8 replies to this topic

[Doktor]

Hello everyone,

I am a newer member on this website, but am by no means a stranger to the nootropic, supplement, and performance-enhancement (athletic) industries. If this is the wrong venue to submit this post, then I apologize in advance...

How would you all feel about a new web community dedicated to self-enhancement? To further elaborate, a forum focusing on self-actualization through spiritual, physical, chemical, etc means...

The forum would also provide a vendor database, and eventually, an escrow system for trading goods related to the content.

Thoughts? The website is currently under development, but I thought I would gauge some public interest, and this seemed like a good place to ask.

[renfr]

well I agree that longecity needs a lot of reworking, for instance there should be a huge nootropic database on a wiki type platform.
This database would be made and edited by willingful contributors such as you and me, wikipedia doesn't have intensive information on nootropics, there we would gather all information from all legit sources (wikipedia, pubmed, various studies, ...), put different sections listing side effects, contradictions reported by users as well as a section with a short experiences of the nootropic by its users.
To me doing this is absolutely essential, today longecity is flooded by newbies who come around and ask the same questions all the time, if they had a huge article mentioning all they want to know it would be a huge relief for them and for everyone else.
This isn't difficult at all, installing a wiki is a no brainer, as for contributors, there are a lot of experimented users who would do that and I would also like to bring my knowledge about nootropics I use.

I also second what you're asking for, a trading platform would be kinda good, users could trade their nootropics and become sellers.

I'm not sure what is the current business plan of Longecity executives, are they developing something new for this community?

[Doktor]

Sorry for the late reply, I've actually been very busy with this website idea. I already have a forum nearing completion, and it's looking very nice I am a computer programmer for a living, so trust me, there will be lots of really cool tweaks/hacks involved

I have a pretty cool idea that I would like to pitch, to get some feedback on!. I was thinking of integrating a "database of supplements/nootropics/psych-meds" directly into the forum's code. For example, when you start a thread, you have the option of specifying what substance it is regarding. I would have this database stored on the web server in an SQL table. That way, there would be an incredible degree of archiving/organizing ability built right into the forum, which would make searching for particular information incredibly easy.

But wait, there's more! I was also thinking of having a "Treatment/Enhancement Finder". It would be a web app, where you would choose from a list what you would like to treat / enhance. For example, you could choose to enhance motivation, or treat anhedonia. The app would then parse the database of substances, and make a list of recommendations based on the drugs' efficiacies for what you specified.

The ONLY potential issue I can see here would be getting all the medications/supplements into the database with correct info... but I have an idea for that too. Make the system crowd sourced. You can add an entry yourself (after x number of posts), and it simply has to be reviewed by a moderator or something before it's accepted. Once in, members of the site could rate the various properties of any of the medicines, report junk, leave comments, make revisions, etc etc etc.

I want this whole website to be based around community. I am doing this out of sheer interest, and because I love programming as a hobby. I do not plan to make a dime from this project, and want anyone on the site to have a voice capable of making big changes anywhere they think they see a potential improvement.

Any feedback? :D

[Doktor]

I just realized; I have some experience developing web scrapers (for those not into programming, a web scraper essentially harvests specific data from websites that you tell it to crawl). There are already tons of websites devoted to archiving data on psych medicines, and even rating certain effects... I should be able to write a scraper that collects this data for me

That leaves supplements/nootropics...

[Mind]

LongeCity does leave something to be desired when it comes to organizing all of the data here, but it is not for lack of ideas. This wiki/database idea has come up more than once a year for the last decade. LongeCity is an obvious place to build it because we already have great traffic. We can just never get any volunteers to put it all together.....because it is work....and people do not like to work.

I would support some grant money for a project like this, just keep in mind we don't have a ton of money. If there is enough interest, we could do a little extra fund-raising.

[Doktor]

I completely understand where you are coming from on the development/maintenance time requirements. I would be more then willing to have this app (when finished) hosted on here, as I agree, Longecity would be THE place to host it.

I've already made some developments. I am currently using servers over at scraperwiki.com to collect as much data as I can from websites such as "treato.com" and especially "http://www.ncbi.nlm..../pcsubstance/"; It's actually going pretty darn well so far. I tend to go crazy automating my tasks with computer algorithms, and this project will be no different. My rough plan at the moment is to keep scraping medical data from the web, dump it into a local SQL database on my computer, and then cross-reference/analyze it with language-parsers and similar kinds of tools.

Data mining has actually been a long-time interest of mine, so I have a lot of enthusiasm about this idea. I think I could possibly have a rough app up in a month or two, with a huge database of cross-referenced and multi-indexed journals, drug specs, articles, research papers, etc.

It will be challenging, but I don't mind doing it, and I definitely think it's possible with the vast amount of data on the web.

[Luminosity]

I will look at your website when it opens. We are luck to have so many smart people on this website.

[Doktor]

My direction on this project has actually changed considerably now; I working with someone else from this community on a semi related idea It will be pretty cool when it is finished.

[Mind]

Update. The proposed budget for 2013 has include expenditures up to $1,500 to develop a supplements database. Please let me know if you are interested in developing your idea further.