Welcome back to our ATF Thursday!
It's been two weeks since the last (and first) ATF Thursday and today we want to give you a breakdown of what has happened so far and what the next steps are going to be.
First of all: Whipping u/queuetue was quite effective. He's been working on ATF quite a bit and so far has fixed two bugs as well as worked on a lot of different features that are already on deck, just not quite yet working how they should
Bug fixes:
- When releasing an SnV that doesn't require steeping, you'll get an error if the entered value for steep days is 0, and you therefore can't release your recipe. This has been reworked and you can now post recipes with 0 steep days!
- When copying a recipe you made which had certain licenses, the description of the new recipe would read, that this recipe has not been created by you. This has been fixed as well
Currently in work/Already done:
- Recipe Tagging
- Flavor Tagging
- Universal Flavor Database
- Flavor Comparisons
- Mixer Groups
- Recipe Collaboration
- Account merging
Keep in mind though, you won't see much actual change on the site just yet. Most of the stuff that is being worked on is in the backend. We're working on "cleaning" the UI up and giving it a nice polish though!
There are quite a few things to do, and we have much more on our list. You guys gave a lot of useful feedback on the last post. A huge thank you to everyone who participated in the discussion!
Goal of this post is to find out which of the feature requests we gathered are the most wanted.
I'll be commenting all of the requested features down below, please have a quick look over all of them and upvote whatever you want to see on ATF
Please only reply to comments already posted, so the essential comments won't get lost/other users after you won't have to read through more comments than necessary.
Recipe versioning
Ability to leave reviews on recipes WITHOUT having a paid subscription
So, anybody could just make an email, use it to sign up for a free subscription, and leave a review?
I assume the IP is tracked by their site statistics. It would be easy to prevent most all abuse.
This was my suggestion. They're going to use some sort of "vetting" or "moderation" mechanism.
Independent Logins (Just E-Mail and a password – nothing else would be required to login)
Easier ways to add new flavors to the database (without it ending in ELR 2.0 of course)
That might be the most important parenthetical clarification in the history of putting things in parentheses.
It may be. (Although I'd be intetested in knowing what the other contenders are.)
I couldn't think of one off the top of my head (my memory isn't what it used to be). I tried some googling and while it surely is not among most important parenthetical clarifications, it's certainly a fun one:
> ‘Black dog’ is the mood of bottomless, suicidal despair suffered, most notoriously, by Winston Churchill (himself a kind of bulldog in nappies, a logo for Empire; growling and dribbling, wheezing smoke, swollen veins fired with brandy).
- from Lights Out for the Territory (By Iain Sinclair)
How about making the user search for a flavor before entering a new one and then running the new one against all the flavors and either letting it though or flagging it for manual addition by staff.
I think adding new flavors would 100% require someone to manually look over the new entry before actually adding it to the database. The thing I'd essentially like to see is an easy-to-find "Add Flavor" button. You put in all the info and one of our team who has been approved and access reviews it and adds it to the database. I can't see a way to do this automatically, without having flavors like "! ! ! Piss ! ! !" in the database sooner or later
Sorting your flavor stash by the date added
Oh my god yes. The number of times I've wanted to use this.
Wouldn't you need to remove a flavor and add it again every time you resupply a particular flavor for that to mean anything?
Default sort order of favorite recipes should be chronological instead of alphabetical
Recipe folders
One new feature request. Could there be a place to specify that a recipe is or isn't for pod systems? (Yes, tagging the recipe sich would probably work, but does lead to the issie that the creator may intend something as a pod recipe (or not) and it could end up tagged wrong by other users.) Then people could easily searchcfor recopes meant for pods and such, and the average usage data could be divoded up into pod/conventional recipes. Otherwise, the frowing popularity of pods could skew usage rates.
Lifetime subscriptions
I like this solely because I might be contemplating suicide and then think, but then I won't be getting the most out of my ATF subscription.
Vanetian blinds down 80/20. Fifth of liquor by your leg on the floor 2/3rds empty with a pistol on your lap. Looks like a cyclone has devastated your abode. With a tear and a grin you delicately grab a bottle and fill your tank or replicate the clap . You inhale. Knowing it's just the inhale there is nothing. No lies. As you exhale, your mind wonders. Thinking is this the drizzle? How can there be a drizzle? There was no drizzle. Exhale complete . Euphoria streams through you. I must share this.. Error. Write your shit down people.
