Organize searched vehicle data

[xlibelle]

How can I view/organize data on other cars like mine? IE: List in order of fuel milage or list in order of fuel-ups. What does the chronological listing even represent? - Date joined?

[pb]

The easiest way to find similar cars is to browse to your car detail page and scroll to the bottom where it says: "Browse Similar Cars". Under that, you'll see three links: Make · Model · Year. Or in your case, "BMW · 335d · 2009". These links go from general to specific. If you want to see all BMWs, click the "BMW" link. If you want to see all 335ds, click "355d". If you want to see all 2009 335ds, click "2009".

Here's the page for all 2009 BMW 335ds. The cars there are listed in alphabetical order by name. We specifically don't list things by order of best fuel economy so we don't turn Fuelly into a game with incentives to cheat. Here's more info about that: Why don't you list everything in order of best fuel economy?

So that page will give you the most similar models to yours, and you can further refine things with the filters at the top of the page.

[xlibelle]

Finding cars like mine is no problem.

But in terms of it being a "game" to some so data would be abused, I really disagree. If this were more community based, I could see some pros and cons. If there's no swaying you guys to change the site then this topic is moot.

And what should anyone gain by cheating any how? Why on earth would you award high fuel milage fuelly users? If anything, incentivise those that post fuel-ups!

Thanks for the quick reply!!

[pb]

And what should anyone gain by cheating any how?

They'd get their name (or car, or favorite model, brand, etc.) on the top of a list somewhere. You'd be surprised at the amount of time and energy people will put into getting to the top of a list—even when that's the only reward. We want the site incentives to favor accuracy more than volume of activity or fantastic mileage. That's what we're after more than anything else.

[ShasO]

So whats all this "Top 10 cars" all about?

What are they top of?

[pb]

You mean on the Browse Vehicles page? Those are the cars that have the most Fuelly members reporting. Right now the top car is the Volkswagen Jetta with 2,395 members tracking. The number in parenthesis is the number of members with that car.

It's more difficult to get your favorite car on that list because it would require creating hundreds of fake accounts.

[Don65Stang]

I like xlibelle's request too in that it is difficult to weed out users with only a few tanks...that tells us nothing really. The default setting could be just as you have now but how about adding filters to sort the data like on a spreadsheet? Actually that's what I do now...I copy all the data for a particular vehicle type and paste it into Excel so it then can be sorted.

This site is an excellent tracking site and not so much a community. I use this site as a way to improve my mileage by comparing stats in many different ways like Price/Mile and comparing my cars to the high MPGs cars like mine that have many, many fill-ups. It would be useful to me and apparently others if the data could be sorted and viewed by both # of tanks and MPGs.

If you don't like that idea, then how about the default display being the # of tanks instead of alphanumerically? That would, as a side benefit, reward people to enter every tank for their cars making this site get more hits for you and your (new) advertisers and more useful for members like xlibelle, myself and others to get what we want from it.

What are the incentives now for accuracy? How about giving users the ability to sort the data for themselves when browsing vehicles? That's a win for the users, a win for the site that'll draw more users and hits, and a win for advertisers who want high the high hit counts.

BTW, I'm being a little facetious but I can edit all my individual car names to have a "1" out front and be at the top of the list for each of the Browse Cars page for the individual car makes. If people want to cheat they'll find a way. I personally don't care what list they are at the top of & think those people are few in number. Just my thoughts.

Thanks for a great site.

[pb]

We were discussing this a bit more today and we decided to change the sort order on the browse pages. We're showing vehicles with images toward the top of the list so you can see at a glance what that model looks like. After that, we're sorting cars in the order of most recent fuel-up. This will tend to give a little more visibility to active users.

As you mentioned Don65Stang, it'd be easy to give your vehicles a name that starts with 1 to be on the top of all the browse lists. This way it'll be based on a few more criteria, at least.