Help us design a NEW FEATURE on Colnect
Our catalogs are a community effort and so they become bigger and better every hour of every day.
Currently, members have to follow our Catalog Contribution Guidelines which means they create a spreadsheet file (NIF) with all relevant information and pass it to a coordinator who reviews the information and processes it.
It has long been suggested that this method has a big disadvantage in making it hard to add a few items in and in that it has some learning curve. Its major pros are that it's easy for coordinator to review and the learning curve means more dedicated contributors so a more professional work than members who just want to upload a few missing items.
I would like to promote this long standing feature request NOW and get your help designing how it should look like. We'll together build the requirements for it and, as this can be somewhat external to Colnect's current code, I will be able to outsource this project so it'll be ready quickly.
Here's how I envision this: any member can access the "Add Items to Catalog". This example will be for "Add a New Stamp". A page opens with all fields that should be filled. Some are mandatory (country/name) and some optional (perforation). Some fields must be chosen from a list (country) and other may or may not be chosen from a list (series). Fields such as dates have their own edit gadgets. Images can be added to this page. All this works with AJAX meaning the page isn't reloaded. Warnings are issued on oddities such as expiry date before issue date (relevant in other categories) and duplicate name in catalog (it's best if all items have unique names) or duplicate catalog code (which is not allowed).
When done, the member clicks "Add to Pending Submission list" or "Add and Start Another One". Any new item opened "remembers" some of the previous choices (country/currency/...) so they don't have to be re-added every time. This "Pending submissions list shows all items the member wants to add so the member can review and correct them. An "Export to NIF" option is available if the member prefers to use a NIF later on.
After reviewing the list, the member can choose "Submit List to Coordinator" and possibly add a comment to the submission.
The coordinator view shows a list of submissions organized by submission date and showing the member who sent it and possible comments. Click on one such submission opens the list of items in it and, similar to what the member did before, the coordinator can review it and make changes. The coordinator can finally choose "Add this submission to Colnect" or "Reject this submission". Another option would be "Export to NIF" if the coordinator would prefer to use a spreadsheet editor to make fixes.
"Add this submission" adds all items and posts a message in the relevant forum.
"Reject this submission" requires a comment sent as a PM to the member explaining why this was rejected and what should be fixed.
Let me know what you think about it, what could be done better and feel free to send some screen designs if you know how to use a graphic software.
Thanks
