Which new features do you want the most?

We’ll add that to our list. It’d be especially great to have the shopping list teas grouped by company to make it easier to order all at once.

Exactly!

I can only assume that Steepster users would have such amazing teas in their cupboards that anyone would want to purchase them all. That’s why I think we should add a “purchase all teas in cupboard” button and just make it easier for everyone ;) (jk, don’t look for that anytime soon)

Speaking of updates for Cupboards, I wish there was a way to mark a tea you see on someone else’s Cupboard as ‘log this!’ for when you’re curious about a tea and you want to encourage your friends to chat it up. But I am thrilled with the Cupboard addition – this is what I was using my Shopping List for! X-D

Interesting idea…we’ll take a look at that and see where we can fit it in. Thanks!

I’d also like to be able to “sort” my cupboard – specifically by tea type and/or company name. I also like Suzi’s idea above logging (or “bookmarking”) a tea that you are interested in and want to try or read more about.

@Teaspoon, that’s similar to my “request” button next to teas in a person’s cupboard, but I don’t think the teaspoon idea will work literally. Most cups of white tea take much more than that. I’d only get about a 2oz cup out of a teaspoon.

An iPhone application would be cool. I have my iPhone around me a lot more than my notebook.

I second @ge0ff73’s request for an iPhone app! I’d love to be able to rate teas and add tasting notes on the go! Other than that, keep up the great work here. I really feel like this is a productive place to be every time I log in, and that’s saying a lot amidst all the other social networks out there! ;P

Heated seats and a sunroof

i think it would be great to have a log of what teas you are drinking – instead of adding a tasting note every time i drink the same tea…almost like a last.fm i’ve listened to an artist 5 times this week. i’ve had 5 cups of genmaicha this day/week/month etc.

@Britt Wight- then just click “save” w/o adding anything to the tasting note. Although this line is gettng particularly confusing since most have nothing to do w/ Auggy’s suggestion.

You “like” it by pressing the word “like”. The heart is read if you’ve already “liked” the tasting note.

To expand on Susan’s post, a how to guide or help section for common commands would be much appreciated by newbies.

If you are going to include sorting by tea company name, then some clean-up of tea company names is needed. For example: “The Boston Tea Co.” vs “Boston Tea Co.” and “The English Tea Store” vs “English Tea Store”.

@Little Yellow Teapot. Just PM Jason w/ the companies that need to be merged and he will do it.

Hi, @Cofftea, I sent them a couple of samples to spur them to do a check thru the database, but I think they stopped with the 2 that I sent. This is their site and they need to keep it up properly, not put it on us. It only took a couple of minutes to find those 2. Pretty obvious.

Jason, Mike, and Jack shouldn’t be bribed. They can’t do everything and they can’t know something needs to be fixed if no one brings it to their attention. This is the steepster community. If you think it’s so important then send them a PM volunteering your services.

A tea blog would be cool. I am into flavored teas and there are a lot of blends I would like to see. I would also like to talk about my favorite herbs and spices.

@cofftea: I think LYT meant they sent us samples (examples) of companies that needed to be merged, not tea samplers :)

LOL (cracking up at my stupidity) Duh. See how much tea consumes my thoughts? Sorry LYT=D

It’d be great if a specific tea we’re given a cumulative score based on the ratings from all the shops that offer it. For instance, Pi Lo Chun would have one overall rating for the tea itself, but it’s derived from the scores for all the tea shops. It’d be way easier to find new teas without seeing the same one 30 different times, and less confusing for people who are trying to expand their tastes in tea.

Is there a way to continually update/ change a previously reviewed tea, so that you can just add or change the same tea reviewed, over time. Then you could have one Big tea review for the same tea, or have the Option to start another review of the same tea if you want to, say for a new lot of the same tea-from the same company-should the tea be a better or lesser quality?

Well, I’m not sure why anyone would want to, but you can edit an existing note at any time. Just click “tea log”, go to the tasting note that you want to edit, click “edit”, make changes, and click, save changes." You can also write a new tasting note by clicking on the name of the tea and clicking “add tasting note”. The only thing you can not do; however, is assign more than one numerical rating for a certain tea. This has been suggested many times and is one of my biggest pet peeves w/ Steepster.

