Summarising Recipes and Topics

[CreamPuff63]

Master Moderators - A thought has just occurred... every 10 pages that a certain recipe goes beyond, any successful variations  during that perod are summarised at the end of the recipe where it is printed off so people do not have to read through lots of posts to find what works and what doesn't??

Would this be do-able?

[courton]

What a great idea!

[Russell]

I'm pretty sure the only real way of doing this would be to have the original poster update their first post to reflect any additional changes, unless we came up with a standard way of identifying the changes and having the site owner write a script to collate the information, which is far from a trivial job. This is why people who have spent lots of time creating Recipe software are making a healthy profit from the sales.

Russell.

[trudy]

Great idea!!  Good if it works.

[Katya]

It is a great idea but I think, as Russell says, maintaining it could be problematical.

For examplel, last August people put a lot of effort into setting up indexes (indices?) in each of the recipe topics but AFAIK these haven't been updated to reflect any additions since then.   It requires a lot of effort to manage such things and it takes so long to read through new topics these days, that I guess noone would have the time to do the maintenance   

[brazen20au]

we stopped updating the indexes as a new, better way of setting up / maintaining the recipes was supposed to be coming (not sure what happened to it). honestly i struggle to read even half the threads in 'my' boards, let alone keep the lists up to date.

[Russell]

we stopped updating the indexes as a new, better way of setting up / maintaining the recipes was supposed to be coming (not sure what happened to it).

Probably like all things programming, 90% of the work can be done in 10% of the time. Getting that last 10% of development work completed bug-free can often be a nightmare. I've thrown my hand sup several times when an "almost" working design hits a completion roadblock which means you have to go back to the drawing board and start again.

Russell.

[meganjane]

I can sympathise with you Russell.

I think the only way to do it is if the original poster is willing to add the updates/tweaks that others have done to their original recipe post.

[CreamPuff63]

excellent Russell you are probably right there, it would be the easiest way. that way it will be in the original recipe printoff. we will become Managers of our own recipes so to speak. Down the bottom of the recipe we could put:

Suggested Variations:
add 4 teaspoons of X instead of 3
subsitute X for X
if mixture is gluggy, try adding X

[cookie1]

Brilliant thinking for folks to make the adjustments to their own recipes. I'm like Brazen, if I don't come on the forum at least a couple of times a day  I get behind. I love to read all the posts, not just the ones that are "my responsibilty" to moderate. I love the forum and would happily spend hours here but sometimes the family need dumb stuff like ironing done or even food cooked. 

[CreamPuff63]

cookie and brazen, I really didn't mean for you guys to write down the variations every 10 pages    I completely understand that you have a life outside of this forum strangely enough...the old cogs were just ticking over one time thinking that there must be some easier way of keeping an ongoing track of the changes that people make (recent example is the EDC Hot Cross Buns) and by George I think we've cracked it! 

[cookie1]

No drama CP63, I knew that you didn't as you would realise all the work. You had a great suggestion and as you said it looks solved.

[brazen20au]

i wish the changes MM had told me about would happen *HINT HINT MM* all that would be done automatically...

[cookie1]

At least we have a site that is up and working.