Filter Scrolls by Various Traits - Advanced Search Options to save some data-wrangling headaches

[Melusina]

Okay, so first of all, I'd be kind of amazed if this topic hasn't come up in some way shape or form before.  Please let me know if I'm missing a thread that's already proposing this; I looked and searched but could have missed something.

 

What I would really, really like would be able to filter my dragons by multiple traits. 

 

Here's why:

 

1. We are using terminology about such traits regularly, all over the place, in trades and on forums and on the wiki, anyway - and it seems reasonable to systemically acknowledge them in the game website itself
    
2. It could make it far far easier to trade and breed to public requests via the trading page or forum, increasing player engagement with these processes (which I bet a lot of players don't get immersed in now who might were the UI more friendly to it).
    
3. It could make playing with cool lineages way less hard to get into. 
    
4. Groups would still have lots of uses for ordering scrolls and highlighting selected parts of one's menagerie publicly. 
    
5. It could cut down on the need for a certain kind of player (hi I know I'm not the only one) to go through increasingly complex spreadsheet or custom database acrobatics that could do the trick but would be OMG tedious, and on the need to put all one's little draconic sprogs in groups ten ways from Tuesday (which itself is limited unless you go super granular, like, having a group for 5th gen stairs that are pink or something, which is ... extremely tedious.)
    
6. ... and even if you aren't the type of player in #5, if it's not a huge investment of energy, for a lot of people knowing one's stats and identifying what kinds of holes there are in your scroll that you can focus on fleshing out and such is neat and data is fun to play with.

 

There are two ways I could imagine such a thing working: 

 

1. An advanced search where you selected the traits you were searching from by checking off groups on your scroll you'd categorized dragons into.  This would keep the burden/privilege of classifying new dragons on the individual player but let them look for a cross sections.  For instance, I could look up dragons that I'd placed in all of several selected groups.  Some examples then, from my own groups:
    
   1. I could look up dragons I'd put in both the Cave Born and the Useful (what I call types that have BSAs) group.  This could make it easier for me to make tidy lineages for the AP or trading of frequently-desired BSA dragons.
       
   2. I could look up dragons I'd put in both the Messy AND the Important (I put rares in here, mostly) group - and breed some rares from there to the AP.  It would make me breed rares to the AP more if I could do this.  
       
2. An EVEN BETTER (I think) advanced search based on the following criteria:
    
   1. Generation.  Could select one or more from a list of CB, 2nd Generation, 3G, 4G, and so on.  The list of options could be limited to those represented in your scroll (no 68th gen messies?  no option for 68th gen for you would appear).
       
   2. Subgroup.  Drakes, pygmies, two-headed so-n-sos, and others.  Could also have options for subgroups with overlap with those categories, like holiday (or SPECIFIC holiday, like halloween).
       
   3. Rarity.  In step with the rarity levels described by this page on the dragcave fandom wiki.  
       
   4. Lineage Type.  Could include PB (or at least all one species - definitions where alts are in the lines may diverge), and maybe even checker, stair, or spiral.  It could even spot prizekins, SAltkins, inbreds, even gens, etc - there's a pretty exhaustive list of lineage types here.  Some of these might still need to come from groups, though; I don't know how to tell a computer to spot Messy.
       
   5. Parental Status.  Look for dragons who've had or haven't successfully been bred.
       
   6. And to address whatever of the above couldn't work because it couldn't be readily coded or because it was individually determined, individual player-created Groups.  Could help folks tweak for their personal definitions of things like, IDK, pureblood status (which some might disagree about where different color variants are involved, say), or for whether things were included in a naming scheme that couldn't be identified by a hard-coded filter.
       
   7. You could also get into other stuff, like Color(s), Year Born, or Species.  
       
   8. You could either group the currently extant drop-down filters (like unnamed, BSA-ready, and breedable) in with these or leave them where they are (or both?), too. 
      
      (TECHIE/CODEY SIDEBAR: That those filters exist in the first place suggests some of the sort of back-end categorizing that would be necessary in order to add functionality like this is likely already in place.  Context I say this from: I only code enough to unbreak or break things when I have to on a small scale, but I make websites in several industry-specific and popular cross-industry (Squarespace, Wordpress) CMSes.  I also have a lot of background with databases (mostly recruitment-oriented CRMs, too many of which I've beta tested or had to set up/customize).  My sense is that there's a database under most websites that you can tweak to make filtering of this sort possible.  I bet my socks there are many other people invested in Dragon Cave, including TJ, who know more about how such things could work than me, too, especially given that some of us have grown up into technological and mostly functional adults playing this game.  Hence, adding more and better filters to this game seems feasible.  Also, tbh, I suspect it could help give TJ & friends some cool backend analytics about what people wanted to search for, etc, that could help with everything from priorities for future tweaks to the site down to making the site more appealing and have more granular data for advertisers.)

