narrowing down interests

[amante_donne]

Title
narrowing down interests

Short, concise description of the idea
Interest names are combined to reduce interest names with similar names

Full description of the ideaI think that finding people with particular interests is not made easier by the fact that the spelling of an interest will be different from person to person. Also with a limit of

Comments

[azurelunatic]

I like this general idea, to automatically suggest interests based on alternate/similar spellings, to aid people in a) spelling their interests correctly, and b) not need to enter every possible variation of something to ensure that they get found.

I don't think that this suggestion intends to suggest that people be only allowed to use pre-approved interests.

However, I would not support an LJ-defined Definitive Spelling of any interest, simply because it would be a ton of work to maintain something like that. Besides, I don't think there would be any need. I would guess that if people are given the opportunity to see that most people have chosen "thunderstorms", with "thunder" and "thunder storms" as a distant second and third, and "thnuder storms" as a mere handful, then people who are interested in using the most popular one will naturally gravitate to the popular one without anyone telling them which is "preferred".

I also do not think that it would be necessary to have a separate way to submit interests to a list. People would add things as interests and they would automatically be added.

[amante_donne]

in hindsight i agree, but it would be nice if we could bunch up all those interests that mean the same thing but are spelt in different ways.

The only alternative is to have unlimited interests, that way we could use all options without it eating into a 150 option limit.