BookMooch changes

A new version of BookMooch went up today, with lots of small things fixed and changed, and a few bigger things.

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Big changes

Wishlist notification emails – the wishlist emails have several new features. You can now opt out of notifications of related editions for a single book. Previously, it was all or nothing: either receive all related edition notification emails, or none. I particularly wanted this feature, because I have many Dilbert books on my wishlist, and I’m always being (mis) notified about other Dilbert books which have a few of the same comics in them, thus making them related editions, but not interesting to me.

Secondly, the wishlist emails have been greatly simplified and come as an HTML email. If your email program can’t display HTML email, you will automatically see the older-style all-text message. Here is what the HTML message looks like.

you can see that I’ve greatly simplified this message. The use of HTML was not to make the emails prettier or flashier, but rather to make them cleaner, more minimal, and remove all the visible URLs.

I’ve also moved most of the links and options onto a page you get if you click “more options”. It looks like this:

The related editions email has an extra line, and tells you the publisher of both the edition on your wishlist, and also the edition that is available. I did this because most frequently, I find that the publisher is what’s different between two editions, so it’s an easy way to see how the two books are related but different.

The “more options” page for related-edition emails has quite a few more choices. I’m not entirely happy with the complexity of this page, but for now I’ll let it stand, as the options are all useful.

n.b. this page was improved the next day thanks to member feedback.

Mooch notification emails – I also greatly simplified the email you receive when someone mooches from you, using HTML email (if you can’t display HTML email, the text version will display automatically). Here is what the new email looks like:

2:1 mooch ratio – you must now maintain a ratio no worse than 2 books received for every book given. Note that sending internationally counts as 3 books in your ratio. This idea was vigorously discussion in November 2007, and the consensus was that a stricter enforced ratio would cut back on the few-but-annoying abuses which sometimes occur. The consensus also was that people who send books internationally should not be penalized by this ratio change, and that’s why in November a brand new way of calculating your mooch ratio was created and a new page at BM for showing it. In November, we found that around 98% of members were under the 3:1 ratio, and about 95% were under a 2:1 ratio, and that most of the members that were above the 2:1 ratio were currently inactive anyway. So, I don’t expect that this 2:1 ratio change will effect very many existing BookMooch members.

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Small changes

mooch this book button – I relabeled the “mooch this book” button on the book details page to be “get this book”. I made this change for a few reasons, a) many newcomers’ first impression of BM is a book details page, and if they don’t know the word “mooch” or how we mean it ironically, it’s confusing, and b) for non-American speakers, the word “mooch” doesn’t make a lot of sense in this context (“mooch” in British English means “to hang around”). I’m still using the word “mooch” this the sense of “get” elsewhere on the site, but I decided to gently introduce it. Also, I spaced the “get this book” button apart from the other buttons, as it’s the most important button on the page, and there are both many other options and they are not as important.

Sex and Linux – previously, if you searched for “Linux”, the #2 related search was “sex”. This was caused, quite correctly, by the fact that the same people who searched for “linux” did frequently search for books with “sex”. I thought this wasn’t a particularly helpful correlation to make, so now the top “sex” related searches aren’t correlated to any other search terms. n.b. : I’m reading a book about Google and other search companies, and evidently sex-related searches are about 12% of the use of Google, so naturally this presents a special case for algorithms which find similarities in a mathematical way.

Close & vacation swapped – I received an email complaint that the “close” button, being right next to the “log out” button, was very easy to mis-click, and caused this person anxiety. Yes, there’s another page after the close button, where you have to enter an author-name to proceed, but nonetheless it was worrying them–being so close to closing their BM account– that they wondered if I could change something. So, I made a very small change, swapping the position of the vacation and close buttons, so that not only is the vacation button right next to the close button now (so if you accidentally click it, the anxiety level is lower, since going on vacation is reversible) but the label text next to vacation is much shorter than the log out button label, so it’s easier to tell them apart

New 13 digit ISBNS – previously you could not hand-enter a book that used a 13 digit ISBN. This is now fixed.

Wishlist remove page jump – previously, if you removed a book from a secondary page on your wishlist, you would get moved back to the first page of your wishlist (which was annoying). This is now fixed.

rejected mooches in points log – when a mooch is rejected and the .1 point deducted from your points if you indicate the book should be removed, the person who requested the mooch is no longer mentioned in the points log, as this caused confusion for some members.

never giving, fixed – there was a weird case, where someone could join BookMooch, get lots of points by typing in books, and as long as they didn’t get any mooches, their ratio stayed at “zero” because “giving divided by receiving” would be an illogical number (you can’t divide by zero). If they got a mooch, then their ratio would start to make sense. The new way it works is that now you can mooch only one book, and no more, until you get at least one mooch request. In cases where you mooch a book, and have no-one asking you for a book, your ratio is immediately calculated as 10:1, so that no more mooching is allowed.

fixed width pages – all pages at BM now have a fixed screen width, which fits inside the width of the top-of-page navigation. Previously, many pages would widen with the browser, and I had done this on purpose, so that wider screens could display more data. However, I’ve since decided that this varying-page-width looks sloppy, so now everything is nice, neat and tight. (n.b. this has been changed back)

Country API – for programmers only, the “mooch” API call now requires a “country” field to be specified, which is the country where the book will be sent.

Delayed sending on points page – on the “explanation of your points” page, there was a line that said “Delayed sending: 0” that always appeared. This line was always zero, and made no sense, and was a mistake of mine. It’s been removed.

French emails better – I received a number of corrections to the French (translated) emails and applied them. If you are using BM in another language and get emails with translation mistakes, please email me corrected translations and I’ll apply them.

Mooch rejection – the mooch rejection email didn’t include the reason given for the rejection, now it does.

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That’s a lot of changes, mostly small, and I’ve tested quite a bit. But, if you see any bugs or problems with anything, please leave a comment on this blog entry.