Sorry. I have not been ignoring the issues here. I had some personal things that required my attention for past few days and couldn’t be at my PC. Real life gets in the way.
Now…regarding Cereal 27. Obviously my fault and I’ll take responsibility, but unsure how it happened. It could have been an errant mouse click, key press, distraction etc. Excuses are a dime a dozen but that’s all I can muster at this point. Hopefully Lars can or will take some corrective measures.
Regarding the thought processes with some of the merges (or names disappearing)
“02” for example…on the recipe side main page if you click on User->Flavor List the first thing you see is a whole list of garbage. #, !, &, numbers, random characters
(This example is much cleaner than it was before)
Many flavor names were (and still are) also prefixed with numbers…01, 02, 03 etc. along with those weird characters. In order to consolidate all of those invalid entries a pseudo-name is created to serve as a ‘host’ into which the invalid entries are merged. You can see 1 example in the screen cap. Unfortunately, some flavor names also have those prefixes or suffixes, which means they too get caught up in the merge. That’s just the first page. I stopped counting after 24 pages!
To weed out just the recognizable names and manually match them up properly would literally take months to accomplish. I think I’d rather have my johnson slammed in a door than try to tackle that! I’m still recovering from the TPA/TFA debacle.
But that’s a little of what goes on behind the scenes. Mistakes are happening and flavor notes are getting lost, I’m painfully aware of that. If I could go back and correct them I would.
On the other hand, while everyone is entitled to their opinions regarding the clean-up process, posting banners like “Stop The Merge” is totally unnecessary. It has no value and serves no purpose.
First, thanks to both of you doing all this enormous work. We all appreciate it a lot and noone meant anything bad; all of those ‘comments’ were about trying to help and to figure out maybe even a better way to fix the db.
But it does have value and it serves the purpose (we tried to explain why it would be better to stop merging real flavors).
I (we) am not talking about those funny names with signs, numbers, etc (you gave a reasonable explanation for those and noone questions that, place them all into ‘Garbage’ named flavor), but about perfectly entered flavors without any grammar mistakes and with reviews & recipes of more experienced mixers who we can assume they know what they are doing. Why merging anything with Cereal27? Persimmon FLV with Persimmon Spice FLV? Margarita Candy WF with some other unknown candy? Silly Rabbit Cereal TPA with who knows what TPA cereal? Those were perfectly entered flavors. There’s no logic in merging different names together. Why do you think it makes sense?
Since i’m just talking, i should once more mention the problem of renaming into '‘(discontinued)’', like Amaretto (Cap) (Discontinued) and many other Capellas. TZ, there is no flavor that is named like that, it doesn’t exist and it never did. So why renaming those flavors like that? The DB should consist of real names of flavors, not some imaginary ones. Put that (Discontinued) inside the flavor review or under that diketone information inside – there’s a perfect place for this if needed and it will look much better, cleaner, less confusing and less annoying.
It helps noone, it makes existing recipes look weird and questionable to new mixers and ofc no other website is practicing this for a reason (they all are writting real flavor names to help mixers). On top – and this is important, many of these (Cap) flavors are still available in shops worldwide and will remain being available for quite some time (and people will still be mixing these flavors 10 years from now). Totally useless and annoying (while paradoxically, we fight that everyone should be careful at writting real names of flavors). Not to mention that some flavors can be resurrected after a while (and another confusion again); like all RF line was dead for a long time to be later resurrected etc… Why making things unnecessary complicated?
(once again, this is not meant as a critique; it’s meant to help make db better; it’s not about right or wrong, it’s about community giving food for thought; maybe not all ideas are fine, but maybe some are worth to consider)
Same here @TorturedZen. I will admit to a certain level of panic, when I started checking some of my recipes, only to find some had borked ingredients, and I was trying to remember which ingredients they were LOL !!!
This DOES bring up the questions why ARE we merging ?
What would happen if you LEFT the correct entry, and deleted the wrong ones ? Would those (wrong) flavors disappear from all the recipes it was in ?
Glad your back, and hope everything’s okay. You know I love you brother and can safely say the work on the database IS appreciated by all, we know it’s a Custer fuck!
Just trying to understand, I asked the question on Sept. 3rd (above) is this being done by a bot or program ?
