Favorited By In Shop Listings Are Missing

Discussion in 'Bug Reporting' started by UniverseBecoming, Aug 5, 2016.

  1. UniverseBecoming
    UniverseBecoming Well-Known Member
    I noticed that some of my most popular products are now missing the bulk of the "Favorited by" tally. My most popular product had over 175 last time I looked and now it is 30. Why?
     
  2. Youknowwho4eva
    Youknowwho4eva Well-Known Member
  3. HenrikRydberg
    HenrikRydberg Shapeways Employee Design Team
    Could you share links or SPINs to the products that had more likes than what you're seeing now. Feel free to PM me if you don't want to post these publicly.
     
  4. UniverseBecoming
    UniverseBecoming Well-Known Member
  5. mkroeker
    mkroeker Well-Known Member
    No offense meant, but maybe they finally got around to dumping all the spammer accounts that used to be created in waves every few months, favoriting ten models at random just to link to their designer profile which had SEO spam for some obscure used car dealership or bedding retailer.
     
  6. UniverseBecoming
    UniverseBecoming Well-Known Member
    I don't think so because for years I've been kind of keeping track of the favorites numbers of other products and I haven't noticed a change in any of those. Also, if there were dramatic drops across the board, others would be in here complaining. It appears that it is just my products which have been effected. This needs to be fixed. I have spent a lot of time being EXTRA nice to customers and prospective customers who have PMed me over the years and there are a lot of people who have plainly liked my designs, not just here but on other sites as well. On Etsy for example quite a lot more people have favorited my designs. Here is a screen cap of the top three on Etsy.

    Etsy top three favorited.png

    I don't know if you recall, but years ago I made a thread regarding using Google to search Shapeways in various ways. One of those searches listed all of the most favorited products on Shapeways. Back then I made a study of what all of the best products were based on favorites and thoroughly documented it. Shapeways has since changed the structure of the site enough that one can no longer search for products based on the number favorites.

    Anyway, in short, the favorites are very important to me and I'd like for Shapeways to figure out what happened and fix it. :)
     
  7. mkroeker
    mkroeker Well-Known Member
    Seems that "ring of life" started life as "dna ring", or did anything untoward happen to the original, prompting you to do a completely new model page for it rather than just changing its title ?
    Wayback machine to the rescue, that model had 104 admirers back in march 2015:
    https://web.archive.org/web/20150324061656/https://www.shapeways.com/product/JAMH82WFR/dna-ring?
    Digging deeper, the latest designer to favorite your model back then, wohdee, still exists here, but your ring is not in his/her public list of favorites. Same for the other three I can access - either no public favorites list at all, or your model
    no longer in it.
    So, either you fell from grace or the original favorites list was made private and a new one started. (At least I assume that making the list private would retroactively remove the backlink from the model page ?)

    (Could be your model was favorited just to put it on a temporary shopping list, and these people are now just happy customers. Or it was a list of interesting things to show someone, mention on a blog etc. - my own favorites list is just such a mixture of things I really like - some of which I may eventually buy :) , things I want to recommend to friends and models that just appear to showcase particular strenghts of 3d printing).

    Now you could use that archive.org history to threaten all the people who stopped liking your ring.:eek:
     
  8. UniverseBecoming
    UniverseBecoming Well-Known Member
    Good idea to use The Wayback Machine! :D I found a capture on September 7th 2015 with 128 favorited. Seems that after that date The Wayback Machine is not able to archive the favorited portion of the page for some reason. I renamed it The Ring Of Life DNA Ring just a few months ago. I haven't got around to updating the name change here on Shapeways, but I'll do it now that I'm thinking about it.

    I think that perhaps my favorited numbers may have gotten messed up because I turned off the display to the public and offer for sale, of my DNA ring and a few other rings on May 24, 2016 and then reactivated those again on July 22, 2016. This had to do with the ring size problem. Could it be that site upgrades during that time may have had something to do with this?

