I sent Lars a PM. Just in case I’ll tag him here too. @daath Cereal 27 got merged. Ill try and check back tomorrow.
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Thank you 
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I hear ya, there were bound to be mistakes and some were gonna be big ones. Hopefully we can get this one taken care of.
@MisterSinner fingers crossed!
PS: How do you guys do this on phones and tablets? It takes forever to type!
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My Cereal 27 completely disappeared from my stash. Presto, gone.
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I tried to explain this before, will do it once more.
Why merging? Why merging differently named flavors is needed?
Deleting wrong names would hurt ONLY those who did not enter flavors correctly; it would punish them and help them be more careful next time. Merging on the other hand destroys all merged flavors (like the whole Cereal27 db is now destroyed and all Cereal27 recipes compromised, wtf).
This is totally wrong, this makes mixers angry and this will eventually turn off more experienced mixers away from sharing their recipes on ELR. They did nothing wrong but someone is playing with their recipes and changing their flavors. And people searching for recipes will much rather be opening ATF since there at least would know what the recipe is. It’s turning people away from the ELR.
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It’s a magnificent job you are doing and we all are thankful for that, but i would highly recommend to do it more organized rather than all at once – make it in steps (and completely stop merging flavors at this point).
Step 1: go after all those hundreds of thousands wrongly named flavors with zero, one, two, three (etc) recipes. That’s an easy task and that will hurt absolutely noone (and help all of us). That will narrow the database to maybe 150k flavors.
Step 2: delete all remaining flavors with clearly wrong names. Delete them and not merge them. Fuck those who entered them wrongly, they are damaging to the site and give you an additional work. No merging. That will bring the list down to maybe 80k flavors.
Step 3: delete all the new flavors that emerged in the mean time.
(most importantly, up to this point zero mistakes are possible while the db is looking quite better, thinner since hundreds of thousands of garbage entries are deleted)
Step 4: only then you will be able to start merging if you want to (personally i would always rather look for deleting, rather than merging AND i would totally avoid merging flavors with heavily used and more popular flavors = to not fuck up the database and fuck up thousands of mixers/recipes). In case i would do merging, i would rather ask the community for opinion when in doubts, rather than just merge.
One thing i would NEVER ever do is merge different names (wtf). Another thing i would totally avoid is delete/merge flavors that are entered correctly (no spelling errors, everything looks fine at first sight) and have more experienced mixers in comments or recipes (you know who they are by now). If in doubts, i would rather leave those to the following steps.
Have in mind, deleting hurts noone, while merging hurts all the database / all the mixers / all the recipes / all the flavor reviews. Don’t underestimate the fact that if this error happens once or twice for the more popular flavors, then people will start question all the other flavors/recipes too (is the Strawberry in this recipe really SB Ripe or is it…). Just trying to help, because something is clearly going very very wrong here, so wrong that it can break this site.
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I don’t know how hard this would be, but if recipe listings contained an invalid name, it should not be able to be made public, ever.
On new flavor entry in creating a recipe only valid names should be shown.
I had 2 entries called ‘1Shot blah blah blah’ that are now invalid. Luckily in the notes I had put the names & %'s. How can I name them and have them stay @TorturedZen ?
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If anyone really wanted to make dent in cleaning up invalid flavors, they would start with the first 40 or so pages in the (alphanumeric) flavor list
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Now I have this in my stash,
The only clue I had was that I bought 15ml for $9.00 and I rated it 5stars, had to do some digging and go through all my orders and it looks like this is MF Dark Chocolate which I still have in my stash,
My total stash count is still at 722, so what did I lose in place of the MERGE???
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My wild guess: You had it entered under some ‘dilution’ name, like
'Dark Chocolate MF, 10% dilution'.
My humble opinion: all those flavors with ‘‘5%, 10%, 12.5%, 15%, 27.42%, 33.1573% dilution’’ in the name are just making a mess and those should be deleted (besides entries should be flavors names and there’s no flavor named ‘‘DC MF - 10% dilution’’).
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Just catching up on all this now as I could not access the forum (thanks for sorting that Lars!)
