I think the vendor section is a very valuable tool and should be made a little more user friendly and informative.

My suggestion:
1) Combine all posts regarding a vendor into a single thread named after the vendor.
2) Change format of the posts to a poll for people to rate the vendor on a scale of 1 - 10 or Love'em - hate'em

I think by doing this it will make it so a person can quickly and efficiently check the quality of a vendor based on the collective thoughts and opinions by the nexus users. We could even have sub-forums of specific products with links to the vendors thread.

What do you think?

I like the poll idea

I think the poll would need to be reset every few months. Otherwise the poll's outcome may not reflect the current Rating.

Good point. Perhaps a monthly, quarterly, annual and overall rating (or whichever ones seem suitable) that would be kept track of right in the polling box.

Excellent idea here. Much easier to get a sence of peoples experience with vendors.

Yeah, having just one permanent poll where people can vote just once, like the polls we currently have, is a bad idea. It's better not to have a poll, unless it's a new one periodically.

Vendors can go from being 5 star to 0 star overnight. All it takes is a management change and wham, suddenly your 5 star vendor is cheating everyone.

Also, some new vendors tend to get poor ratings at first because they're learning how to do business properly, and then their ratings tend to increase over time. The rating system can kill a new business because of this.

It needs to be well thought out before it's implemented. It can be abused by the vendors themselves if not done properly. If the poll is updated every month, you can bet the vendors will have it on their calendar to give a new positive vote every month.

I have some mixed feelings now that I think more about this polling system. It can be abused and give inaccurate results. Maybe if only senior members have access, that might keep Wal-Mart like vendors (such as BBB) from creating multiple fake accounts to skew the poll results.

Very good points. Similar to the way ebay has an overall rating but then also lists it by 6 and 12 months. In our case I think it should be:
1) Overall
2) Month

More than that I think would be too much info. What really matters is there overall and recent. It could eventually even lead to revenue to keep the forum afloat. By way of sponsors who want to stay in the good graces of the members by good prices and good products.

Agree, it could be manipulated. Only allowing a vote to be placed if you have over X amount of posts should limit any type of mass manipulation. To assure accurate ratings allow 1 vote a month.

Doing it this way would still allow an overall rating and put the importance on the monthly rating. There would still be the active thread so if there are any type of ownership change, etc. it could be posted like it is now to let everyone know.

I think it would give the vendor section a clean interface that you can easily research a vendor and see how the nexus feels about them.

if they aren't full members, then they can't vote, correct? It would probably be easy to detect if the vendors suddenly created a ton of member accounts in an attempt to manipulate it. They could be stopped at the Nursery.

I love they idea. I would suggest:

1) A sticky thread for each vendor.
1a) It should contain a quarterly poll and an overall rating. Monthly seems a bit frequent, no?
1b) The sticky should allow members to post permanent comments, too.
2) A separate sticky could contain the highest rated vendor for each substance, if we had enough information.

my 2 cents.

Sounds good to me. A sticky for a particular plant with each individual vendor as an option for members' votes on preference may be a good idea, but it would be difficult to make it sufficiently inclusive. That one may require a bit more brainstorming.

I think all of this is a great idea but it is rather cluttered for a forum.

A separate framework (take a restaurant rating site for example) would allow for more customization and better organization.

This could be a page that is linked to in the vendor forum. This page would allow user input as well as real time display of data.

Good point, perhaps it's rather low priority for this community. The only reason we really have vendor subforum is because we insist on discussing vendors all over the forum. It's good to have some idea of the quality of vendors, but it's so difficult to manage. Perhaps this is a good longterm goal if we can develop a fairly accurate method of management.

Cluttered? Cluttered is what we have now. Right now we have numerous threads on the same vendor. How would consolidating duplicate threads on a vendor make it more cluttered?

You are over thnking it, a new website is a large production. What I'm suggesting is easy, clean and usefull.

1) consolidate all current threads on a specific vendor under one thread named after that vendor and sticky it.
2) turn the new thread into a poll with a few simple questions about that vendor.
3) if the forum has the ability for a rating system then implement that so full members can rate the vendor.

I feel the vendor section can be a very usefull tool for us. Most of us use these vendors or will at some point. This would give us a clean interface to search for what is needed.

The reason you give is the perfect reason for the subforum. So we know the quality and reliability of any given vendor. It could always be expanded on long term but what I outlined above is very easy to do with low maintenance.

But just trying to help.

It would be a fairly large addition to the site, considering how low a priority it is for the community (in light of less commercially implicated pursuits). It would be very nice to have a reliable way to rate vendors, but it's always been completely circumstantial and secondary function for this site. I would imagine that the resources required for this may not be so easy to come by, but I also don't know a whole lot about web administration. If it's easy to do, however, SWIM says go ahead, but he's not aching for it.

I do think, if there could be a good way that did not take up too much space in the nexus, this would be an excellent addition to the community. Sometimes it can be very difficult and frustrating with choosing and trusting vendors as they are not always honest, for instance virola bark being scraped of alkaloids.

Just a small suggestion. What about adding a sub-category to "Suppliers" called "vendors" and set up sticky's for each vendor. In these sticky's, members can talk about there purchases from that shop and yields ect.

I believe by using a poll, the site will be too susceptible to abuse.

very nice idea.. but calculating monthly performance and reseting the results can be a problem in my opinion. just a poll would be enough i think

the poll is a good idea and I recently learned that some of the shops are good, on different scale...I'm not in the UK so for example :arrow: Jimjamshop is excellent but I have no way to utilize its awesomeness as it is way out of my immediate proximity. What I'm talking about is slightly biased reviews based on anyone from anywhere browsing polls..just a thought