OK, I see the Flavor List is Down to 106897 flavors, is this just eye candy, if all the incorrect entries (and a few valid) were just moved / consolidated (swept under the rug) ?
How bout, step back, think, get feedback… where are we going…
Amen, nobody’s critiqueing the probably hours upon hours that goes into this enormous tast of shoveling shit against the tide…
Just questioning the process
I think that better FULLY hashing this shit out would work for BOTH SIDES. Wait, BOTH SIDE ?? Who’s Dat ??
Well, ONE side, is the side trying to fix things.
The OTHER side is US, the users, some breaking shit, others have some shit broken UPON us, by the aforementioned.
I think @TorturedZen started to allude exactly how F’d up this problem is, AND, that the solution isn’t much easier. I guess if we ALL KNEW exactly how much work/hassle it was to try and clean this mess up, maybe MORE of us, would be better informed, more forgiving, more understanding WHEN the boom booms happen.
Another POSSIBLE side effect, would be if enough GOOD USERS saw what actually WAS having to be done to fix this, and SAW the amount of TIME, and EFFORT required, maybe some of US (good users) could help start POLICING some of the newer members, newer recipes, newer flavor entries.
Until the database entries are locked down there is no solution, TBH the dupes / bogus entries do not effect me at ALL. Sure when I first started I made some mistakes entering flavors in my stash and TZ took my under his wing and got me sorted
Obviously (I assume) Lars is ok with giving ppl freedom to enter there own flavors as they choose, still doesn’t effect me in the least…
Lot of buzz on social media lately bout ppl ready to pull out of ELR, so let’s think, talk,
#1 thing that has to be done IMHO. If we could be preventive instead of having to be reactive, the amount of time taken would (should) be a lot less. I am sure that constant requests, especially from new users, to add a name to the database would probably be annoying, but the current situation is surely more so.
I 100% appreciate the work being done by @TorturedZen and @Ken_O_Where and it must be so frustrating at times, but if @daath could stop the incorrect entries at the outset, surely that would help a lot.
Just my 2 cents worth, nothing done has affected my stash as yet so no problems from my side
For years I’ve been saying the front door needs to get locked. Some good ideas have been tossed around but never acted on by Lars. What’s frustrating is that he hasn’t let anyone know why.
Sorry…I didn’t realize there was more in this thread when I replied to @Ianc13 otherwise it would have been in the order posted. I’m tired but I will attempt to reply a bit more in-depth tomorrow, if y’all want.
The prevention rather than cure would seem to be the most logical option here from what I can tell, not being able to add random things / new flavours without some form of cross check process to confirm they are known flavours & have been entered correctly, I’m useless with I.T stuff myself so have no idea how easy something like that would be to implement, but it seems like the ideal solution for going forward.
Right this is what I have managed to figure out on my own stash that’s showing up wrong which I hope may help at least a little, maybe others could do the same & we can get a more comprehensive list up of what we can figure out which can (maybe) help TZ & Ken? -
(ooo) (Invalid Flavor Name) = TOBACCO BASE (VG) OOO
02 (Invalid Name or Unknown Brand) = Cereal 27 (CAP)
I have no idea if the above will help, but it’s what I have managed to figure out that’s changed from reading my notes on each of the flavours.
In the mean time I am slowly going through my entire stash & adding the correct flavour name in on the notes section, so if this merge continues at least there will be something more concrete to go on/a way to figure out whats changed.
Well I’ve just added names to notes for the flavours starting with B, one hour just to do one letter, this is going to create a lot of hours work for a lot of mixers, but with luck may help if more things end up being merged/lost.
Sorry 4th reply on the trot, but just checking my stash as I go through adding the names to the notes & I came across “cream Clyrolinx”
Does anyone have any idea which brand this has been merged with?? I am at a loss even with my notes as I have never tested/tried or for that matter even heard of Clyrolinx - had to go google them.
EDIT -
Mystery seemingly solved after a few burst brain cells - Cream Clyrolinx is in fact -
Have one that didn’t delete the flavor house just the flavor it’s self. Eventually I’ll find it. INW is not that big of stach for me.
Thanks for the OOO hint. One more down two to go. A FE flavor that goes to a totally different flavor house in notes.