I have just read every word of the above posts & am in a bit of a panic myself with my stash & with a couple of my mixes which have been affected by the change/merge.
I have to wholeheartedly agree with Mikser here that simply merging flavours is IMO a really bad idea, not all flavours are listed on manufactures websites, some flavours get name changes an example is ( Lucky Leprechaun Cereal (TPA) which used to be known as Marshmallow Cereal (TPA) ) & I can see looking at my stash Marshmallow Cereal has disappeared now, I had even indicated the name change in my flavour notes.
I seem to now have 22 flavours in my stash which have either been merged or renamed & trying to figure out what they are so I can at least add that into the notes is a near impossible task (sadly)
Is there a list up on here anywhere showing what is known to have been changed?
Example - 02 (invalid name or unknown brand) = Cereal 27 (Cap)
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I also see that by typing in the word “name” into the flavour list throws up 178 flavours which would seem to have been affected by this merging.
Trying to at bear minimum get the correct name added to my notes (be it old/discontinued etc etc) is imperative & I do have all my notes backed up, but cross checking notes on well over 1k flavours to achieve this will be a monumental undertaking.
if the changes had been implemented & the old flavour was still showing but then also this is an invalid name/brand etc after it, this would be fixable, as it stands I am struggling to see how the merged/incorrect deletions can be fixed/put back right.
I do know from reading my notes that - Mint* (Invalid flavor name, brand or no recipe) equated to Arctic Mint by Hangsen, I have this flavour sat here in front of me with the manufactures label on the bottle, so regardless of it no longer being available directly from Hangsen is a know flavour, same thing with their Arctic Frost which has simply vanished from my stash altogether.
This really is a travesty & a bit of a clusterf**k.
I personally do a hell of a lot of SFT’ing & take detailed notes which I am happy to be public for the benefit of all, but seeing 100’s of hours of time wasted by merging & deleting flavours from the website in order to help it, seems to not be working all to well, IMO it’s having more of a negative effect than it is a positive, it’s not that I do not appreciate the workload involved or the commitment by those who are doing it, I like Mikser just wonder if there is not a more logical solution to the problem which does not involve loosing flavours from the DB as well as merging notes for different flavours, as it makes the entire process a mute point.
I do a fair bit of beta testing as well are regular SFT’ing & am really concerned about loosing hard work put in.
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- 02 (Invalid Name or Unknown Brand)
- Butter* (Invalid Name/Unknown Brand)
- Cake* (Invalid Name or Unknown Brand)
- Coconut* (Unknown Flavor or Brand Name)
- Invalid flavor or brand name - Flavour Art
- Peach* (Invalid Flavor Name or Brand)
I haven’t even gone INTO the flavors, as I have 806 loaded. Luckily for the ones I SFT’d I have THAT to go by in my notes, to RESTORE it, but if I haven’t SFT’d it, I am not sure I’ll even know WHAT the flavor was before the purge/merge …
One ^^^^^ of these was clearly Imp Dust by Gremberry Farms, but it got wacked and shows as invalid Flavour Art ?
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I’m starting to think the Merge, not so much …
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I’m in the same boat SessionDrummer, I have 22 showing as either invalid or unknown, the ones I have notes on I am sure I can figure out if i put the time & effort in to cross check against by backed up notes, but for ones not yet tested there is little hope without the aid of the notes to go by, those don’t worry me half as much as the ones that are just vanishing altogether like the couple of Hangsens I mentioned above.
I have to agree with the immediate halt of the merge as it does seem to be creating a huge pile of problems for the DB & it’s users
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Well I don’t mean to GLOB ON, and rail against attempts to fix, or somewhat fix the massively borked DB here, as I"m not.
I AM however, wondering about the merge, because it also seems to be a PURGE at times.
Maybe @Ken_O_Where, @TorturedZen can explain the logic.
I’m ASSUMING, when going through and looking at ALLLLLLL the incorrect flavors, you wouldn’t want to just start DELETING them, right ?? So trying to figure out what they SHOULD have been, then merging to try and NOT just delete them ??
Maybe someone can chime in here.
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