 

It would also be really cool if you could use filters on other user scrolls.  Individual users could opt out of letting others filter their scrolls, in much the same way that they can opt to have their scrolls be invisible, though, too.

 

pantpantpant  Er.  Also, if this is riddled with typos or otherwise absurd, I blame insomnia, sorry, please move along, etc.  

[SomeRandomCorviknight]

"Generations" would be useful! I feel as though some of these would be complicated, though? But i dont know really anything about coding so

 

¯\_( 0▿0 )_/¯

 

i support! 

Edited October 24, 2021 by SomeRandomCorviknight

[HeatherMarie]

There are a lot of different filtering suggestions in this post, and some of them are probably much more helpful and/or feasible than others. I *very* much want different and better options for groups, that has been asked for many times in the past. I would love to be able to filter for dragons that are in, say, both my 'messy' group *and* my '20+gen ' group. 

 

Rarity is probably a no-go, the wiki you linked to is unofficial and that rarity guide is very very subjective and not actually based on anything on the site's end (ie, it's based on user perception rather than any actual stats).

 

Getting into filtering by lineage *types* gets messy. The site already has the capability to filter by generation (you can use #2g, for example, in the Fertility filter box or the 'add dragons to group' filter box) but lineage types are another thing that are very very subjective. Looking at the list you linked to I can tell you right now not everyone would agree on the definitions there. 'Mirror' and 'Gaia' are terms I've never even seen used around here regarding lineages. The definition for checker and arrow can also vary depending on the user. (And yes, as someone who prefers messies, other people have wildly different ideas of what is 'messy' so trying to code something to define 'messy' would be fairly useless.)

 

51 minutes ago, Caspod said:

It would also be really cool if you could use filters on other user scrolls.  Individual users could opt out of letting others filter their scrolls, in much the same way that they can opt to have their scrolls be invisible, though, too.

 

I would rather it be an opt-IN, if it's an opt-out there will almost certainly be users who don't even know it's a thing or that it can be turned off at all and people who wouldn't ever want others to have that ability for their scroll will have 'opted in' without even knowing it because they don't know.

[Melusina]

15 minutes ago, HeatherMarie said:

The site already has the capability to filter by generation (you can use #2g, for example, in the Fertility filter box or the 'add dragons to group' filter box) but lineage types are another thing that are very very subjective.

 

HOLY SMOKES I had no idea about the #2g thing, say.  Whoa.  I may still need groups for those but that makes things SO much easier.  Thank you for cluing me in - and also, ack, I wish that were more obvious.  I've figured out typing a breed in when mate-searching before accidentally, but are there any other things you can type in to filter for in those contexts?

 

15 minutes ago, HeatherMarie said:

Rarity is probably a no-go, the wiki you linked to is unofficial and that rarity guide is very very subjective and not actually based on anything on the site's end (ie, it's based on user perception rather than any actual stats).

 

Yeah I hear that and own that some of this stuff might be pie in the sky.  Even, I donno, species with variants, or metallic species, or something like that might be useful and less subjective unto unusability.  

 

15 minutes ago, HeatherMarie said:

I *very* much want different and better options for groups, that has been asked for many times in the past. I would love to be able to filter for dragons that are in, say, both my 'messy' group *and* my '20+gen ' group. 

 

Relieved and not surprised it's come up!  Having the individually defined groups in the mix seems really important.  Still would be cool in conjunction with generation filtering, say, as a way to just search your scroll without it having to be in the context of adding to a group or finding a mate.  And having anything that COULD be done without relying on someone's groups would make the possibility of filtering through other user scrolls that much more useful.  

 

15 minutes ago, HeatherMarie said:

I would rather it be an opt-IN, if it's an opt-out there will almost certainly be users who don't even know it's a thing or that it can be turned off at all and people who wouldn't ever want others to have that ability for their scroll will have 'opted in' without even knowing it because they don't know.

