A Steepster Cleanup Initiative

Definitely! The moderator powers we were given don’t extend to merging or deleting entries, so this is about the extent most of us CAN do, but at least when things do change, the Duplicates will be easily marked. Which will hopefully dissuade future Steepster users from posting in them too, until they’re dealt with.

Fixed all the images to the ‘spoon’ shot, deleted broken and duplicates.

Hmmm I’m thinking ‘Yunnan Sourcing’ for the master. There was a suggestion for adding Factory Information for database entry in the future, otherwise that info can go in the description body.

Agree.

Fixed

Non-english company names are tricky… Especially if they don’t have an accepted romanization. Would be nice if there was a redirect feature.

Yes, I was pondering a bit what to do with the names with accents, but I decided to keep those. Same with Østerlandsk Thehus, because although Ø is only a Scandinavian letter, I didn’t feel right changing it. I don’t even know what I would change it to, because it’s not even an accent. Ø and O are completely different letters. I could go with Oe, which tends to be the standard approximation on non-Scandinavian keyboards, but that still looks and feels wrong to me as a native Danish speaker. Having the drop-down suggesting ‘Øster’ when typing ‘Oester’ and vice versa would be ideal, really, but as it is I had no idea which would be best, so I stuck to the correct spelling as a starting point.

I would definitely call that an ‘own blend’ sort of deal.

Yes, that’s what I would do too.

Personally a little conflicted on this; one of the reasons/advantages to having the blender listed out in the company (aside from credit) like that is that there was a period where specific blenders were MUCH MORE heavily purchased/trusted.

For example, Cara McGee has a really strong reputation for the quality of her blending combinations so you could in theory type “Cara McGee” and pull up all of her blends. I still use that often when looking for potential new series to watch/drink along with…

Yes, an Adagio Blend CAN be made by anyone but there are definitely blenders with distinct styles in how they approach blending; that’s why it was called out.

Yeah, this is a big grey area… I’m sure, with Adagio taking over, they’ll jump at the chance to add more Adagio-specific fields. So that grouping them together (for now) under ‘Adagio Custom Blends’ could work, with the ‘Blender’ in the description until we’re given a feature that allows us to add them.

It sort of falls into the same boat as say puerh factory names being appended to Yunnan Sourcing (as an example), OR Harney & Sons’ ‘sub-companies’/collections, like Ambessa (I’ve got a few of those floating around I haven’t changed yet, as I don’t know the right course of action yet).

What, ideally, needs to happen down the line is we need another searchable input field, separate from “Name” and “Company” that is going to be indexed by the search engine. Because as it stands, I’ve found 54 unique “companies” for the Adagio Custom Blends, and that… is just too many. Having another field, as AJ says, could allow for data such as a Blender, Pu factories, or Tea Gardens. Like Yunomi, I notice the actual tea garden/farmer/source is currently is the “Name” field while Yunomi is in the “Company” since the actual “companies” (garden/farmer/co/what have you) in Japan typically don’t make it easy to order directly from them. Yunomi has very good transparency about their sources at least, making this information available, and then you order through them to get to those tea gardens… Likewise, a field like this could be used to add the Wholesaler info on those annoying blends where we get tons of dups of the same Metropolitan Tea Co. tea from 20 different shops. Basically like… In cataloging terms, we have subfield markers for data. Like a title will have a marker for the main title, and a separate marker for a subtitle (for those annoying pretentious non-fiction books). We just need something like that. Another separate field where we can add another piece of data, individual of “Name” or “Company”, that will still be indexed and searched by the search engine.

A librarian can dream…

Yes. I’d love an Advanced Search setup that lets you search by input-field. Source, Factory, Blender, Sub-Company, Tea Type… Even Flavours (since those are ‘static’ as is, I wouldn’t be surprised if those had already been in the works), and Year of Production (specifically useful for puerhs—so tasting notes could be organized by year/climate). Wholesalers, 100% (when they’re known—which at least MTC and Serendipitea are pretty easy to spot).

What would be useful too, is beefing up the Company Pages: 1) images (logos were added to some, I think at the company’s request but isn’t available to everyone). 2) adding duplicate-search-terms that redirect to the ‘correct’ tea, such as David’s Tea to DAVIDsTEA, white 2 tea to White2Tea. It’d have to be heavily monitored because I could see companies taking advantage of it to put variations of their competitor’s names in there to redirect to their page.

Right! Basically (again another librarian term, sorry!) it needs authority files. This is where you can get those “duplicate” search terms to auto-redirect to the right thing, by placing them into the authority file. You could also then link the small tea companies that are known to use certain wholesalers to the wholesaler data, so if someone searches one tea, it could bring up the entries for the other (or vice versa).

And yes, I would love to have ALL those things be searchable! Ingredients as well (another “static” field)…

That sounds like a great solution – but personally I wouldn’t want to lose the ability to search by the blender until that change is (hopefully) made. I do think though that, at the very least, formatting it consistently could be a change made now.

I can understand that. Maybe if we agree to a standard formatting until then (like the ‘ [Duplicate]’ setup), maybe make a list of Adagio blenders so that they can be ‘combined’ at some point in the future?

Adagio Custom Blends [Blender Username] – with a link to their blending page. Technically Adagio calls them ‘Signature Blends’ but Custom does explain what they are a little quicker.

Edit: Another annoying problem I kept meaning to bring up, is that even though you can edit company information, and it even has a field to provide a website link… Nowhere does it display that link, so you have to edit the company just to access the link.

I suspect that link is meant to tie in to that ‘buy this’ button or whatever it’s supposed to say. I’ve rarely seen that button say anything other than ‘not currently available’ even though it’s not true. I’ve never quite understood that button.

Yeah, it was a feature that never got implemented fully… The problem (as I understand it) is it’s all manual. Companies have to opt in and request access to their Company Page (Jason explained the feature briefly once, and they don’t have any real access), and each linked tea is manually changed by an admin.

Another issue I have with Adagio taking over… Those features were implemented to give Companies more control over their presence on Steepster, but with the site no longer being third-party it’s likely most won’t want to go through Adagio for access to their company-info on ’Adagio’s site’.

The only companies that had that ‘link’ were those that, back in the day, had a heavy presence on Steepster: Butiki, Andrew & Dunhams…

(Ugh, trolling through the database for examples, I’m reminded of other desperately needed features: a list of people who gave reviewless ratings, and an overhaul of the algorithm that decides top-rated teas, because 1) some are so OLD 2) some are clearly put there by 1-review-bots).

Seconded and added. White2Tea is the one I use too.