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| E Thayer : forum comments they have written | |
BookMooch Blog : John's official BookMooch Blog
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re: New feature: auto-focus
Very, very thoughtful, as usual. Thank you! @renee... try opening a new tab to mark a book as rec'd, rather than clicking through the link on your current page. Works well for me.
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E Thayer
2 years ago
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re: Feedback +0.1 no longer
@CelesteJak -- Greed? On the part of BM? Do explain, please, because I don't see it. No one is profiting from these changes. All Jonn B. has done is to bring a BM point closer to what it's supposed to represent; one book trade. BM points aren't supposed to represent courtesy, or inventory, or how many times you've sent overseas. They are supposed to represent book trades. At least, that's what I understood when I joined. @JonMoss -- thank you for mentioning the swap function at GoodReads. I had forgotten about it, and didn't realize that any GoodReads member could post books for swapping. I have a number of titles where I own multiple copies, so putting them up on GoodReads would give me an extra chance to rehome them. Thanks again.
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E Thayer
2 years ago
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re: For techies: data feed of book prices
@Joe_in_Australia -- what you're saying then, in that case, is if I have BM points accumulated, but not cash, I'm out of luck? Doesn't seem very fair. Plus, NO book on Amazon is "a few cents." The minimum cost, when you add on shipping, is $4.00 US. If you don't have $15 to spend on 3 points, that's fair. But basing it on what you *think* is the situation on the other end, isn't. Besides, if I've accumulated BM points, what good are they if I can't spend them on the book I want? @John, looking at the data available just makes me want to cry. I don't do the file formats you're using (yet.) I'm still a spreadsheet user, so I'm out of the loop, but I don't want to be.
What about making the data available as a (tab-delimited) snapshot text file?
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E Thayer
2 years ago
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re: Feedback +0.1 no longer
I'm fine with this change -- if it makes BookMooch a little more viable, then I'm all for it. The upcoming change in the point cost of international mooching, I'm not so thrilled about. I'd also like to point out, however, that there's a way to determine which of your changes help BM the most -- and that's to be methodical about it. Make changes one at a time, then assess their impact over a span of time. When you make multiple changes at once, it makes data analysis more difficult and less accurate.
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E Thayer
2 years ago
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re: End of +.1 for leaving feedback
Kat, I'm going to assume that you're criticizing my response, since mine is the only one I see posted after MarchRose's but before yours. Pointing out the difference between percentage and integer based systems is a valid observation. I didn't remark on the potential pluses or minuses of a tiered feedback system as I've never participated anywhere that had something of the ilk, so I have no first-hand insights. Anything else I might post would be conjecture, however the immediate impact of her proposed system on me as a trader, which I could see, I did reply to. Most people don't think in terms of large volume BookMoochers, so I considered my reply as being useful to the conversation at large. And still do.
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E Thayer
2 years ago
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re: End of +.1 for leaving feedback
@MarchRose -- I think I would be on the chopping block, despite having given away something approaching 2000 books. 10 unhappy people would represent half a percent of my trades. A percentage system would be fairer for people who trade a lot.
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E Thayer
2 years ago
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re: Not much junk on BM
I would support vacationing accounts that were obviously abandoned; one person I recently mooched from, with the express purpose of vacationing them in 1 week, had been absent from BookMooch for over 1500 days, according to what was posted. Has BM even been in existence for 1500 days?? Could that have been a bug? The tricky part is deciding how long "abandoned" is. I think anyone that hasn't logged in in the last year is probably not interested... however, that's just a "probably." This could be a touchy subject -- people do go on sabbatical or have heavy semesters. I wouldn't support out-and-out deletion of the account unless there's been an extremely long period of inactivity, such as three years. Can you imagine coming back to BM after a particularly arduous year of studies, and finding your account deleted? I'd be pretty ticked off, myself.
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E Thayer
2 years ago
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re: Not much junk on BM
Fern wrote: The only thing I can see that could be useful would be some kind of measure of how likely you are to get a book mooched. Check the Amazon page and it's sales rank. If it's very very low, like 5 million, the book is unlikely to find a home. It it's around half a million, you can consider there to be a decent demand for it. My cutoff, and I only recently instituted this, is a sales rank of about 1 million. That's only because I have soooooo many books already listed on BM. If you're willing to wait a good long time for the right person to show up, a sales rank of 2 or 3 million wouldn't be out of the question.
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E Thayer
2 years ago
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re: Not much junk on BM
@Cheri -- most nonfiction is still useful even 15 or 20 years down the line. How to knit, woodworking, herbals? Just because -you- look at something and think "Oh, junk" doesn't mean it is. Even some computer books, which someone in this discussion singled out as likely useless, aren't useless to the right person... say, a legacy systems enthusiast. As far as taking out books that have been in the system a long time,
I would also like to point out that unless a book is very, very oversupplied, it's still not junk. Just a couple days ago I sold a book that I had had listed for eight years. So -- was it junk? Not to the person that wanted it. Was it junk to me? Maybe, if I had wanted to clear my shelves off. But to toss something out of the BM database because the right person hasn't come along yet is shortsighted.
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E Thayer
2 years ago
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