Forum

It's a shame that there are not more ratings and notes on the books in the library.  I'd love to read what other members think about particular books.  I am sure they would be very helpful.  Is this something the Founders of the site would like to see members encouraged to do?  Also how does the rating section work?

I too, really appreciate comments from others - good, bad or otherwise. 

I am curious about the criteria when you ask for a list to be sorted by rank?  If several folks have given an item 5 stars (but only one person per entry), then how are they sorted after that?

Hi Cheri & Elise

Thanks for your posts - and I totally agree with you.  Jane & I would love to see more Notes and Ratings from members and we are looking at ways that we can encourage people to do this.  It's a habit we all need to get into!   We have some members who are very generous in the time they spend sharing their experiences with us.

We have been focusing on getting the data and search side of EYB right, but we are now moving towards making the site more community focused.  We recently made several changes to Notes:

• You can now have personal or public notes


• You can edit and delete them more easily


• You can see all the recipe notes for a book in one place - on the book details page (if you own a 'linked book' you need to look on Master book to see the Notes).

We have just improved the Profile page - so you can click on a members name if you like their Notes and see what other cookbooks they own, the books they have in common with you, and if they've added this information - what city they live in, a link to their blog or website (if they have one) and a small bio about themselves.   A review that says "the family loved it" has more meaning if you know "the family" comprises of toddlers or teenagers.  Or if the reviewer is just cooking for one person with plenty of time. 

In the July newsletter - there were 3 articles encouraging members to add Notes - and we'll keep 'nagging'.   I think people need to feel that if they add a Note it's not just going to be lost amongst the half million recipes now on the site.  We've done some things to improve this, but we will do more - such as a notification system so you get to see a feed of all Notes as they get added to books and recipes.

The rating system does a simple sort by stars.  When we launched, this wasn't an important feature, but is becoming more, so we will improve it.  The number of people who rated it should influence the order.   For books we decided that Popularity (ie the number of Bookshelves a book is on) was more meaningful than ratings.

I'm wondering if maybe it is the use of the word, "notes," rather than, "reviews," that does not encourage users to write more developed thoughts and rankings for the recipes they try using EYB. I know there is a Reviews tab, but IIRC that is meant for external reviews only. The word, "notes," to me provokes just that, a quick note, maybe to myself regarding a simple fact or possible tweak about the recipe, whereas the word, "review," sounds more inviting to fuller thoughts about how well a recipe worked.

Perhaps the Notes tab could be rephrased to something like, "User notes and reviews," and the Reviews tab could be, "External reviews?" I realise those phrases may look a bit clunky, but hopefully you can see what I'm getting at.

I've tried to post Notes/Reviews; however, I keep getting an "invalid character" error message. Is there an FAQ on what characters are forbidden?

Thanks,

Lucy Zoe

One half baked idea about the note/review participation would be to give members who post stars or posting number totals.  Possibly if we enter a magic number, we might get a free 2 months extra subscription.  Or something!  I hugely appreciate the comments I find. 

  When I am dying to say something about a recipe in a book not yet indexed, I plop the comment in anyway.  I hope this is transferable to the recipe if/when the whole book gets indexed.

lucyzoe - you will often find this error message if you type first in Word then cut and paste it into Notes.  For some reason the characters that are not letters can often not be recognized as text.  If you can you are better off typing in a text document such as Wordpad.  If you only use Word then you will need to edit the Note, replacing characters such as colons, speech marks with characters in the Notes format.

There is one character which can never be used - the ; semicolon.  That is because this character is often used by hackers.

Thredbende - we will do our utmost to encourage more members to post Notes (and we will give some thought to the naming of Notes and Reviews).  It's probably going to be one of those critical mass things - the more people who review books and recipes, the more other members will notice them, and hopefully encourage them to review themselves. 

Reviews on books do not transfer to recipes and it's not something we have time to do manually at the moment.  Perhaps if you do that you could make a note to yourself, then copy it over to the recipe when the book is indexed.

