I love ATF - it is pretty much the best resource for DIYers out there.
However, development, support and maintenance appears to have been completely abandoned.
I use the android app when I am mixing, but recently it no longer recognises my subscription, meaning I can't create new recipes or sync my old ones.
This has become especially important as I have just had to reinstall the app and now it has no data! I have submitted a support request but I don't expect a response, as I didn't receive any for a previous request and lots of people are saying the same.
I know that the developer occasionally visits this sub. Does anyone know how to get in touch with him? Lots of people need his support!
I've only ever used http://e-liquid-recipes.com/ I'm not sure when or why this sub switched over to ATF but I gave it a go last week after seeing so many new top mixers here posting there.
I'll admit it's a hell of a lot prettier than ELR but the only extra feature I noticed was batching which I've been doing by dating recipes on ELR and adding notes as comments which are already time stamped.
Meanwhile all the other features ELR has and I imagine most other mixing sites have are paywalled on ATF, whether it's due to that or just that ELR is much much older ELR also has a substantially higher user base, recipe base, flavor base, etc.
That being said imo this sub made ELR as great as it was back in the day and while now it's a hot mess as far as user submitted content goes, the features and robustness of resources are still just as good as ever. Might even be a few new ones afaik.
I remember when ATF was started. All the "pro" mixers were jerking themselves raw about how this new site wouldn't be swamped with all the pleb recipes.
I mean I understand that pov and while there's some truth to it. I'd rather have 100s of people voting on shit recipes so the true cream of the crop can ride to the top vs. Timmy who paid his monthly dues and put out something halfway decent and gets 12 other Timmy's votes on it.
But now we're talking about opinions instead of features and functionality, the latter of which which is way more important.
I've recently cancelled my subscription because there is no unity between the web page and app.
And that's exactly the right thing to do, if that's important to you!
Well yeah, why wouldn't that be important to you?
Because I have a lot of things that a lot of people think is important and only a teeny tiny number of people that preferred the Android app - a group that didn't include me. I also hated programming for Android, and don't have an Android device - or make enough from ATF to purchase one just to develop on it.
It really sucks that he has abandoned the app. I don't think it has been updated in 2 years. It's all I use to mix. Now, since I have so many recipes still that I never synced, I can't even get them to the web without manually entering.
I think i can get your recipes off, if that's what you want. Making it sync is beyond my ability right now, as the mechanism the app used to authenticate is no longer provided by Google.
You can try to get ahold of Scott through my discord (https://discord.gg/t2q7KH6) but he hasn't been active there in a while. I believe he attained new employment somewhere, and has since been hard to reach. You should be using the site through a browser on mobile, instead of the app though. I think the app died a long time ago.
If there was a place to get in easy direct communication with me, that would be the place.
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You're right, in that after losing the job I was at while writing ATF, I am now kept a lot busier, and all of the communities I used to enjoy participating in are seeing a lot less of me, so even your Discord that brought me joy every day is pretty much on my disallowed list, because it was such an attractive nuisance. :)
oh wow, funny that this thread has popped up. I made this throwaway account to rip on ATF* and ask if the community would like me to start the creation of a better recipes website (open source, free and ad free unless ya'll use all my bandwidth. being able to find non-shit recipes, easily, would've been my payment)
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I work for Alphabet/Google as an L7 (staff) software engineer so prefered to stay anonymous, hence the throwaway. I minor in UX design, something ATF's creators are AWFUL at.
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*= I pointed out every flaw with ATF I had found, most of which apply to ELR as well. I was really annoyed with ATF at the time, and had found a serious exploit when fucking around with the site which allowed me to access other peoples accounts, I was going to point it out and suggest a fix method.
