Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Thunder Snow on August 10, 2012 at 3:41am

Yesterday, I spotted a mapping error, which Kevin quickly fixed.  An address that was clearly in Wicker Park showed up on the Google Map as being in the center of the Loop, the result of the theft victim adding "the Wood Street side" in the address field.  I'm suggesting we structure the address fields tighter to prevent this, possibly providing a text box for helpful comments like "the Wood Street side" that could be read by humans but ignored by Google.  Pull down fields for block numbers (100, 1200, 5200, etc.) plus pull down fields for direction (N, S, E or W) and pull downs for street names (so you always get "Wood Street" and never "Wode Street").  The complexity arises, of course, if you deal with suburban thefts as well, where a different street database would have to load as soon as you provide a town name or zip code, so this is perhaps not practical.

The ability to filter map results into user configurable reports would be good.  We might like to see all the thefts in our ward for the alderman to see, or a specific police beat for a CAPS meeting.  We might like to see the monthly trend over a year in one area or be able to see just where angle grinders are cutting U-Locks this week.  Right now, thefts in close geographical proximity, but spread out over many years, just clutter the results without being useful.

It might be useful to be more specific with lock brands and models, to see if a particular Kryptonite or Abus is being regularly defeated.  This would be a problem if we were sponsored/funded by a lock company who wouldn't want to be called out on a defective lock, but I don't think we are funded.  (Have we tried to get them to spring for bucks?  A stolen bike registry would seem to be a natural charity for Abus or Masterlock I should think.  Kryptonite's already hooked up with a national registry.)

These comments relate only to mapping and theft trend-seeking.  The more important changes, to quickly match up a suspect bike that shows up at a swap meet or bike shop, are more important and have been suggested by others, above.

Just my two cents.

Permalink Reply by Justin B Newman on September 9, 2012 at 10:15am

I would be interested in knowing how folks use (or would like to use) the Registry. Do you find yourself paging through the listings? Looking at the calendar? Using search? We've gotten pretty good feedback re: mapping and searching, but not much about browsing.

I'm aware there's a desire for mobile friendly, and perhaps printer friendly (Swap-o-Rama "cheat sheet").

Other thoughts about the "user experience"?

Permalink Reply by Far'arned Retrogrumpalunkus #63 on September 9, 2012 at 11:17am

I would like to quickly and easily search a bike I"m thinking of buying (say on CL) for brand/model/color and quickly come up with a GO/NO-GO on whether it is stolen or is likely to be a match requiring further research.   Searching by Serial Number at that poit would be nice too.

Being able to do all this at point-of-sale would be a huge bonus so a mobile interface would be ultra-special. 

Permalink Reply by Justin B Newman on September 10, 2012 at 2:31am

Currently, brand and model searches work quite well. Color is probably the biggest challenge, because it's currently a "user entered" field, which allows someone to enter "pink & black" rather than having to pick just pink or blank. The down side is that you get things like "pink, blk, wht". Which isn't much help. 

That said...

Here's a draft, built to attempt to respond to your request: 

http://chicago.stolenbike.org/bike-search-working

Does this do what you're asking? (Note this is just a draft; the URL will change if it's brought into production). 

-jbn

James BlackHeron said:

I would like to quickly and easily search a bike I"m thinking of buying (say on CL) for brand/model/color and quickly come up with a GO/NO-GO on whether it is stolen or is likely to be a match requiring further research.   Searching by Serial Number at that poit would be nice too.

Being able to do all this at point-of-sale would be a huge bonus so a mobile interface would be ultra-special. 

Permalink Reply by Far'arned Retrogrumpalunkus #63 on September 10, 2012 at 3:08am

It seems to be a little more user-friendly than the last time I tried searching.

If I enter "Jamis Beatnik"  I get 15 results to go through one-by-one.     I can see that color is pretty difficult as it dependent not only on the user's entry, but spelling or combinations as well.  Having the color right next to the search results makes them much easier to go through though.  

One of the 15 results for "Jamis Beatnik" is a 2008 Trek 1000 which happens to have a note in the listing that "My Jamis Beatnik was stolen at the same time."     I can imagine that the number of spurious results that create more hits would go up as other, more common, search terms are used.

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