I’m sure this has probably been said, but I just joined up. On the home page on the right hand side, the list of tea types with the check boxes — is there a way to de-select all? I usually only want to look up just the black and green teas, and it takes several minutes to unclick all those check boxes. Thanks!

I’ll second that one!

I hope I’m not being repetitive (in case it was mentioned before), but will there will be an iPhone or Droid app to steepster? I think that would be EPIC!

Would like to post Ingredient of True chai or simply Masala chai being an Indian, I have travelled half of the world and never had the same Chai we drink in India. How I can post it if there is no wall like in facebook.

A section for teas I had in the past.
A list of companies that have some sort of single portion sample service. Photoalbum for our teacups , teapots etc

This may have been suggested but a way to export the tea log to an excel spreadsheet and to download our tasting notes into a file.

I would LOVE to see a mobile app for smartphones so that all of this information would be available on on the go in an easy to use platform. Had a wonderful matcha the other day and had to make notes on it in my phones “notebook”, then transfer it into Steepster when I got home later.

Oh what fun it is to ride in a one horse open sleigh for an oolong time

I am a new tea connoisseur and I would love to see and educational section on Steepster including:
- a dictionary for tea terminology,
- an index of tea categories explaining the history and characteristics of the different categories of tea,
- an index of common tea ingredients explaining what type of plant they come from, the taste profile of that ingredient.
- How to section teaching newbies some basic theory on traditional, popular as well as newer techniques for steeping tea.

An iphone app that rates teas and notes so when I’m in the store and see something new, I can tell if it’s worth bothering without logging in and search the website.

An easy way to log the teas I drink that show up in the cupboard. I’m probably not going to write about a tea every time I drink it but it is an entertaining thing to know what I’m loving.

Ditto! Also, maybe an e-mail notifications on when we get comments, that way we don’t have to check back to see if someone said something awesome. Like that little box under this box that I just noticed.

Haha, those little boxes can be hard to spot. Personal messages are on the list and coming soon!

Awesome and yay!

Hooray! Personal Messaging was my biggest request, too :D

DITTO!

Maybe bulletin boards for ISO and haves for teas and one for books. A book swap would be cool!

TeaSwapping would be great on a small scale, a medium scale, and a large scale.

Yes to tea swapping! I swap now on swap-bot but would love to do it on steepster so that I could read the recipient’s reviews afterwards!

swap-bot???

http://swap-bot.com/ is for swapping all kinds of stuff (esp. handmade crafts and postcards). Some people swap tea – mainly pre-packaged teabags since it is cheap and easy to mail a few in an envelope, even internationally. I think steepster would be a great site to use for swaps since you can easily see what types of teas a member likes, what they already have, etc. Plus it would be a more appropriate venue for exchanging loose tea too. I would love to be able to mark some of my cupboard teas as “willing to share” or “willing to swap” and then negotiate a trade and share addresses privately on Steepster.

I love it! By each tea in the cupboard there could be two buttons to click, “TAKE PLEASE!” and “request”.

Yes to swapping, and being able to mark a tea from someone else’s review!

yea it would be great if you could mark up the teas in your cupboard that you wanna swap and then people could request them

I would love to swap since here in Mexico the best variety of teas is from Teavana.

Yeah! something like markdown.

+1 to basic HTML!

+1

BB code is easier to use than HTML, that might work too

HTML is on the list and hopefully coming soon!

Second the discussion board search feature, and the forum and sub-forum organization principles. At present, I choose not to contribute much to the discussions, because my usually-careful writing is just scattered and lost in the shuffle. Kudos for all you’ve done and the exacting, staged way you are implementing things! Very few bugs and very little system down time, considering the number of features being added. Being a career computer systems person, believe me, I know good work when I see it. Just keep on being measured and methodical, as you have, and don’t be swayed by arguments for adding stuff before it’s proper time. It’s hard to do, but you’ve been doing it. I’m 65 yrs old and so bleeping envious …..

Hey folks, I found one of the types available this afternoon by accident. I usually use asterisks to denote an exhalation of sometype (e.g., a sigh) but when I put ‘asterisk sigh asterisk’ in a comment this afternoon, it translated into bold such as sigh.
If this is BB coding as opposed to HTML, I’d appreciate it if Jason or one of the Steepster set-up folks would list them for us when we prepare to post a Reply.