What's this "might be" business? Isn't that something everyone does daily?
Well, yeah, but it's not enough to really prevent it. It's one thing to be ready to pull the trigger and think, "but wait, I've got a few months left on my ATF subscription," and another to think, "How many years of ATF am I cheating myself out of if I go through with this?"
Substitute suggestions for recipes
Would this just be a universal table of substitutions - or would each recipe have it's own list of potential substitutions entered by the creator of the recipe?
Good luck getting more than two people to agree on a “universal table of substitutions.” That’s a fantasyland idea, in part because what might work as a substitution in one setting might not work at all in another.
I would probably even stop using ATF if it were implemented without the option of turning it off, because it’s dumb and I don’t want to get blamed for sharing a bad recipe because someone used a sub from the “universal substitution table.” Look, I’ve been testing multiple flavors with the same or similar names on the bottles weekly for years. How often does one flavor taste very similar to another with the same name by a different brand? Not very often!!!
A substitution list entered by the creator of the recipe would be cool.
What about pinning substitutions to version control (suggested as another enhancement elsewhere in this thread)? I envision a workflow something like "what can I make (include substitutions)" -> "mix with substitutions" -> version # incremented/code forked if this substitution has not been previously mixed/jump to existing forked code if it has.
This would help /u/id10-t avoid bad reviews of recipes due to subs (as they would be mixed under a different version #) while still allowing a programmatic/automated way of accommodating "pepper tasters" and "strawberry blind" etc users. My manual workflow today is to simply copy the recipe, make my substitutions, and mix, which works, but doesn't allow "what can I make" to be very useful or accurate unless I lie about my stash and claim I have eg TFA VBIC in my inventory. Truth is a lot of the recipes that contain "problematic" flavors look really interesting, but there's precisely zero chance I'll mix any of them as-is.
I can't see the harm in this if it is done well and it would reduce some people's manual workflow, so that's great. That's a significant IF, though.
Earlier, I was saying I would be on board if it allowed the recipe creator to define acceptable subs for that particular recipe. But, the way you're describing, it would be more useful if the end user were allowed to define their own subs. So I could tell ATF to include MY substitutions that I want to use (just for example I could set LB Vanilla Ice Cream as my sub for TFA VBIC and I would never be asked to choose whether I want to sub CAP or FW or some other VBICs that might really suck as a sub for it) and that would also be used for "what can I make?" inclusion purposes, which would be terrific.
It would allow recipes that contain TFA VBIC to show up on what can I make for me because I've asked it to, but not for everyone who happens to own whatever vanilla ice cream flavor whether it's Delosi or McCormick's. And when I go to hit the mix button, I get my sub that I made for me, rather than a scroll through list of all the possible subs that someone could conceivably attempt to use based on.... what? The name on the bottle? Lolol, because of all the times the two flavors with the same on the bottle couldn't possibly be more different.
Universal substitution table can still GTFO. For example, some chucklefucks think FLV Nectarine is a perfectly suitable sub for TFA Nectarine simply because they both have "nectarine" in the name. But I think that's so ludicrous it shouldn't be dignified with a inclusion in a substitution table. You'll have brand new mixers who don't know any better ruining their mixes because ATF gave them the idea that's cool to just sub whatever has the same name and everything will be fine. That's simply not true. It won't be just fine, they'll produce terrible unvapable crap. We have enough trouble already educating people here about no, you can't just sub whatever brand you feel like that has the same flavor name and still expect the same results, without having ATF reinforcing that brand new mixer misconception.
I think both of it should be possible to achieve - question would be, what does the community rather want to see? What is easier implementable? Would both options at the same time would even make sense?
Heres one thing many overlook - sometimes the reason a flavor is used in a recipe is that was the best choice of what the creator had, but nit everyone has the number of flavors /u/ID10-T has. So maybe someone else has other flavors that work even better than what the recipe creator had. Now, I can understamd some not wanting certain substitutions being made, and then having a review based upon a substitution the creator didn't approve of, but...
