New features: Reply to comments, Quick search your base by notes

October 30, 2017

Reply to comments

Here at ScentBase, we've all had the ability to comment about our scents for a long time. But conversation has been stunted, to say the least, because we've never had a way to reply directly to another user's comment.

Now you can! Just click the reply link on any comment, and type your comment as you normally would. You'll see your comment threaded beneath the one you replied to, so it's clear who you're responding to.

If someone replies to your comment, you'll receive a notification by email by default. (Don't worry; you can turn this feature off in your account preferences if you'd prefer to only be notified about replies when you log in to ScentBase.)

Quick search by note

ScentBase user Leeanne contacted me last week to let me know about a problem with our recent updates: one thing she liked about the old site was the way that searching showed both general search results and results from your Base. Specifically, she likes to search the scents in her Base by note. The new website wasn't giving her a way to do that.

So I made it happen. It's not a big change that you can see, but now if you use the Quick search feature to filter through scents in your Base, Stash, Wishes, or Swaps, you can just type (for example) "vanilla" to get a list of those scents with vanilla listed as a note.

I should point out that this isn't perfect yet. The new notes field (where you type each note, separated by commas, separately from the complete description) is still a work in progress. We have almost 17,000 scents in the database at this time, so getting notes into that field for all the old scents had to be done with a script, and it was a bit hit and miss. For example, if a description lists "Indonesian musk" as a note, what the script added as a note would be "musk," because it was impossible to account for all the possible variations. (You can help improve this by submitting suggested edits anytime you see any of these that are missing notes or partial notes.)

Imperfect data aside, it's so great to have input about the ways you guys are actually using the website. Thank you so much, Leeanne, for reaching out!