‘asterisk test asterisk’

Markdown Markdown Markdown!

Really good thoughts. I like! These are things we’ve considered and may do in the future, but I also just wanted to expose some of our reasoning on the different features.

Discussing multiple teas in a single tasting is something we haven’t done because we’ve found that focusing on describing a single tea experience helps keep things organized. But this is something that does happen and we’ll keep in mind for the future, we’ll have to think about that one a little more and come up with a good UI for it.

We have considered allowing ratings for tasting notes to help direct people to the best ones for a specific tea. There’s some considerable work involved and we didn’t want it to be too overwhelming for users at the beginning. We added the “likes” to help raise the best tasting notes to the top, but more detailed ratings could help that even more. Plus, most of the tasting notes on the site were added before the “like” functionality was available.

For the “umbrellas” for major tea types, I think this brand new discussion board might be the perfect place for those. There could be a topic for each major type where people talk about all the things you mention. Plus, once we have those filled out, we could even link those onto the the tea pages for each type of that tea. Thanks for the suggestions.

As for the message board thing for the umbrella-ing, I think that could work rather well. I think it would work well if there were sub-forums in the forums (like, a topic for “Green Tea”, and inside of that, a topic for “Gunpowder”), so the conversations can be kept kind of organized. Regardless of what happens, though, the forums open a lot of doors for expanding and sharing tea knowledge.

Also, another small suggestion – kinda dorky.
Maybe a forum for tea literature. That would be prose, poetry, journalistic articles, how-to articles, historic writings…
I know I have a few articles on tea I’ve written, and… as lame as it, some poetry about tea.

Re: Tasting Note Ratings

I’m sure most of you are familiar with Yelp, but I love their Useful, Funny, Cool rating system. Succinct and all-encompassing. Perhaps something similar would work nicely on here.

I think there should be a way to incorporate several teas into a tasting – as when a person blends teas, or they have multiple teas in a sitting, and want to talk about how they balance/compare.

SECOND!

Second the sub forums!

We’re already looking into the best ways to help organize the discussions using things like sub forums and search and will be ironing out the details soon.

We’re also looking at different ways to help draw attention to the best and most recent tasting notes. Thanks!

I have to agree with the desire for multiple teas in a testing, maybe flagged as “blend” and with a spot to list other teas so that one can update once but find similar blends without searching for every tea used. Finding good blends has been one of the main reasons I use Steepster, and it’d be great to have that versatility.

Thanks :)

Re: Sean’s comment… Maybe have a “blended with” field where we can add teas and herbs. If it’s already listed on steepster the name could be a link right to that tea’s profile, but if it isn’t we’d have to enter it 1st.

Well I was tempted to do a “First Post, LOL!” but I figured your guys would lynch me if I did. XD

I was thinking of just a generic “List your favorite teas!” one, but since I’m relatively new, I figured I’d give it to one of the oldies-but-goodies on the site.

Done!
So, uh, where’s my Reward? Trophy? Honorable mention? Horde of screaming, tea-drinking fangirls?

Reward…um…gonna have to get back to you on that…
Endless gratitude and adoration?

I second these ideas (or is this a third by now?)

ditto

I agree about the duplicates. The Metropolitan Tea Company is a wholesale distributor where the original names they give different teas and blends of teas carry over to to the individual retailers and retail companies that sell the tea such as The Tea Table etc. It’s easier to spot when a retailer uses the same name such as Queen Mary, Lady Londonderry, Windsor Castle etc., and much harder to spot when the name is something even more general like Cherry, Earl Grey, etc. What does everyone think about this?

Flagging spam/duplicate teas and companies is on the list. Good suggestion.

I agree with this. Or maybe some kind of filter system where you can first check reviews and then all the other stuff afterwards.

After playing with the ‘new’ dashboard yesterday and today I want to add to this request for some sort of filtering device. As much as I love reading reviews, the notifications for Cupboard additions/Shopping List/Discussion Notes are getting really overwhelming really fast!

We’re already working on better organization for the dashboard. With all of the new activity we’ve been tracking, we know it can be overwhelming and we want to make it easier to consume. Should be out soon!

This is something we’re looking to incorporate into the new dashboard designs. So you know when people have interacted with (commented, left a new reply, etc.) on content you’ve already interacted with.