The Chainlink

Please use this thread as a notepad to list ways the Chicago Stolen Bike Registry could be modified/revised to be a more useful to to combating bike theft.


Paul (the tech mastermind) gets sporadic opportunities to work on it and it would be nice to have it all in one place.

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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. 

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. 

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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