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I also had a lot of ideas I had wrote down in the post, I wanted to waste my time programming doing things that others don't have the skills to do. such as incorporating machine learning into giving an artificial rating to go alongside the usual user rating system, but making both ratings a lot more obvious to the end user and NOT using the star system. 1-5 stars means most will rate average recipes 5 stars or 4, and bad recipes 1, mixing the commercial-ready amazeballs recipes in with fizzmustards milk thing, which is a simple beginner proof of concept recipe. leave the star rating system to vendors on amazon trying to make their chinese crap look as good (4.4) as the american made steel, rated 4.8/5 (gosh I suck at explaining this shit. I'm better at providing a boilerplate)
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I didn't end up posting the thread because
a. I wasn't sure if somebody on this sub owned it (specifically somebody from DIYORDIE, who seem to run/own this sub?)
b. I wrote out most of what I wanted to say in a bear note with the intention of posting it here once I had proofread it, got distracted and closed out of the tab a couple days later not realising what it was
and finally
c. I wasn't sure if it'd be used. I'm no master of marketing, just a programmer with severe impostor syndrome. I don't mind creating something for a community I'm part of in my (scarce) spare time, but it's disheartening to create something that I'd be paid a *lot* of money to create for somebody else, just for it to not be used. I figured a better approach would've been to spend that time instead just learning to mix like the pros.
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I'd still do it and release it if people wanted... but I lack the confidence of my, ahem, marketing skills. I was on modafinil at the time and excited, thought that I could eventually expand the recipe site and help create a DIY e-liquid website where the community could congregate at in a "forum"-- not a forum in the traditional sense, I wouldn't just use discourse or FB groups or a subreddit, I still see them as low-effort cash grabs and Idk why. I don't use turnkey or CMS scripts. I'm really anal when it comes to coding, I can't stand mess/bloat, even back in the day when I ran a large forum I refused to use vbulletin or phpbb, and instead programmed everything by myself (which had new features monthly, beyond the pre-made options) wasting a lot of my teenage years at my computer.
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the whole congregate in a "forum" bit is bc I hate places like reddit who impose their own sitewide rules on specific subs, like this one. the whole "u cant post where to buy nic wahhh" sort of rule is absolute bullshit and my drugged up mind was mad at that too.
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ugh. this is tl;dr, again, but I'm fucking tired and want to post about this. I'll prolly rewrite my sub post to see if I have any backers for my plan, then spend my long weekend getting the POC up and running on github,
- I think ATF and DOD are indeed in the same circle, albeit not as close as before. Just speculating. I'm not convinced this sub is run by DOD or anything. Apart from that I don't see why you can't post your thread because of that, although it's not completely clear where you 're switching between writing suggestions / fixes to ATF and the idea of building a system of your own.
- But anyways, I also contacted ATF with suggestions, see my post in this thread. I got not much of a response possibly because they just thought my input was shit, but something tells me your being amped up / mad / annoyed / ripping on them would have not helped create a constructive conversation. Big egos or not, nobody enjoys taking notes from someone who tells them their work is an annoying piece of shit, Google L7 or not. As far as marketing skills go I'm no natural either, but I learned that it really helps to focus on talking about your goals and the ideas you have for improvements instead of your opinions about the current situation. So "wasting my time on sht others don't have the skills for" could be "I'm considering investing some time in improving the rating system with machine learning". Also, "non-shit recipes" is three more keystrokes than "great recipes" if you catch my grip.
- Mustard Milk is not a bad recipe because. It has the quality of being a good beginner's proof of concept. Oh well, maybe not, I never mixed it. But I'm saying "good:" is way too general for being a useful qualification. I'm with you on the stars problem.
- I'm quite curious what you'd come up with, but admittedly I don't foresee a quick mass migration from ATF or ELR no matter how good your application will be. I'm afraid you can't just look at these as being web apps, there's community aspects that stretch far beyond usability, functionality and sometimes reason in general. You must have noticed how ELR members are seen as Neanderthalers, ATF members as self congratulating circle jerk snobs, ECG are supposedly a totalitarian state of masochists led by nazi moderators,, VU is an Flavour Art Cult of HIC worshippers from the past, etc. etc. I'd say the vape / diy scene is in a tribal state rather than "a community". If you'd want your effort to be a success in terms of community vibrancy, I guess your best option would be to offer your services working with one of them.
