Upcoming change to your private Favorites list

"Next week, we will be making a site change that affects your private Favorites list. Currently, users can choose to display their Favorites list either publicly or privately. After next week, there will no longer be a private option and the Favorites list will always be displayed publicly."

Easily fixed. I just deleted my private list.

Thanks for removing a facility that was useful...

Where was this announcement made? I was hoping that private lists would be improved with the ability to add models that haven't yet been made public or for sale. That would let users make a prioritized list of things to test print before trying to sell them.

Via email ~9hrs ago., full email copied below;

Hello Michael,

Next week, we will be making a site change that affects your private Favorites list. Currently, users can choose to display their Favorites list either publicly or privately. After next week, there will no longer be a private option and the Favorites list will always be displayed publicly so that designers know how many people like their products.

We are giving you advance notification that after Friday, May 20, we will migrate all the products out of your private Favorites list to a new private list called "favorites_private." Your Favorites list will then be made public.

This change will only affect your Favorites list. Your other lists and list settings will remain the same.

If you'd like, go here to make your Favorites list public now.

Thank You,

The Shapeways Team

oops logged on under different shop. That is/was from MichaelAtOz

They must be dribbling the emails out over time. Or since I'm not in the habit of favoriting designs from other designers maybe I won't be on the notification list at all.

All I have is 12 of my own designs in a private verifications list. That's used to prioritize future print-proving purchases but again you can't put unproven designs on that list if they aren't for sale. Oh well, guess I'll use my white board instead from now on. Yay, simplicity!

Shapeways emails appear to be in their own timezone sometimes - e.g. I received a delay notification for a BHDA test print after that model had been rejected and the remainder of the order already delivered to me. Nothing in the mail header suggested the message had been held up in transit.
That said, from my reading of that supposedly official email notice there is no need to delete one's favorites list as they state that they will only rename it and add a new, always-public favorites list. (Though what purpose that change is supposed to serve escapes me, except probably to create new site bugs and another spot where one must be extra careful to check that one performs the intended action)

a. 'supposedly' - give me an email address and I'll forward it. Don't give me that denialism!

b. So they will just publish your private list? While I didn't have any sex toys or other fetishism items, everyone's own privacy is their own. How dare they just suggest to publicize a private list.

a) could be they were just testing the waters by sending the message to a subset of their customer base and waiting for their reaction.
b) I read it as "move our current favorites list to a new "private favorites" name and add a new one that cannot be set to private anymore", so at worst we would have to refrain from visibly favoriting anything on the site in the future.

It read to me as if they are going to automatically make private lists public, but simply append the "_private" to the end of the original list name so you realize that it once was a private list. That's very confusing to say least. It would make more sense to add "_formerly_private" to the name of a private list when doing the transitioning. Sort of like "Caitlyn_formerly_Bruce" makes more sense than "Caitlyn_Bruce".

On second thought and yet another re-read perhaps only the "favorites" list is affected. I don't know if it has always been the case but you can change the favorites list to be public or private. The message seems to imply that ONLY the favorites list will be converted to public IF it presently set as being private. Any other lists that aren't called favorite may be immune to this change. I may draw a different conclusion after another reading.

This could make sense to the developers because there might be some serious coding issues that need to be overcome to keep private favorites filtered out of the feeds of designers. This way they can streamline the mirroring of a favorited item all over the place in one fell swoop. But if there was an assumption of privacy for whatever reason when a favorites list was generated it does seem a bit brash to simply make it public. Wouldn't it be better to convert a private favorites list to some other private list and then let the person decide if they want to make it public after the site wide transition?

Depends what migrate means, if that means removing the product, and thus the Favorites list will be empty when made public, that would be OK. out of your private Favorites implies that.

If that is the case, I would have said, we are renaming your private Favorite list Favorite_private, leaving it private and creating an empty public list called 'Favorite' which cannot be private.

May explain why some didn't get the email, presumably only sent to those with Favorite set to private.

I finally threw some items into lists and favorites, and made the favorites list private. Guess I'll wait until the 20th to see what happens.

I assume they will clarify what they are doing if more people can't decipher the email.

Let me see if I can find someone who can answer these questions for you.

@Youknowwho4eva, you called?!

Today, there are two types of lists: Favorites and Custom. When a user clicks <Favorite> on a product page, the product automatically goes into his/her Favorites list. Other products get added to Custom lists when a user clicks <Add to list> and selects the particular list to which he/she wants the product added. Favorites lists are system-generated; every user gets one. Custom lists are created by users at their whim. The privacy setting of both types can be toggled from private and public.

As a public marketplace, we can derive great value for our shop owners about how their products are doing: how much they are selling, how much they're being seen, how much they're being interacted with by others. Favorites are one of the ways we can understand this interaction and we consider the act of Favorite-ing to be a public act.

However, some users have chosen to set their Favorites list as Private. In these cases, we lose the ability for our shop owners to understand interaction when those interactions are happening privately.

So, we are going to be making a site change after this week that prevents the Favorites lists from being able to be set as private. Nothing is happening with other kinds of lists. Custom lists will still be able to be set as private.

For the users who currently have a private Favorites lists, we won't be suddenly revealing their contents to the public. We will be preserving those lists under a new name, and the lists will still be private.

We sent out advance notification email only to users who 1) currently have a private Favorites list with ? 1 product in it; and 2) currently are subscribed to receive emails from us. It's a rather small population and that's why we didn't send the advance notification email to everyone or message it previously on the forums.

I hope that helps clear up any confusion about what we're doing and why.

So those of us who want to keep their personal choices to themselves have to do one more click in the future (which appears to be a general trend in the shapeways UI anyway) and for everybody else nothing changes, except perhaps the realization that our service provider strives to draw marketing data from all our actions on the site ?

for those who want to keep their lists private they can choose to do so, yes it will take an extra click.

this change brings our user experience closer to other systems of "favoriting" to other social experience on the web. Favoriting is typically a public activity for showing someone else (shop owners) what you like of theirs. Its about communication between users so everyone can have a more personal experience.

May be my fault for having grown up in a day and age when one did not go to the internet for hugs ??

Which leads to the question, when something is unfavorited does that information get distributed as thoroughly as from a favoriting?

There you go. If you had a private favorites list it has been renamed to a different private list called "favorites_private" and you should also have a brand new public list called "favorites" that should be empty.