Tom's dashboard

Kohorte, we apologize for the inconvenience and understand the frustration. I agree with the analysis that you have made, yes that is the expected behavior. This is an issue that was recently introduced in the system otherwise it was working as designed before. This issue is prevalent in the LiveSearch, which is the search that is performed when you add a new filtr. We are currently testing the fix and we will roll it out as soon as we have a 'go' from testing. Once again, our apologies. We will notify everyone as soon as the fix is rolled out.

Thanks for bringing this issue to our attention. You are right in your expectations of the system, phrases are are supposed to be treated as phases and not as individual words. We are looking into it and we will get back to you.

FrancisT, thanks for sending your account info.

I would like to apologize for the inconvenience that you experienced this morning when you did not see your articles in the Filtrbox Dashboard. In an effort to provide our users with the best user experience with Filtrbox, we performed a massive memory upgrade on our servers last night and unfortunately we experienced a glitch that resulted in some of our users not being able to view their articles. The glitch has been addressed and you should be able to to view all your articles now.

I smile with glee each time I hear people who have strong opinions about technology. That constantly reminds me why I love what I do. I would love to hear more about your dissatisfaction with Flex; if you have time to discuss it, please do not hesitate to send me an email to my email address: tom AT filtrbox.com. I love to hear the feedback so that we can take action on some of your concerns in an effort to make for a better user experience.

The answer to your question is that the view settings on the Dashboard work. The best way forward to address your problem is to send your account id to support AT filtrbox.com ; we will take a look at your account to figure out what is going on. Whatever we find out, we will post it to this thread so that everyone will be better informed going forward.

I am assuming that you are asking about the separation of words on the "Add Filtr" section:

In the text fields labelled "That must contain all of these words," , "OR contains one of these words." and "But should not contain...", the words that you enter should be separated by a space. If the you are entering a phrase, use "double quotes" at the beginning and at the end of the words in the phrase.

Rob,

When a user does not see articles in Filtrbox, it is usually one or more of fours reasons. They are as follows:

1. Filtrbox has very powerful controls that allow the user to filtr out (ooops!! filtEr out) results using different criteria. Sometimes, these controls may get in the way of seeing your data when the user forgets to check their previous settings because Filtrbox persists the settings of the controls between sessions. The first thing you should do when you do not see the results that you expect is to click on the tab labelled "Filtr Rank X, Days X" (where X is a number) and move the slider labelled "Filtr Rank" to the leftmost position and the slider labelled "Show" to the rightmost position. When the sliders are in these positions, they show the most data because when the "Filtr Rank" slider is in this position, its shows all articles regardless of rank and when the "Show" slider is in this position, it shows articles over the largest date period.

2. The second set of controls to check are the controls under the "Sources" tab. Verify that all the sources that you desire are checked.

3. Click on the "Edit Filtr" icon (the pen next to the filtr name). Check too see that your qualifiers, i.e. the words that are in the "Include" text box are not too restrictive. Often times users put a combination of words that result in little to no results. Here is a simple example "boulder and colorado and united states" may yield little or no results because when articles are written they are most likely to not contain all those three words; however "boulder and colorado" may result in more results for you.

4. Unlike most web search engines which offer the user synchronous search capabilities (you enter search term and you get all the results right away), Filtrbox performs persistent search. This means that Filtrbox will continually search for articles that contain your Filtr until you modify or delete the filtr. When the user enters a filtr, they do not necessarily get their results right away like web search engines. Our searches may take a little time to start delivering results to you. So in some cases you may have to check back later. We are working on improving this latency for results but we are carefully doing that while not compromising the quality of the data because we do not want to return the same noisy information overload that regular search engines return you.

The above mentioned are some of the reasons why users may not see articles.

For your specific case, Rob, I would suggest that you refer to 1. and 2. above. Regarding whether there is a way to request articles, there is no explicit facility for the user to do that because the Filtrbox dashboard implicitly request articles on you behalf when you are logged in . When new articles are found, the user is alerted with a message in the bottom right hand corner.

Karl, thanks for bringing this to our attention. We are looking into it, however we may have to contact you for help with verifying our fix. If you don't mind helping us with the verification process, please send us your email using the contact form at https://www.filtrbox.com/help.php . We definitely would love everyone, all over the world, to enjoy Filtrbox.

The thumbs/up/down have been replaced by the rating stars in the Filtrbox Dashboard. Unfortunately, the documentation has been lagging behind in updates. However, we are about to unveil major features upgrades to Filtrbox and you will be getting new up-to-date documentation. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Guy, thanks for taking time to help us test Filtrbox. Thanks for bringing this issue to our attention. We are working on it to figure out why some users are failing to save filtrs and fix it. We will get back with you as soon as have the fix in place.

Thanks for the recommendation. We have received some great feedback around the tag cloud. Different Filtrbox users have various points of view on the content of the tag cloud. This has been very helpful feedback. We are currently synthesizing this feedback in order to determine the changes that need to be made to the tag cloud.

PS: The current Filtrbox tag cloud shows the list of all the user's Filtrs and the size of the Filtr is based on the number of mentions of that Filtr in all the user's articles for a given period (period displayed in the graph).

Duly noted.

I personally agree with you regarding boring dupes. However, we are currently working on a solution that satisfies, both, the people who do not like to see dupes (like you and me) as well as those who like to see the reach and impact of an article. Hang in there, we are a few weeks away from introducing that functionality.