Support for using PDO/PEG instead of PG in a mix
Not so much a 'feature request', but is there a chance you could get the app working again?
What's wrong with the site? What did the app do that the site does not?
I just much prefer using the app over using the website.
Analytics/Historical data
What kind?
As another user suggested - all kinds of it. For example, how often has this flavor been used at which percentage? Has the average percentage of this flavor went up over time or down? Tbh, everything you could imagine to be historical data should smh be achievable. Of course, that's not really useful most of the times. It's more of a feature to play around with for data freaks (like me)
Flavor substitution suggestions. For those who have hundred of $$ in flavors that need use but the flavors are getting lost in an ever growing field of competition. Ie don't have INW xxx try TFA xxx
Average percentages (fixing and automatically fill in when adding a flavor to a recipe)
Uh, not only no, but HELL NO. Leave the percentage field blank so it's easier to enter a value. Now, some way to get the flavor usage distribution data while editing/creating the recipe would maybe be handy, but not filling in a field automagically.
It currently puts in the value 0.0 so either way you've been having to change the value in that field this whole time. If the field automagically had the average usage the only difference is that you would know the average usage before changing it to whatever you intended.
Respectfully disagree. When I’m adding a flavor to a recipe that I don’t know intimately, I might first try the most commonly used percentage. This currently requires looking up the flavor details in another tab, so an autofilled value could save people like me a lot of time. I also don’t see how an autofilled value would slow down entry of a custom percentage if it’s done well— the percentage field could even autofocus to allow you to immediately type another value overriding it. Currently I think you have to select the field before entering the value so this could even save you time.
Of course, some other way of accessing that info from the recipe edit page could work too.
It would need to do a "select all" so typing a value would overwrite instead of appending the prefilled value to one end or the other. But while I will usually use other usage for a otherwise unknown flavor the mode is usually a much better choice than the mean. Although if there's clusters, usually the lower mode is accent range, and the higher is as primary flavor range... Like i saod, beong able to see those values from the mix page would be handy, maybe in a hover/tooltip display?
A date when recipe was added
I would love love love date when flavour concentrate added. And to be able to sort by date added.
A page to explain what all the button images represent.
I would love to see a full forum attached to the site. You can just use free forum software to set it up like phpbb. It works fine. I would pay higher month rate for a real forum.
There is one. It's where the discussion happens.
It's a shame the discussion embed is broken and nobody knows about it.
I think that's not the kind of forum vApe_Escape actually means, although I feel like the forum is already here - on the subreddit
There's already discussion on recipes, and apparently notes on flavours is coming soon.
You can also post stuff in the ATF forums that isn't tied to a recipe, so just general posts. I imagine more categories could be added easily.
Otherwise, yeah, most of the info is here. I think we already decided that we didn't need another mixing site.
How about the ability to mark a particular ingredient as optional?
Sometimes a recipe can still stand alone without certain components (sweetener, cooling etc).
Maybe fix the filter. If I choose tobacco recipes it does not go to tobacco recipes, it goes no where it just goes back to recipes page. It used to work but not anymore I guess.
I don't want to make a separate post just for these small questions so I'll post them on the off chance someone from ATF will see them.
I can't see the discussion on recipes. It only says "error embedding." I can still see the reviews, though.
Can we get a sort by date added on favorite recipes? I don't always remember the name of recipes I want to try and seeing the newest added would help. Or maybe be able to save it to different categories.
Also the ability to delete lists? Maybe it's just me but I can't find a way to delete an entire list.
holy shit, never new about this site. Looks really promising. Any plans of adding in a way to mix by weight? I would love to not have to go back and forth between this and e-liquidrecipes.com. If this is in the works, i will buy pro today
What are you talking about? You can mix by weight or volume with both sites.
I need to dig deeper then. I added all of my flavors and see the recipes. I saw the percentages in the recipes but didn't see a spot to that showed pg, vg, nic, and flavors by gram. I will look again. Thanks for giving me a heads up that I missed this feature. I have been using the other site for about a year and always thought the ux of that site could be so much better. cheers!