- For that to ever work you'd have to be willing and capable of building trust, mutual respect and understanding, putting a cooperative spirit in front of egos, willingness to compromise on things, etcetera. Judging from your post ( = disclaimer, I don't know you) I'm guessing that the technical skills are not going to be a problem, but the aspects of patience, tolerance and marketing your ideas to a passionate existing user base could be an interesting challenge.
- So I'm not sure you'd even consider this, but if you would, I'd say contact Lars of ELR. See how you get along. He seems like a reasonable and practical dude, although I don't know him or anything, it's more a gut feeling. Also,the Neanderthalers are generally a reasonably good spirited bunch and among the hordes are quite a few very interesting and talented mixers.
- And I'm guessing that the dataset is quite a suitable one from your technical perspective, am I right? I'm a nitwit when it comes to machine learning, but if it's about finding patterns in a heap of data then i say drop a few modas and get working on an algorithm that reveals the gold pockets. I've been using the site for a couple of years now and I could definitely think of some indicators of a recipe's chance of being interesting.
There's a simple answer to this: Yes, the android app was abandoned, because I think it is terrible compared to what the web site became. The site had to get a hefty upgrade a number of months ago, due to a change in how Google handled authentication, and all the Android users got disconnected from synching as a result.
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Before I can fix that, I need to un-mothball the Android app source, because I don't even have a machine to build and test it on anymore. Since it provides a tiny fraction of the value of the website, and anyone who pays for it gets the website for free, yes, it is seeing very little - scratch that, no - attention at the moment.
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If you want a refund over that, then a) Cancel your subscription on the Play Store and b) write or call me and request a refund. It's pretty rare I won't give one to anyone who isn't a dick.
I created https://www.shake-and-vape.it for myself but anyone is welcome to use it. It's a Mobile friendly web app, but don't expect feature parity with ATF. In particular, searching recipes from other users is broken... It's nice for mixing your own stuff though.
Wutang clan - protect your neck. ATF is nice but you gotta utilize other resources. ATF isn't entirely free, I dunno why that is
No site is truly free. Any site needs bandwidth and storage. Neither of those are available for free. Either costs are covered by advertising or fees (or both) but the costs are there. Then there are costs associated with development and maintanence. Now, maybe it doesn't make sense to millenials that the person who created the site doesn't cover all the costs to be completely taken advantage of by all the users, but in the real world its more reasonable to expect the dite to try to at least break even.
And after all this time, he still hasn't fixed it so VG-based concentrates actually influence the VG calculation. So basically, the calculator isn't even accurate.
The account sync issue was discussed months ago, he knows it's a problem and said it would be fixed but it's not.
Dude must not care about maintaining those subscription fees.
Yah, dude just don't care.
Is that sarcasm, or a confirmation? Your app/site has been many mixers favourite for a considerable length of time, and many of us were holding out hoping you'd get it back on track. Are you officially done with it?
BTW, VG-based concentrates do affect the VG % of the mix, if whoever entered the flavor checked the "vg base" checkbox. Most flavors aren't entered by me anymore, they are entered by community members, but if I knew there were problems and had time to fix them, I do care and I'd fix it.
From what I remember the app is no longer being supported, the web page however is pretty great
They're still managing to collect subscription fees for the app though. I just got billed for it on 4/20.
Is there a seperate sub for the app and a premium sub for the site?
Agreed. It did that to me 6mos ago and when I email quetue to ask whats up, he just sent me a link for a free months subscription.
I did? It doesn't sound like me to give a free month's subscription.
Yes sir. The I still have the email. By the time I got to it I believe it was so old it didn’t work. Then again, I didnt know about the app until I read further down. I also still use ATF, but not enough to warrant bothering you for the very minimal year sub charge short of a quick email. My login stopped working long before I stopped paying. But im easy goin enough.