 

I'm agnostic about this, and would be happy for it to go any which way.  I feel like the majority of users I interact with or even just look up because I caught their egg on the AP have anonymized their scrolls, though, which I think is an opt-in thing - which makes me think it's something people do fiddle about with a lot.  But that might just be a section of user preferences that folks mostly only visit when they're creating an account, idk.  Whoever runs google analytics on this site could find out to inform a decision, though.

Edited October 24, 2021 by Caspod
typo - loop instead of look

[HeatherMarie]

13 minutes ago, Caspod said:

 

HOLY SMOKES I had no idea about the #2g thing, say.  Whoa.  I may still need groups for those but that makes things SO much easier.  Thank you for cluing me in - and also, ack, I wish that were more obvious.  I've figured out typing a breed in when mate-searching before accidentally, but are there any other things you can type in to filter for in those contexts?

 

Yeah I really wish that was more obvious on-site, I only learned it from forum posts. In those 'add to group' and 'Fertility' filters you can search by any gen that way, and you can also do it for biomes, using #forest will bring up all your cavebreds from the forest, etc. 

[purplehaze]

7 hours ago, HeatherMarie said:

 

Yeah I really wish that was more obvious on-site, I only learned it from forum posts. In those 'add to group' and 'Fertility' filters you can search by any gen that way, and you can also do it for biomes, using #forest will bring up all your cavebreds from the forest, etc. 

I keep finding out more things that we can search in this way. I really wish there were a place where it was spelled out on site! Why have a feature that almost no one knows about?

[Shadowdrake]

On 10/24/2021 at 3:58 AM, Caspod said:

HOLY SMOKES I had no idea about the #2g thing, say.

Fun fact: this is also capable of filtering cbs (#cb), lineaged (#bred), biomes (#cave, #jungle, #market, etc), and exact dragon breeds (#blackdragon instead of searching "black dragon" and getting all breeds with black in the name). The generation check is also automatic, so it can search for #37g and so forth. And, all of these can be combined for exact group or fertility searches.

 

Unfortunately this was only discovered bc the site admin offhandedly mentioned it on the forums despite being incredibly useful.

 

 

On 10/24/2021 at 2:47 AM, Caspod said:

Rarity.  In step with the rarity levels described by this page on the dragcave fandom wiki.  

I don't think this will ever be a thing as dragon rarities are both constantly in flux and very subjective/rarely official in any extent.

[Melusina]

4 hours ago, Shadowdrake said:

Fun fact: this is also capable of filtering cbs (#cb), lineaged (#bred), biomes (#cave, #jungle, #market, etc), and exact dragon breeds (#blackdragon instead of searching "black dragon" and getting all breeds with black in the name). The generation check is also automatic, so it can search for #37g and so forth. And, all of these can be combined for exact group or fertility searches.

 

 

Thanks for the rundown! When the howlidaze has calmed, I am going to try to think about how to boost the conspicuousness of this info better, even if it's just by making a snippet folks can append to their signatures or profiles on the forum to spread the word.

 

And yeah, I concede that rarity is probably a red herring for filtering hopes.

[w0rmg0d]

Support any and all search functions that can be implemented. Bit annoying to have to guess at which page by dragon is on etc every time in looking for a specific one but don't remember the name/code. 

[Darth Krande]

This would be super awesome and I'd use it a lot!

 

As for rarity, maybe we could have market price? I know these don't necessarily overlap but the current prices can be checked quickly. Right now if I asked for dragons between 1300 - 1500 shards, it would give me all three  coppers, goldenwyverns, and green dino.  If I searched for dragons over 4 000 shards, it would give magma and staterae. I think this could be a good reference for rarity and (even more so) for current demand. 

 

[Moriaty]

Wow only upon reading this thread did I know you can search for generations and biomes!! That information really should be put on site somewhere. I’ve been a member for over five years and I just found this out how did that happen.

 

I really want the advanced search with several traits checked. One very basic thing I experienced: all intentionally unnamed dragons on my scrolls are coded, and they should be in a group, and I’ve always wanted to check both “not grouped” and “unnamed” when I’m trying to check if I forgot to put one of them in the group it belongs to, because I do tend to forget. Right now I just click on each individual unnamed dragon and check that way and it’s a real pain that could be easily resolved if we can do advanced search by “trait A and B”. Full support!

[Mewtie]

I'd love a simple, quick way to search something on my scroll. As of currently, it's difficult for me to find dragons, especially when I'm using my phone that shows fewer dragons per page, and that discourages me from breeding them. Even with groups it's difficult for me because I keep forgetting to actually add stuff. A simple filter bar like we have for groups, placed at the top of the scroll, would make me happy.

