LA Book Festival Photos

Teresa wrote me today, having come back from the LA Book Festival:

I wanted to report in on the LA Times Festival of Books – wonderful event.

As one of the larger book festivals turnout was very healthy — organizers estimated about 170,000 attended. The BookMooch booth enjoyed a constant stream of visitors who expressed interest & appreciation. Folks understood the concept right away and were very enthusiastic. Most overhead comment was “Great idea, I will definitely join!”.

BookMoochers Margot and Veronica came to help out with the booth. Several other Moochers stopped by specially to say hello and thanks. The Festival was on the beautiful UCLA campus and I’ve attached some shots in a zip file if you want to post them on the blog.

This weekend: BM at Los Angeles Book Fair

BookMooch will be exhibiting at the LA Times Festival of Books on Saturday, April 25 and Sunday April 26, 2009 in Los Angeles, California.

The festival will be held on the UCLA campus and it should be a fantastic event! If you would like to come help with the BookMooch booth or have questions please email Teresa

BM had a problem for 10 hours

BookMooch had a technical problem for 10 hours, from about 5pm Pacific time to 3am Pacific time, and the web site was giving an error message in response to most things.

Everything should be back to normal now, but if you have any problems please do contact a tech support volunteer.

Sorry about that!

-john

new BM version

A new version of the BookMooch software went up today. There are a lot of tiny things changed in it. Most people won’t find the list below very interesting, but the detail-maniacs (like myself) prefer to have everything nicely documented.

I’m working pretty heavily on BM at the moment, going through all the little bugs and annoyances first. After those are done, highest on my list is redoing the reservation system to hide reserved books (and not send email notifications) and to put up a new forum system.

So, without further ado, here is a list of the small changes on BM as of right now:

ie8 maybe doesn’t work with bookmooch
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I received a report that IE8 didn’t work with BM. The user sent me a screen picture where the text entry fields on a form were really tiny. I installed IE8 and had no problem with BM. If you have problems with IE8 and BM, please email me and tell me how you caused the problem.

supress too-often-recommended books (ie, bestsellers) from recommendations list
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The recommendations feature tended to recommended the same 50 or so books over and over, which are the best-sellers that everyone has read (that’s why they get recommended). I decided to automatically remove books that were over-recommended, which for the time being I defined as recommended for more than 20,000 titles at BM. Hopefully, that will help the recommendations be more interesting.

change “lost” number of days to: 6 weeks domestic, 4 months international
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The admins, and also Australians and Singaporeans have noted that sometimes books take as long as 6 months via boat from a foreign country. So now, you have to wait 4 months (it was 3) to mark a book as lost from a foreign country. For the same country, this has been lengthened to 6 weeks (from 4) for the same reason.

add a “help close this account down” link next to bios of inactive members
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I get a lot of emails complaining about accounts on BM where the user hasn’t logged in a while, and the person wants me to remove them. The way I prefer old accounts to be removed is for you to mooch a book from them, and if they don’t respond to the mooch for 10 days, if you cancel and indicate they didn’t respond, the person’s account is automatically put on vacation. This avoids the case where someone hasn’t logged into BM because nobody has mooched their books in a while, and seems fairer. The change I’ve just made simply has a link from “possibly inactive” in their bio to a page explaining how you can help.

limit dupe copies of books to 3 unless admin over-rides, also dupe limit of 1 prohibits user from having dupe entries
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The admins have noted that some people add way too many dupe copies of the same book. There isn’t demand for that many copies, and also it’s not fair that they get 1/10th of a point for each copy. From now on, you will be limited to 3 dupe copies by default. If you want more (such as if you’re giving away mooch cards) you can email the admins (a link is provided) and they can increase your limit.

add “move to savelater” button and “move to wishlist” button on the confirmation pages for add-wishlist and add-savelater
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self-explanatory

make email form clearer that john doesn’t do tech support
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self-explanatory

display that a user is “temporarily on hold” in their bio page
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If an admin is looking at somebody’s account, and that person can’t use BM while this happens, this is now indicated on their bio page. This doesn’t mean they’ve done anything wrong, but “temporarily on hold” is a precaution while the account is reviewed by a volunteer admin.

no wishlist notification for multiple copies of the same book – currently bombards users with wishlist of moochcards because so many copies
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fixed: self-explanatory

bug with removing last copy of a multiple-copies book when dupe copies feature enabled, leaves reference in book to owner as if book was available
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fixed: self-explanatory

remove weird topics
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There were a lot of odd topics coming from Amazon: I’ve removed them

forbid adding non-books
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most bindings at Amazon like “Clothes” or “Electronics” are now stopped from being added to BM. About 5% of the catalog at BM has non-book stuff like this. However, most of the non-book stuff are audio-books, which I do want to allow, and audio books are still allowed. I’m working on something that will remove the non-books from the database.

make trim version of asin feed, w/o recommendations
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for programmers: the XML database feed of books was really large, due to the recommendations field being included. That field is no longer included, resulting in a 80% size decrease in the XML feed.

email to moocher should be clearly different than to the book owner after a mooch has occured
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previously the email the moocher received looked way too much like the same email the book owner received

change “Estimated delivery time” to “estimated ship date”
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thanks for the user suggestion on this

charity-log-given shouldn’t show dar-a-luz network (and others) which aren’t a charity any more
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self-explanatory

shouldn’t be able to mooch from a closed or suspended account
should not be able to give charity to a closed or suspended account
suspended accounts should not be able to receive smooches
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self-explanatory

when adding books for the first time, warn user to not enter too many or they may get tons of mooches
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self-explanatory

add Bookmooch to email subject line of “your book was sent”
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self-explanatory