pb's Forum Comments
Showing comments 61-90 of 1312 by pb.
A couple of suggestions involving forum signature bars
Great suggestions. One issue that comes to mind is using other forum logos and things. We'd need to talk to each forum owner individually and get their permission. They might not want their brand attached to an outside service. That makes it look like a partnership/endorsement. So we'd definitely need to set up that partnership/endorsement behind the scenes.
And we can think about adding signatures here. The vast majority of activity in the Fuelly forum is talk about Fuelly itself. So there's not as much incentive to show your personal fuel economy, because there's not as much personal talk going on. Or even fuel economy talk. There is a bit, so that's something we can think about. But as you mention, the design here is pretty sparse and adding more weight might detract from the discussions themselves. I think signatures are right for some environments—I'm not positive they are for this one.
posted by pb April 3 at 11:13 AM
Drivetrain missing & necessary
Yes, we have discussed this quite a bit. The general idea of requiring people to enter more details about their vehicle is something we think about quite a bit. As we've said before, we definitely will add manual vs. automatic. That is on the way.
Beyond that, we're comfortable with the details we ask for right now. We ask for fuel type, engine type, body style, and soon auto vs. manual transmission. There are potentially dozens of other attributes that can affect fuel economy that we could track. Drivetrain is one. Engine displacement is another. People have different ideas about what the bare minimum is. Some feel you need to ask for all of these and more. We feel like we don't want to alienate people by asking for too many details.
We'd rather see more data with fewer details, partly because we feel like having more people tracking means more people thinking about their fuel economy. Some people choose to include these details in their vehicle description, and that's great. We encourage people to do that, but we don't make it a requirement.
Here's the FAQ on this topic: Why don't you track more vehicle details?
posted by pb April 3 at 9:44 AM
For SMS, do I use trip or odometer?
You might have missed it in the FAQ. It says, "If you're using odometer tracking, swap out odometer for miles." So just use your odometer reading when you send the SMS.
posted by pb March 31 at 7:35 PM
Difficult w/ Fuelly & Blackberry
We haven't changed anything on the Fuelly Mobile site (m.fuelly.com) for quite a while. So I'm not sure what could have changed between the time it was great/easy and now. Maybe a Blackberry software update changed how things work for you?
You said you've already tried Basic at Fuelly Mobile, but you might try that again. We have that version specifically for people who are having trouble with the standard mobile site. When you click "Basic" at Fuelly Mobile, it sets a cookie that tells the mobile site you don't want any formatting whatsoever. It doesn't look pretty, but it should work—even for older phones.
posted by pb March 30 at 4:35 PM
Signature pic not adopting uplaoded photo
Sorry about the delay. We cache those signatures because they're requested a lot. If we had to create them on every request our server would grind to a halt. So yeah, once in a while it might take some time for a signature to update.
The best way to get a signature to update right away is to add a new fuel-up—even if you're just adding a test fuel-up it should update the signature fairly quickly.
posted by pb March 29 at 5:02 PM
Adding fill ups
Jonesyt23, you might take a look at the 2nd video on this page. That might help explain a bit more how Fuelly works.
Whenever you fuel-up, note the details and add it to Fuelly at that time. One trip to the pump = one entry at Fuelly. If you don't have a tripometer or odometer reading, then you'll have to wait until the next time around when you do.
posted by pb March 29 at 8:19 AM
Add to signature page
There's an outline of the process here: How do I use a Fuelly forum signature/badge?
Go to your vehicle page and look for that badge icon under your log book. Then copy either the HTML or BBCode. You'll need to find out which you need at the forum you use.
posted by pb March 28 at 9:56 AM
Canadian SMS
Many thanks, works very well.
Yay! Thanks again!
...maybe you could format the page to have a 0 outside the box when we select UK...
Yeah, that's a good idea. We ask people to select their country when they sign up. So by the time someone visits the preferences page to enter their phone number to set up SMS we should know their country and can add that hint.
posted by pb March 27 at 10:13 AM
Thanks for the extra info MMUK. Would it be weird to ask UK folks to drop the leading zero from their number when they enter it here at Fuelly?
posted by pb March 27 at 8:43 AM
Not sure how my number would be presented to you, a possibility this could be a problem?
