Member Recommendations -- Flag duplicateations by a user

I know it's easy to hit the button twice for Member Recommendations and end up with the same book recommended by the same user on the same date for any given work. Too easy, even. For my smallish library, 125 books show up under user-recommendations -- five of these are duplicates (that is, two identical lines beginning with "Recommended by"), one more is a triplicate, the most recent one is... a pentaplicate? In any case, this is something that might be fixed with a special flag for such duplications, perhaps with a "hide" for all but one "copy", along the lines of hiding Talk posts with at least a certain number of flags.

Quintuplicate.

Oh, perhaps a way to get rid of the two recommendations for Mass Historia from the same user for America: The Book from the same user?

Perfectly fine recommendation, but no need to have it on twice...

It would seem reasonable for LT to disallow the same user from making the same recommendation between two books more than once.

Are you sure it's error and not recommendation-spam?

>5 lorax:

You mean for America: The Book? Well, considering he was a contributor for America the Book, I think it's a legitimate recommendation, even if he is recommending it himself. I don't think we told LT authors they couldn't recommend their own book and he only appears to have recommended it on this book.

I know we're hyper-sensitive to spam and all, but I don't even think this is close to spam - if it were on every humor book or every piece of Daily Show/Colbert Report book-related material out there, maybe...and that's a big maybe depending on his level of involvement with the original works.

Either way, I think it's pretty clear he ment to recommend it once and it went through twice.

Actually when you try to recommend things it tells you authors can't make recommendations involving their own books. I would have liked to do so, connecting my books to some of my favorites which inspired them, but haven't for this reason.

>7 gwernin: To be honest, I think the policy should be a "we know it when we'll see it" kind of thing.

There was the Art of War guy. He was annoying and would have put his book on anything Sun-Tzu related he could have suggested. And that was annoying - because it was clear he probably hadn't read half the material. He was just another in a long line of folks hoping to cash in on the cyclical interest of "ooh, I'll put another spin on the book and make some quick cash" folks. (Okay, he spammed my profile as well - so he was way too obvious.)

Then again, I don't make the rules. I just know it didn't really bother me that he'd made the recommendation.

AAAAND back on track...

We do need a way to get rid of the duplicates - I did see what AnnaClaire was talking about - the Harry Potter recommendation is not only silly (one HP book for another), but the fact that there are 5 of the same book from one user is annoying...

7>

I just checked, and it says nothing about authors making a recommendation ON their own book, just about making one FOR their own book. So you can certainly say "If you liked my book, read these favorites that inspired it"; you just can't say "If you liked (these books that inspired my book), read my book!" Make sense?

(You need to uncheck "make reciprocal", of course, since in what was IMO one of their worse minor decisions they decided to make that default-on.)

>10 lorax:: Oh, I see. Thanks. I missed the part about being able to turn off the reciprocity.

It does sound like the case mentioned in 6 breaks the rules, though.

Sorry!!!

I didn't mean to spam anyone. I'm a bit of a Luddite and always seem to be pushing the wrong buttons on these sites.

I'm just on here trying to meet fans of my book--If I can figure out my error, I will correct it!

It would seem reasonable for LT to disallow the same user from making the same recommendation between two books more than once. (#5)

...Which is fine for preventing more of this from happening, but it would only work from the time it's implimented. It wouldn't retroactively prevent the existing duplications.

>12 chrisregan: I don't think it's so much you as it is a system sensitivity that makes it too easy.

;)

There is of course no way to stop people recommending a book for the same book in a omnibus volume, like this one, which really irritates me by it's pointlessness:

"Hamlet by William Shakespeare
9013 copies. 56 reviews. Average rating 4.22.

Recommended by xxxxx for The Complete Works of Shakespeare by William Shakespeare (Oct 22, 2008)"

I wonder if that has somehow come out of confused combining?

Bump?

Bueller?

http://www.librarything.com/work/3577382

Noticed that TeamJacob101 felt the need to tell me not once, not twice, not thrice, not frice (I know, I'm pushing it), but FIVE times, that if I liked Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows that I'd like Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Really, the recommendation is stupid on a number of levels (although I'll give that it could be the reciprocal problem that was recently fixed - but STILL - book 4 to 7? very random). At the same time, that's ALL the space for the recommendations.

I'm sure Jacob's heart is in the right place and all - but if we could just suppress 4 of of his 5 recommendations, that would be very nice.

Another thought - I know we originally said that different folks could nominate the same book multiple times on reader recommendations - that way you could see, "hey, if a bunch of users say I should read this book, it must be a match!" as opposed to the singletons.

Maybe it's time to look at a thumbs-up instead and a one-time only recommendation per title. In other words - if I want to recommend Persepolis 2 for Persepolis and it's already been recommended, perhaps I get the following message:

This title has already been recommended for this book. If you were not the original recommender, you can thumb-up the recommendation to push the recommendation up higher.

I'm really doing this off the top of my head - but essentially, it would work like the thumbs on reviews - the more thumbs up on recommendations, the higher up the list user recommendations go - and you could see who agreed with the recommendation to see if they're in your similar libraries. If you could allow folks to add to the comments on the recommendation - bonus.

Better yet, I hope it would make folks add new recommendations.

EDIT - closed italics

A thumbs up option would be fun. :)

I agree, provided our usernames get associated with the thumbs-up. As in:

Recommended by user for book by author (date). other-user-1 and other-user-2 concur.

aaaannndd...

http://www.librarything.com/work/8488

There must be a way to not allow recommending the same book for a book...recommending it four times is sort of the double-treat. :)

>22 stephmo: Though I wonder if that's a misunderstanding of what the 'recommendation' area is for -- my limited Italian makes me wonder if that user was trying to write a positive review, and put it in the wrong place.

(Are recommendations carried across language sites? If so, I wonder about the contents of the Italian translation of the recommendations instructions (which I can't assess); if not, I wonder how much the user was an Italian-speaker trying to navigate an English webpage.)

Repeating it four times is annoying -- and likely accidental -- as people keep mentioning, I do wish there was an automatic systems-level 'inability' for the same person to recommend the same book more than once for the same work (I like the thumbs-up option for different users, too)...

Just got another duplicate user recommendation.

Since there's nothing in the system to keep it from happening, is there any sort of guideline on how to handle it?

>22 stephmo:
Not a duplicate, but someone recommended Don Quixote for Don Quixote. I don't know any German (those comments are in German, right?) so I can't figure out if there's some sort of logic to this recommendation.

25> Yes, it is German, and recommends a new translation, so does make some sense.

I now think --for various reasons -- that an adjustment to the member recommendations thing would be good. Issues to be fixed include the lack of a "hide" feature, and multiplicate recommendations of a single title per work by one user.

Another good idea is a thumbs-up/down option for recommendation, preferably one that allows us to add our own comments. This last part would be useful for thumbs-down-ing a review we don't get and which is unexplained, such as this item for Wuthering Heights.

27: That recommendation makes perfect sense, considering the emotions in Wuthering Heights. Although a comment would be nice, admittedly.

Yes, a comment would be good. But how, in the absense of a flag/whatever, does one go about asking for a comment?