Originally Posted by: Jane

There is one character which can never be used - the ; semicolon.  That is because this character is often used by hackers.

Well, that explains it. I'm a big fan of the semi-colon. Must needs be I remove a few and try to repost.

Thanks,

Lucy Zoe

Am trying out for dumb question of the week. If I rate a recipe in error, how do I remove my rating from it altogether? I couldn't find that in the "How do I..." section. Reducing the recipe to half a star when I haven't even tried it hardly seems fair.

I don't think that is dumb question of the week at all. I have also tried this and concluded that you are right. Once you have rated a recipe, it doesn't seem to be possible to entirely remove your rating.

Perhaps this is another enhancement for the hardworking developers?

Added to the list!

I agree that the word note does not inspire.  We really all want to be know as reviewers in our secret hearts.  You know:  "everyone's a critic".  

I did think that one month you could have a note making contest or "drive".  Everyone try to review a recipe from a book that has not been reviewed at all.  

Also having a counter sort of like ebay does would make it more dynamic.  

I just reviewed three recipes just because of this thread if that's any consolation.

Thank you blisstone.  It all helps!  I just added a Note for tonight's dinner - Indian-style chicken curry with cauliflower and peas and tomorrow I'll add the review from my daughter's class of the 24 chocolate chip muffins we made tonight from Nick Malgieri's Bake. A very interesting technique I had never used before of whisking eggs, melted butter and milk together then adding the flour and sugar. If everyone added a Note every time they cooked something, imagine how great the resource would be!

One thing we plan to do that should help is add a rolling list of Notes, so every time one is added, it appears on your home page, sort of like the Twitter feed we have at the bottom of the page.  And yes, a Notes count on your Profile would help too.  We are rolling these ideas into the whole redesign of the social netwrking side of the site that we are working on.

I know this is an old topic, but I couldn't think of anywhere better to put this!

I've noticed on my shelf that there are quite a lot of recipes that have been given very low ratings - 1/2 or 1 star - but no notes to explain why. It's hard to know whether to ignore the rating or write off the recipe as a dud! Is this something that other people have found to be a problem? Would it be possible to link ratings and notes or something, so you have to write a note for a rating of 2 or lower, perhaps? Or would that just put people off rating?

I've come to ignore any star ratings if there aren't notes for the book or recipes.  For a future enhancment it might be a good idea to embed the star ratings within the notes feature so when you read a note on a book or recipe you'll know what rating the reviewer assigned...I believe Epi does this (albeit w forks).  This wouldn't address existing notes/star ratings but would ensure all future ones were linked. 

Originally Posted by: Foodycat

I know this is an old topic, but I couldn't think of anywhere better to put this!

I've noticed on my shelf that there are quite a lot of recipes that have been given very low ratings - 1/2 or 1 star - but no notes to explain why. It's hard to know whether to ignore the rating or write off the recipe as a dud! Is this something that other people have found to be a problem? Would it be possible to link ratings and notes or something, so you have to write a note for a rating of 2 or lower, perhaps? Or would that just put people off rating?

I'd like to see a note required whether giving a high OR low rating to a recipe. Because someone might give a recipe a 4/5 rating yet in a note say "I substituted x for y" or made other changes, such that the rating doesn't exactly reflect the recipe as written in the book.

Trisha, I wouldn't impose a rating with a note, I would simply not allow a member to rate a recipe without adding a note. My suggestion was to embed the option to add a rating within the notes functionality.  There will definitely be notes where a rating would not be applicable.  

Originally Posted by: Breadcrumbs

Trisha, I wouldn't impose a rating with a note, I would simply not allow a member to rate a recipe without adding a note. My suggestion was to embed the option to add a rating within the notes functionality.  There will definitely be notes where a rating would not be applicable.  

I agree with this! Notes without ratings have value, ratings without notes don't, for me.

I want to know if something is 5 star because it's the only thing your fussy toddler will eat, or because it is the most delicious thing you have ever eaten.