    Edit:
    I remember now, I did change the name here on Shapeways to The Ring Of Life DNA Ring the same day I changed it all the other places I sell at.
     
  9. mkroeker
    mkroeker Well-Known Member
    I am almost certain that making a model inaccessible removes it from everybody's favorites, else that would create back doors to a supposedly private model... I believe just removing it from sale is enough as one cannot (no longer?) favorite items that are not for sale.
     
  10. UniverseBecoming
    UniverseBecoming Well-Known Member
    Well, I turn them off and on all the time, like when I'm changing the prices and don't want someone to order at one price and then find out a short time later that it's being sold at a different price. It takes at least an hour to change the price on a ring with multiple sizes and multiple materials.

    Perhaps it may have something to do with this.
     
  11. crnm
    crnm Well-Known Member
    Hi @UniverseBecoming,

    I did some investigation into this issue. I'm thinking that unsetting the product for sale is likely the culprit here. Unfortunately there is no simple way for us to remedy the issue. I've ticketed it internally, we'll see what can be done.

    Thanks for reporting and sorry that you lost your favorites count :(
     
  12. UniverseBecoming
    UniverseBecoming Well-Known Member
    Yes, but I have done that before. Are you saying that each time I did that in the past my favorites count reset to zero and I didn't notice? If that were the case shouldn't there be a warning prompt in big red flashing letters alerting us that we are about to lose years of favorites accumulation from our listing?? And why hasn't this happened to anyone else?
     
  13. crnm
    crnm Well-Known Member
    The underlying issue here is complicated and hard to explain, the easy thing to say however is that we have this on our radar and will hopefully fix this soon™. We will also try to restore the follower count on affected products if possible.
     
  14. UniverseBecoming
    UniverseBecoming Well-Known Member
    It's been 53 days. Any updates on the progress concerning correcting the problem?
     
  15. Youknowwho4eva
    Youknowwho4eva Well-Known Member
    @crnm in case he isn't following this thread.
     
  16. UniverseBecoming
    UniverseBecoming Well-Known Member
    Thanks Michael! :)
     
  17. UniverseBecoming
    UniverseBecoming Well-Known Member
    It has now been 6 months and the problem has not been corrected. Consequently, after much consideration, I decided I am going to close down my Universe Becoming shop permanently. I will keep it open for another month or two. But after that, if this problem has still not been corrected I am going to close it down. No hard feelings, it's just that I have way too much invested in the brand to let it be dragged down like this.
     
  18. NimlothCQ
    NimlothCQ Well-Known Member
    Hi James,

    I'm really sorry for your frustration :(

    The cause for this issue is that favorites (and all "lists") are linked to a product on a product configuration (combination of model + material + settings) level. You can see this aspect when you favorite/list something and it displays in your list with that material choice active in the link and image.

    The complications arise when a product gets updated with a new model file, or materials get removed, or in some cases when the product settings get saved in new configuration records -- because at those points, the product configuration that was added to the list gets deactivated.

    The bad news is that fixing this issue requires a little more effort and thought as to how we can make favorites work on a product level while letting other types of lists work on a configuration level.

    The good news is two things:

    1) None of favorites are actually entirely "lost", and we will be able to bring them back once we identify exactly how we can make this work from a technical perspective.

    2) We're going to look into how we can implement a fix that does not break the functionality of other lists, while aggregating favorites from a configuration to a product level. Unfortunately I don't have an exact timeframe for when this fix will be live, however I do promise that this is an issue we do take seriously and want to resolve.

    I'll make sure to update you here as soon as I know more.

    Best,
     
  19. UniverseBecoming
    UniverseBecoming Well-Known Member
    Ok, let's see how that goes.
     
  20. UniverseBecoming
    UniverseBecoming Well-Known Member
    Ok, I went ahead and shut it down. Shapeways is great, but it's not inline with helping with brand development. Especially now since Shapeways has started hallmarking with Shapeways' logo for jewelry items.

    I'll probably start a new jewelry shop on Shapeways someday if Shapeways changes the way it handles designer brands.