...in parallel with the discussion about improvments to mine classifications.

One of the areas I really do want to improve is mine searching.

It occurs to me that we have a bewildering range of pages for listing mines. All added to over the years as I tried to respond to requests for features.

We have:

UK:

UK List by Major Mining Region
UK List by Mineral Type
UK List by OS Landranger
UK List by Region
UK Show all Mines A-Z
UK Major Surface Features
Search Mines, Quarries & Sites

International:

Show all Mines A-Z
Search Mines, Quarries & Sites

Does *anybody* actually use any of these? Is there any benefit (other than from Google's point of view) of having a hard-coded page listing (for example) all mines in a given UK OS Landranger sheet. Or are these anachronisms from when the site was originally started?

http://www.aditnow.co.uk/mines/default.aspx  page which allowed searching by country, zone, mineral type and mine type with a re-loading data-set every time the search parameters were changed be a better approach.

Do we need all those old pages?

Similarly in the header bar, we have 4 search functions; Mines, Mine Names, Photos and Forum. Should this be rationalised to 3 dropping the Mines name and have a simple eBay / Google style name search were a drop-down appears with suggestions as you're tying the name in?

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All the options are very useful but I tend to use these the most.

UK List by Mineral Type
UK List by OS Landranger
UK List by Region
UK Show all Mines A-Z

I rarely use anything other than

UK List by Major Mining Region


then drill down.

I just use the A-Z index of mines, sometimes the Major Regions.

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I normally just use the Mine Names search facility.

I just use all of them.

I just use the A-Z index of mines, sometimes the Major Regions.

Same here

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By a-z index, presumably people mean the link at the top right of the screen?

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By a-z index, presumably people mean the link at the top right of the screen?

There's an A-Z under the 'mines quarries and sites' drop-down menu as well.

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Personally the only lookups I normally use have been by 'mine' name or location and forum search by keywords. I have never used the facilities for looking up photographs (mainly because too many photographs have little or no description to search).
Looking up a 'mine' by name is OK but would be greatly improved by the 'Google style' list of possibilities that reduces as you enter more characters (a great help to us dsylexics).
Looking up a mine by location is more interesting as there are two coordinate systems in use UKNG (for UK) and Lat/log (for international) it would be nice to hide this and as the two look very different it should be possible to do this behind the scenes. There is a difficulty with location in some cases in that it is not well defined (i.e. what is the location of the oil shale deposits in Canada the current shipping point or the current working face or the original shipping point/working face) so some form of wild carding is needed. With UKNG this is easy as the precision can be given in the supplied coordinate (SH 12345 12345 being much more precise than SH 12 12). With Lat/Log this is not so easy, in fact only 'within a radius of x kilometers' is probably the only solution.
That said some of the qualifiers (mineral type, only with content, etc) probably need to stay as options. A move to this style of lookup would possibly help to 'internationalise' the site - which I know is off topic but was the subject of a question about a year ago.

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which I know is off topic but was the subject of a question about a year ago.

And of course the question of who pays my mortgage while I write all this :lol:

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which I know is off topic but was the subject of a question about a year ago.

And of course the question of who pays my mortgage while I write all this :lol:

The feature which automatically lists the mines nearby is very useful, if it could be expanded to include the best nearest pubs as well that would be very handy :thumbup:

I only ever use the A-Z strip at the top right of the home page.

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I mostly use by mineral type

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I use the name, sheet and regional searches....

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Mostly the a-z, but occasionally the regional lists.

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A-Z from the drop down, but having been prompted to look at the others, the major mining regions is very useful.

I use Mine names the most, followed by Mines, never used the photo search. Never used the forum search from that button as, by habit, used the search facilty in the forum itself. To be frank, I hadn't even realised there was a forum search there, now I have I will use that in future!

In fact, I am quite surprised you are even thinking of removing the mine name button.

The thing with a search is that you have to enter search criteria which is fine if you are looking for something particular. With the pre-defined links, you can just click and come across something you weren't even aware of and which may be of interest.

Robin

In fact, I am quite surprised you are even thinking of removing the mine name button.

Ah I probably wasn't clear enough there! It wasn't the 'Mine Nams' button (name search) button I was thinking of removing from the top of the page. It was the 'Mines' box, because that's a simpler version of the mine search page.

What I had in mind was a Google-stylee single search box for mines which suggests names as you type.

And below that a link for 'advanced search'.

On the A-Z lists, Landranger lists etc. I thank you all for the feedback. I had thought these might be felt to be a bit of a throwback, but if you like them and use them they'll stay (although they might get improved somewhat over time).

In fact I'll start another thread with thoughts on ongoing site improvments.

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