Yep, that's the problem. Checking the error logs I'm seeing that Twilio is sending me a "from" number that is longer than we expect. (It includes the +44.)
I just added a rule for UK numbers so I think we should be set to accept them now.
Are you able to check activity logs to see if my msgs have actually reached you?
Yes, I see your message hit Twilio so that part is working. (Also noticed that your message is slightly off. It should be MPG: [miles/km] [price] [gallons/litres]. Looks like you have fuel volume and price switched around.)
Thanks again for testing this out and helping us get this running. I appreciate it.
posted by pb March 27 at 8:30 AM
Thanks for trying it. Did you use +44 before the number? The full UK number as Twilio lists it +44 20 3322 2674. I assumed the +44 was just like the US +1. (You only need the +1 when you're making a long-distance call from a land line, and mobile phones never need it.) Maybe it's completely different in the UK and that +44 is required. I don't know.
posted by pb March 26 at 12:55 PM
Great, thanks for the confirmation that it's working.
posted by pb March 26 at 8:54 AM
turbo motor option
Thanks for the suggestion. As you noted we're not tracking turbo at this time and we don't currently plan to. (Here's the FAQ on this: Why don't you track more vehicle details?) But we're constantly thinking about these things and we appreciate the feedback. As always folks are welcome to include this information in the vehicle name or description—it's a big help to others who want to see more details.
posted by pb March 26 at 8:45 AM
Cost/km calculation error:
Maybe we're talking about two different "banners". Can you add a link or URL to a page that has the banner with the incorrect information?
posted by pb March 26 at 8:37 AM
Taptalk
Google to the rescue! Taptalk.
I took a quick look at the requirements. The forum here is custom code and the work involved with integrating with the Taptalk system is more than we want to take on. This isn't a very high traffic forum, and it's almost completely devoted to site bugs and feature requests.
If we get to a point where there's a lot more activity on the fuel talk side, or if we end up doing more with discussion forums we can revisit. But for the now the work involved wouldn't be worth the potential payoff. We have a long list of things we want to add to the site as it is and we'd rather put our time into developing the core Fuelly features.
posted by pb March 25 at 8:10 PM
What is Taptalk? Can you describe what it is?
posted by pb March 25 at 7:59 PM
iPhone/Andoid App
Yeah, I can see that an offline mode would be good if you're going in and out of cell range.
SMS might work for you in those situations right now. You can send the message out of cell range it should send automatically once you're back in range.
posted by pb March 25 at 7:28 PM
Electricity (kWh) Fuel Consumption and MPGe
I've tried my best to be clear, ryogajyc and I feel like I've been very patient explaining our side of things. We're not going to see eye to eye. We've had a good discussion here hashing out some of the issues.
We're going to take our time with this, and we might not add kWh tracking. Fuelly is a free service that we run on the side because we believe people should think about their fuel usage. We can't be all things fuel economy to all people. Some folks are going to disagree with how we do things—some are going to want more features than we offer. We're ok with that.
posted by pb March 24 at 10:52 PM
Partial Fuel-up Calculations Improvements
I think we'll have to agree to disagree on the simplicity and the difficulty of explaining things. There's definitely more than one way to track fuel economy. We'll give this idea some thought. Sometimes changes can be worth overcoming the obstacles to implementing them.
posted by pb March 24 at 10:41 PM
Fuelly is based on the simple idea of one trip to the pump = one fuel-up. Once we start combining fuel-ups and assigning an average across multiple fuel-ups we start to lose that simplicity and it becomes harder to explain. I understand what you're saying here, and I understand the frustration with not seeing a fuel economy number every time. But we'd rather err on the side of keeping things simple.
posted by pb March 24 at 2:28 PM
Oh, and just to be clear, you mention in your post that "This discards fuel-up MPG..." and I just want to note that partials do contribute to your overall average fuel economy. For your overall average Fuelly calculates your total fuel volume filled and total distance driven. So even though you don't get individual MPGs for the fuel-ups around a partial, they do contribute to your overall average.
posted by pb March 24 at 7:09 AM
We can't really do that because Fuelly's individual MPG calculations are based on the difference from full. Partials are not a full tank, and if you combine them with another tank, the size of full changes. So the individual mileage calculation would be off.
