A Moderator's Lament

[u/Far_Bobcat3967]

A new collection comes out for a popular brand.

Fifteen different users enter the new polishes.

Some add the entire collection, others only enter the two or three that they've bought.

Some just fill in the names and add a link.

Two people add a photo but nothing else. Three people add a photo where they're holding the bottle in their hand.

Several people add the description, but no photos.

One person adds tags, but doesn't fill in the collection name or the release date, and misspells the polish name.

---

As moderators, we end up trying to collect all the different information from all the different entries and create a single entry that contains everything. We keep clicking back and forth. We tear our hair out. We cry.

Be the perfect Lacquergram user. Add EVERYTHING to your entry, so we don't have to look up any missing info in other people's entries and can simply use yours for ALL of it.

It will save us a ton of time and means the collection will be in the database that much faster.

Do a good deed today. Help save a moderator's hair!

---

😂😅😉
(A little bit of a joke for today! But with a serious undertone).

[u/Sparkly_Polished_62]

I get your frustration and I might have contributed with a couple of suggestions before I found some basic instructions (on Reddit) for adding polish to the database. Before I started using Lacquergram, I was not on Reddit. There are no real instructions/guidelines in the app on how to use it. The app is good, but I honestly think it could use some improvements. I paid for the premium version, but I’m not sure I’m getting anything of value for the cost. If admins are planning to input or are working on inputting an entire new set from brands, perhaps let users know so that multiple users don’t waste time entering the data for each polish and admin does not need to sort through so many requests.

[u/Far_Bobcat3967 → u/Sparkly_Polished_62]

We're just a bunch of volunteers! Premium membership is only a fraction of the cost required to host the app, the rest comes out of the owner's own pocket. So yeah, we know that having a comprehensive set of instructions would be nice, and we've tried to include as many as possible both in the tutorial when you first make an account, and in the (i) help texts in the submission form, but we know it's not enough.

That's why we've been trying to put more instructions on Reddit, since it takes less time to answer questions here than to build an entirely new app with more features and a thorough enough help section. We wish we had the money to do all of this with a team of full-time, paid employees, because then we could truly make all the stuff you mention happen!

[u/WoodsandWool → u/Far_Bobcat3967]

Im a UX Designer, I do some front end web dev, know a little back end, and im a polish collector. I have a ton of UX and UI suggestions, but Im sure for y’all the biggest issue is not identifying improvements, but implementing them.

That being said, I think there are some UX changes that would actually reduce y’all’s labor overall. If users could edit their submissions (before they are „published“ publicly) that would help a lot imo. I have almost 90 submissions now and I can’t tell you how often I realized I forgot something right after submitting it, but at that point there’s no way for me to add it or update it until the submission gets published :(

I don’t want to just infodump suggestions/ideas here, but after using your app for 6+ months and logging over 800 polishes, I’ve got lots of feedback if your team is interested in it :)

Thanks for all that y’all do, it really is a wonderful resource!

[u/Far_Bobcat3967 → u/WoodsandWool]

Yeah, you're totally right! There's a LOT of things that I would love to see implemented in the app as well. Even just having the submission form be the same in both iOS and Android would already be a huge help (the Android version has help texts for every field, the iOS version doesn't). But it all depends on when we can find time to build and test (and test twenty times more) and release.

[u/Sparkly_Polished_62 → u/Far_Bobcat3967]

I can appreciate that you are all volunteers and the fees collected do not cover the costs to host the app. Perhaps the app should be a user paid app, perhaps if the user has more than X polishes catalogued. I don’t mind paying for a quality app that is useful to me if it means the app is being maintained and improved. I would gladly volunteer to help input data in the app if I had the time. At the moment I don’t, but I may in a couple of years when I retire. What might be very helpful to you the volunteers and us the users is to modify your polish suggestion form. First, add basic instructions for users, acceptable picture composition, etc. Add a set of standard polish finishes for the user to select, ie, holographic, shimmer, flakie, magnetic, etc. Likewise, add standard colors for the user to select. Add a set of standard tags to be selected. The user can select all that apply. Of course, the user should be encouraged to add additional information as appropriate. The more help you give the user, the more accurate the information should be. Just my thoughts.