Ideas
0
Election Stats: Bug fixes and feature requests
I've been trying for over a year in various forums to get TownNews to fix some problems with Blox Election Stats, including a customer service ticket (#567614), but I have received no feedback. Here again are some of the bug fixes and improvements we would like to see:
1. Need a way to specify section tags, or to specify party
I find it strange that candidate assets don't have a discrete field for party. Instead, the Election Stats way is to assign a party is to give the candidate a section tag (ie /elections/party/republican).
But neither the Candidate CSV nor the Race CSV have a field for section tags. So there is no way to specify to which party a candidate belongs when we upload the CSV.
The end result is that we have to go through hundreds of candidates and manually select add party tags, when it could be done all up front in the CSV.
2. Need to fix creation of child candidates from CSV
Say I create a bunch of races and candidates; then I put all their respective UUIDs into a properly-formatted Race CSV; then I upload that CSV to Blox. The race_child candidates SHOULD become associated with the race that I specified. Jason Dean from Madison told me that this used to be the case. But for more than a year, it has ceased working.
The end result is that we have to go through hundreds of races and manually attach all the candidates as children. This takes hours, when it could all be done up front instantly.
3. Broken search
Many aspects of Election Stats search are broken.
For example, if you add a column (ie Right-click a column header, then select "Columns" > "Delete Time"), that column will immediately disappear when you refresh the search.
When you sort by a column other than "title," results on different results pages overlap (ie: Sort by "city" and Page 2 contains multiple results which were already listed on Page 1). I believe that sometimes results are *missing* in this circumstance, as well.
Further, search seems to be limited to only the title/name fields.
Say you wanted to search for all the races which have "St. Louis County" in the "District" field so that you could batch-add the elections/st-louis-county section tag. We can't do it by searching for "St. Louis County." Search doesn't turn up results for things in "District," "Description" or even the "Notes" field, for example.
The only workaround we have found is to concatenate information into the name fields. So, the "Affton Fire Protection District Director" race becomes "Affton Fire Protection District Director+=St. Louis County"
Now we can type "St. Louis County" into "Search text" and find the right races.
4. Not enough batch tools
Okay, after concatenating and uploading a CSV as explained above, we can search for "St. Louis County." But yikes, there's hundreds of races -- and we can only batch-edit one results screen at a time.
Same problem if we want to batch-delete assets. Say you wanted to purge all the races from 2013 out of the system. Yes, you can search by "Election Year," but I would have to delete the 597 races one screen at a time. That means hitting the select-all check box and clicking "Delete" 24 times, instead of just once.
It would save time if the Batch Edit, Unlock, and Delete buttons had submenus similar to Export, with which you could apply those functions to "Selected Assets Only" or "Search Results Only".
1. Need a way to specify section tags, or to specify party
I find it strange that candidate assets don't have a discrete field for party. Instead, the Election Stats way is to assign a party is to give the candidate a section tag (ie /elections/party/republican).
But neither the Candidate CSV nor the Race CSV have a field for section tags. So there is no way to specify to which party a candidate belongs when we upload the CSV.
The end result is that we have to go through hundreds of candidates and manually select add party tags, when it could be done all up front in the CSV.
2. Need to fix creation of child candidates from CSV
Say I create a bunch of races and candidates; then I put all their respective UUIDs into a properly-formatted Race CSV; then I upload that CSV to Blox. The race_child candidates SHOULD become associated with the race that I specified. Jason Dean from Madison told me that this used to be the case. But for more than a year, it has ceased working.
The end result is that we have to go through hundreds of races and manually attach all the candidates as children. This takes hours, when it could all be done up front instantly.
3. Broken search
Many aspects of Election Stats search are broken.
For example, if you add a column (ie Right-click a column header, then select "Columns" > "Delete Time"), that column will immediately disappear when you refresh the search.
When you sort by a column other than "title," results on different results pages overlap (ie: Sort by "city" and Page 2 contains multiple results which were already listed on Page 1). I believe that sometimes results are *missing* in this circumstance, as well.
Further, search seems to be limited to only the title/name fields.
Say you wanted to search for all the races which have "St. Louis County" in the "District" field so that you could batch-add the elections/st-louis-county section tag. We can't do it by searching for "St. Louis County." Search doesn't turn up results for things in "District," "Description" or even the "Notes" field, for example.
The only workaround we have found is to concatenate information into the name fields. So, the "Affton Fire Protection District Director" race becomes "Affton Fire Protection District Director+=St. Louis County"
Now we can type "St. Louis County" into "Search text" and find the right races.
4. Not enough batch tools
Okay, after concatenating and uploading a CSV as explained above, we can search for "St. Louis County." But yikes, there's hundreds of races -- and we can only batch-edit one results screen at a time.
Same problem if we want to batch-delete assets. Say you wanted to purge all the races from 2013 out of the system. Yes, you can search by "Election Year," but I would have to delete the 597 races one screen at a time. That means hitting the select-all check box and clicking "Delete" 24 times, instead of just once.
It would save time if the Batch Edit, Unlock, and Delete buttons had submenus similar to Export, with which you could apply those functions to "Selected Assets Only" or "Search Results Only".
Customer support service by UserEcho
Election Stats is a product originally co-developed by Lee and Town News, and the development tasks in question would have fallen to our staff in this case. I'll follow up with you shortly in regards to these requests.