasberry vs razberry, etc) is to split it into two words with the alternate part removed or just use the first part of the word (ra berry).
- I don’t merge stones or bases into anything, so don’t suggest those.
- Flavors are only merged into the same company, so don’t suggest that all companies of a flavor be merged into one. I won’t even look if I see two/three/etc companies suggested, I’ll just reject them all.
- I can uncheck individual flavors before merging, so if you’re pretty sure something is a dupe feel free to check it, but typically when in doubt, leave it out.
- V1/V2 are Cap flavors, DX are TPA flavors.
I will add more to this list if I think of anything else. Huge thanks to anyone who helps out by suggesting dupes. It really does make things simpler. I try to cull the list at least once a week and good suggestions make that much easier.
OK I make a start when I can
I have thirty-something in line for you and thank you so much for the time and effort you invest in our community 
You have and we 
you for it 
It’s super slow on my iPad so will make a start tomorrow on the PC 