more fuel up options

[slineaudi]

I love this site!
I was wondering what everyone else thought about having more pre-defined slections on the fuel up screen. For example, the option to select what brand of gas you bought or if you used an additive or if you have have a stock engine and so on... I know you could do this in the comments, but if it was in a drop down box it would be easy to compare between uers. That way I could see if the band of gas I buy is really affecting my MPG (compared to others).

[pb]

I can see how having a few pre-defined options would be convenient, but these kinds of features don't scale very well. I personally probably interact with a dozen different gas stations, and maybe a dozen different additives or whatever. That's very manageable. But we need to think about everyone that will use Fuelly across the globe. Then we're suddenly managing *every* gas station brand and *every* additive brand and it becomes our job to track those and present them to the user. And do we put them all in a single list? Choosing from a dozen or so is easy, but choosing from hundreds is a pain.

One option is to let the user build their own pre-defined list of options. I believe only a few power-users would take advantage of that, so that means complicating the interface in some way for what I think would be a rarely-used feature.

I understand your point about more metrics for comparison, but I'm not sure you'd find much meaningful difference between fuel-ups marked "Texaco" vs. "Shell" for example, because of the way we gather data. You fuel-up at Shell, and Fuelly is calculating the MPG for gas you burned from Texaco. I think Fuelly is better at giving you a sense of the big picture.

[korova]

I'm new but I plan on using the tag section to keep track of gas stations.

How about being able to search by tag? Then people could just search for tag 'chevron' and anyone tagging their gas stations will show up?

If the tags show up in the exported data (haven't checked) then you could easily sort your fuelups by tag too or graph it or whatever.

[slineaudi]

hmmm great points! haha. I'll stick to using the comments for my own comparisons! I think I have been notcing a change in my cars performance between brands. I'm going to research this more using fuelly.

[pb]

Good point, korova, we'll think about opening up tags across users. That could be interesting. And yeah, tags show up in exports so you could do your own graphing by tag with Excel or some other program.