We know it's frustrating to not get an individual fuel economy number when you add a partial, but we don't want to provide misleading numbers. And combing full and partials would be misleading because the size of the calculated full tank would be too big. There's more info in this FAQ: Why do I have to fill the tank all the way up every time I buy fuel?
posted by pb March 24 at 7:03 AM
iPhone/Andoid App
We know people want it, but it's not something we're going to do. You can read some of the previous threads for our reasoning.
Once we release our API we're betting some existing mileage-tracking apps will include a "send to Fuelly" option. We also provide Fuelly Mobile and fuel-ups via SMS as mentioned.
posted by pb March 22 at 9:25 PM
...have you tried that? Yuck!
Absolutely. We want the Full Site to work on Android phones and we think it looks pretty good. Everyone is going to have different preferences for things, but was the site not working for you on your phone? If there's a problem we'd like to fix it up.
Let us know what version of Android you have, and which browser you're using and we'll take a look.
posted by pb March 22 at 2:54 PM
Add Gal / 100 mi (in both US and UK) as a display unit option
We offer that in the mini-stats section of vehicle profile pages so you can add it there if you want. There aren't a large number of people using Gallons/100 miles to compare performance like there are with the other options. So until it becomes more of a standard that people want to use we're fine with offering it on vehicle pages for members, but not across the entire site.
posted by pb March 21 at 8:50 AM
iPhone/Andoid App
First, try out Fuelly Mobile at m.fuelly.com. It's our fuel-up site optimized for phones. You can also add a fuel-up via SMS on your phone.
We don't have plans for a native app for any platform. But we're working on an API that will allow other mileage-tracking app-makers to send fuel-ups to Fuelly as well.
You can read some recent past discussion of this for more of our thinking on native apps here and here and many more here.
posted by pb March 21 at 8:20 AM
Suggested improvement to distribution graphic
It's probably time to treat the motorcycle section of the site like we do the car section where we only show vehicles with three or more fuel-ups in public browsing.
You're right that vehicles with only one or two fuel-ups are frequently either way too high or too low. But once a vehicle has three recorded fuel-ups things start to even out.
Our motorcycle section has typically had much fewer users, so taking things down to just bikes with three or more fuel-ups would have killed public browsing. But we're probably to the point where it makes sense to do that.
posted by pb March 19 at 9:54 PM
Canadian SMS
ok, we have a Canadian number ready for testing: 604-757-2674. (Those last four digits are 2MPG which might help you remember if you like MPG better than L/100km. Setting a Fuelly contact in your phone is probably the best way to remember though.)
We haven't tried this out because we're not in Canada. If you're in Canada and you'd like to test this, enter you phone number into your profile here and then take a look at our SMS format. Let us know if it doesn't work.
We also got a UK number: 20 3322 2674. We haven't tried that one either, so if you're in the UK and would like to try it, give it a shot.
And I have to throw out this warning (!): you'll be charged whatever your carrier charges for text messages. So just be aware that you might be paying for a few texts that don't work if you test this out right now.
posted by pb March 19 at 4:02 PM
That's something we can look into. We use a service called Twilio to handle SMS messages, and when we set it up they were US-only. They offer numbers in other countries now so we can take a look and see if it's cost-prohibitive.
posted by pb March 19 at 11:29 AM
Odo in miles - all other metric
Keep in mind that there are two types of units you need to set at Fuelly. Viewing units and reporting units. You set viewing units by clicking US, UK, L/100km, or km/L under the Fuelly logo on the left side of the page. That will change how you see units as you're browsing vehicles.
You set reporting units when you create a vehicle at Fuelly. In your case you can set that you want to report in miles when you create your vehicle. So you'll want to edit your vehicle and look for the reporting units section. Find Track distance in... and set it to miles instead of kilometers. Then you should be set.
posted by pb March 19 at 8:24 AM