I'm on the same boat. I pay monthly to support more instead of saving a few bucks. All of a sudden I was billed and lost my subscriber benefits as you can see here.
I contacted in every way I found (message on the site and even called.), but no one has gotten back to me. It's a shame but if I'm charged again and this isn't resolved I'll have to go elsewhere.
Edit: Nevermind. Just saw his answer. I'm part of the small group that mainly used the app, but I'll move the website and see how I like it.
ATF got a lot of praise around here and I'm sure people have valid reasons for liking it. But the site's design and usability go against nearly every best practice of UX and quite frankly I have used it as an example to explain design students the importance of making design choices for all elements of an interface. Take the flavor page and ask yourself: why is the top menu organised like it is ("more" has some items that should be top level, some that should go under flavors and some that would make more sense clustered with the other meta items, "help" has elp, about and search items, "menu" has recipe items, flavor items, etc )? Why is the "upgrade" button red ? Why is the main font light grey on a white background? Why are the vendor filters in a dropdown scroll menu inside the search field? Why are the buttons on top of the table blue and small and stuck together? What's the difference between top, hot and popular exactly? Why is that table A. so wide or B. so empty? Why are some columns labeled and others not? What is that list of flavors that comes up initially? Why is it not paginated like the recipe list? ("Not all flavors are shown. Use search" it says on top. Made me chuckle given the site's name. But it's worse that search results also have that notification. ) Why can't I sort the table by clicking on a column label? Why are search results not sorted (at least not alphabetically or based on number of recipes it's used in) Why are vendor name and flavor name in one column? What's the use of displaying these two decimal averages (well at least cap apple pie makes sense at 3.14 %) What is "lists" vs "my flavors" vs "my flavor lists"? Why is "cost" and "score" and "density"(?) hidden in a huge fold out form instead of in that super wide empty table? (there might be a proper overview page but I haven't found it). I could go on for a while but I guess I mentioned enough for you to start disliking me by now....
I'n not saying the site is useless because of all this. These aren't blocking or critical issues and admittedly most things I mentioned are just cosmetic flaws. Neither do I blame non-designers for making these mistakes. I've made all of them in the past. It's usually not because developers make the wrong design decisions., they simply didn't make decisions at all - that's what makes the lecture about the subject so valuable for my students. When you start looking at your design elements asking yourself "what options do I have for these things and did I pick the best ones?" anyone will instantly make a huge leap in making better interfaces.
I contacted Scott some time ago, suggesting (in a respectful and constructive manner) a list of some 20 or 25 quick wins that would require no more than a few hours editing the style sheet and a minimal amount of code. Not to make the site "prettier", but to make it more usable. He answered my email and seemed welcoming to my suggestions. I offered to review the whole thing for more quick wins and pledged I would pay for an account upgrade if he 'd put in some work too. Because I really wanted to like that website but I'm just too burdened by professional pet peeves to accept it as is. Too bad I never heard from him again.
Lars of ELR has made a few most welcomed improvements since then, allowing me to batch edit my flavor inventory, that sort of time savers. He's also pretty responsive when I ask him things or suggest something. Meanwhile ATF's copyright statement in the footer has "2016" in it.
That's why I paid ELR for an upgrade. Not to remove the ads, because any blocker plugin will get them anyway, but because I think he's more committed and catching up pretty well in terms of functionality.
And admittedly I felt more sympathetic towards ELR because of all the times Lars and ELR got condescending, snobby shit from some of this sub's members. Say what you will about the average quality of recipes there, the tiresome substitution questions in the comments and the flavor list that has "straawberis" as well as "TPA βρώμικη κρέμα" but if you haven't figured out how to work around that then I guess you haven't really tried.
You can't even easily delete a recipe! Even the website UI is hot garbage.
How do you delete a recipe at all? I can't even figure out how to favorite recipes.