[Melusina]

Really glad to see more interest in this. Maybe next time TJ's got an itch to work on the UI, some of these thoughts will get incorporated if enough of us say they'd be helpful. 

[CottagecoreKobold]

Can I add a suggestion to the list of Sort By's? I would really love it if I could sort a scroll by whether or not that dragon has a Description, pending or otherwise - better still, allow me to choose to display only the ones that do! I'd love to browse people's scrolls and read some of the descriptions they wrote, but it's just too much of a hassle.

[Fuzzbucket]

I've actually set up a group for those of mine that are described - and a separate group for those that are described but not yet approved.

 

https://dragcave.net/group/90021

[CottagecoreKobold]

Groups are helpful! The trouble I've personally run into is that I use groups to help differentiate "regions" or "factions", but I think that's more a "me problem", so bringing up groups is an excellent point. A lot of users don't think to group their described dragons, though.

[HeatherMarie]

51 minutes ago, CottagecoreKobold said:

Groups are helpful! The trouble I've personally run into is that I use groups to help differentiate "regions" or "factions", but I think that's more a "me problem", so bringing up groups is an excellent point. A lot of users don't think to group their described dragons, though.

 

A good way to use groups for multiple purposes and still keep things organized is to name them strategically: I have 5 different groups for name-related things, like code-names and special names and such, and I use 'Names- (blank)' for each group's name to keep them together in the list of groups. (Also do the same with subtypes, have every different body-type in it's own group but they are all grouped together in the list). 

[CottagecoreKobold]

Yeah, but I can only highlight four groups, so it's not always ideal for helping browsers. It's not a substitute for a Sort By Described-type option, anyways.

[Fuzzbucket]

I don't think many people browsing care about most of the things I group for ! Actually I haven't bothered to highlight my described ones.... There are a couple I could take out, I think.

[Melusina]

If I could filter by which individuals were in a cross section of groups - or were in one group and not another - that would help me a lot.  I have a lot of groups, but I don't have one for CBs that are holidays, say.  It would be cool not to need to get that granular.

[Shokomon]

Include "Search by Progeny Status"  as opposed to just "Bred Status" and I'll get behind this.

 

(Dragons can be Bred successfully, but not produce any children. For example, when no egg is produced or the pair doesn't have any interest, both these pairs would breed again [unlike with refusals], but neither have offspring.)

 

Alternatively, there could be an option for a Fertility-like search for the main scroll. 

That wouldn't exclude the above changes though. 

[Cute_Dragons]

This would be revolutionary if implemented! I think it would be amazing if we could also search by parent's breed.

 

Like this:

2g&m-gold&f-winter

Summer&3g&m-spring&f-spring

Prize&m-celestial/f-celestial

Valentine&m-silver/f-silver&2g/3g

 

Endless possibilities...

[StarlightLion]

On 10/24/2021 at 8:47 PM, Melusina said:

It could cut down on the need for a certain kind of player (hi I know I'm not the only one) to go through increasingly complex spreadsheet or custom database acrobatics that could do the trick but would be OMG tedious, and on the need to put all one's little draconic sprogs in groups ten ways from Tuesday (which itself is limited unless you go super granular, like, having a group for 5th gen stairs that are pink or something, which is ... extremely tedious.)

 

I am exactly this kind of player, and it's entirely because I can't keep track of my dragons in a better fashion on-site. My hoarding spreadsheets are available for everyone to see (through my signature) but I have a collection of other spreadsheets that I use in addition to index everything else on my scroll; that includes precise numbers of caveborns of every species, the same for hybrids (and their freezies), egg descriptions, elemental alignments, assorted lineages that aren't part of my hoards, and so on and so forth. Mega support for this - it probably wouldn't change my habits now that I've set them, but it would make cross-checking significantly easier, and make it so players who haven't made all the googledocs I have can index and evaluate their scrolls much much easier.

[Darth Krande]

Very much yes, please.

[Cute_Dragons]

On 4/6/2023 at 3:19 PM, Cute_Dragons said:

This would be revolutionary if implemented! I think it would be amazing if we could also search by parent's breed.

 

Like this:

2g&m-gold&f-winter

Summer&3g&m-spring&f-spring

Prize&m-celestial/f-celestial

Valentine&m-silver/f-silver&2g/3g

 

Endless possibilities...

Here I am again. I would love to be able to search for dragons with a specific parent 😭