When good ideas are implemented very badly indeed

[andrewducker]

The new "Schools" thing is nice - lifting the idea from Friends Reunited and making it an additional way to find new LJ people.

However....Friends Reunited have the manpower and the focus to make sure that the schools are correct, as well as the regions they are in.  LJ, apparently, hasn't.

Witness the list of "Provinces" in the UK.  Or the number of people enrolled at a certain school in Hogsmeade (Cheers to pickwick for that second example).

According to comments on this post in lj_dev there are now 6 different entries for Moscow.

Even the US has problems, with two entries for Texas, and one for Guam.

This seems to be a classic case of people thinking that a problem is easy "Give the users the ability to enter their own data and it'll save us having to get lists of schools ourselves.", but at the same time not giving the users any guidelines as to how the data should be entered.

At this point I'm mostly wondering if LJ is going to pull it until it can be done properly, or just leave it to fester.

Comments

[pickwick.livejournal.com]

Yeah - I noticed when I went to add my school, too, that I could have picked either UK or Scotland from the main list, even before I got down to putting in provinces and things. (But they're not letting me add my school anyway, for some reason.)

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

Indeed. New Zealand's alread a mess , with the top page looking like this...

* no defined state or province
* Akl
* ChCh
* Hawkes Bay
* North Island
* Southland

Two cities, two provinces and an island, with one of the cities and one of the provinces actually being on the island. And the closest school to where I live had its name spelt wrong...

Spelling mistakes and abbreviations are perhaps the biggest problems though, as I can imagine software sorting out the order of things as more data is added.

But they mightn't get much data - have you checked how many on your friend's list have added their schools? Only one had on mine when I looked a couple of days ago...

[flickgc.livejournal.com]

The funny thing is, this has happened before: it's not the frist time they've tried to do the schools thing on LJ....

[azalemeth.livejournal.com]

They should have paid someone to go through with a large list of counties in each country, and spend eons typing them out :P.

I'd like to go to Hogwarts...

[dapperscavenger.livejournal.com]

I looked at this a couple of days ago. I thought that the categorisation of the geography was very crap indeed, but added stirling uni anyway. Mildly disappointed that there are no actual school schools. Then again, not sure I'd want to see any of my old school 'chums' again

[rahaeli.livejournal.com]

We've actually got quite a lot of people working on the problem. :)

(And Hogwarts was a deliberate addition. There are a few other "bonus schools".)

[cx650.livejournal.com]

Whaddya expect? They're 'merkins'.

[andrewducker]

I'll be making my san checks any second now...

[andrewducker]

I'd be interested to know what kind of change is being made - whether it's going to be done much as it is at the moment, only with tidying afterwads, or whether it's going to be more centralised, with people in charge of the school lists.

[rahaeli.livejournal.com]

There's a volunteer team working on cleaning/approving/sanity-checking/merging the schools list even as we speak. :)

[andrewducker]

It really does say a lot about the community effect that LJ has this army of volunteers happy to spend their time checking minutiae to improve the overall experience.

Maybe there should be a tip jar so we could thank them - or would that spoil everything?

[rahaeli.livejournal.com]

The thought is wonderful, but the logistics would be a nightmare. A sincere thank-you in a Support request or in comments to a news post works much better. :)

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't think this is a Planet America problem - more just a case of "We'll sort it out after we get the data in", which I think is what they said when they first started the idea.

And it now looks like they're in the sorting-out phase - see below...

[cx650.livejournal.com]

Like their government's Iraq strategy?

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

LJ works a lot better than US strategy in Iraq...

[cx650.livejournal.com]

LOL!