Forum:
1. I'd like a user-driven way to hide objectional content (racism/spam/etc) that people can see. "Report post" doesn't really get it done.
2. One of the unwieldy things about interacting with people here is that a single thread can have multiple conversations spread out over multiple pages, which makes it difficult to follow up without derailing another conversation. I know there probably isn't a way to deal with that without fundamentally changing the website, just something to think about. The latest "Quote Post" layout is pretty nice and helps with that.
Main Page:
I like the clutter
Shoe Site:
1. The Shoe Finder is a bit broken. If I first search for "Pronation Control: Neutral" and "Shoe Drop Height: 9 to 10 mm" then I only get one return (Brooks Launch 4). If I then add "Pegasus" to the search bar ("Find in Results"), then it returns two Pegasus models. Where were those shoes in the first case, and what else was I missing there? If I just search for Neutral shoes (no shoe drop info added), I only get 4 results, and none of them are Pegasus.
2. In the shoe finder I don't see a "Shoe Type" category for normal trainers. Current categories are "Lightweight", "Racing Flat", "Spike", "Minimalist", "Maximalist", "Trail". The Pegasus line for example is popular and shows up as Neutral, but if I search Neutral I think I get all of the above.
3. I want a feature that allows me to figure out which shoe is closest in terms of fit and feel to another shoe. So I input one shoe, the website returns a list of recommendations and similarity scores of other shoes, then lets me compare them.
Why? Because the biggest problem I think we all have with shoes is that they change the models every few years. I'm running in my last pair of Pegasus 30's, and they're currently selling Pegasus 35's or something, and they've completely changed the cushioning in between. What I would like is a way to know which of the shoes that are currently on the market are closest in terms of fit and feel to the Pegasus 30's.
So there are two things I'd like to see:
A. Search by similarity according to the attributes in the "shoe filters" column. I select a shoe I like (Pegasus 30, say), I select the attributes I care about (Pronation/Type/Drop/Heel Width/Midfoot Volume/etc.), maybe I tell you how much I care about them (so you can add some weighting to the regression or whatever) and the website returns a list of other shoes that have similar attributes -- and if you do it right, you should be returning matches where maybe not all of them will be identical, but the differences will be highlighted. This will help me look for shoes that are at least superficially similar to the ones I currently own.
B. Search by similarity according to user feedback. Maybe two shoes have all of the same attributes in the list but some small tweak makes them feel completely different -- the Pegasus 30 and 35 might be a good example, the cushioning is different and the shoes feel completely different to me, but they're probably going to have the same attributes under the search filter. There ought to be a user-generated way to rank shoes by similarity. One possibility is to ask people what their current shoe is, what their previous shoe was and how it compares. Another might be to ask them to list all of the shoes they've worn, then ask them to rank the similarity between pairs (like if you have shoes A, B, C, D, which of B, C, D are closest to A?). You might have to think carefully about the ranking system and maybe do some machine learning stuff to avoid blindly following the closest nodes on the tree. Like if A-D are more similar than A-C, it might be a problem if A-B-C is a common upgrade path and A-B and B-C are more similar than A-D.