Andy from Fuelly

You can already export your data. Here is the FAQ for that: http://www.fuelly.com/faq/9/Can-I-export-my-fuelup-data

Thanks for the info Dan. We actually tested, web, mobile, apps and SMS last night they were all working. So this was just some kind of fluke issue. If this ever happens again, just edit a feul-up and click save (with the original data) and that should trigger the image update.

ScubaDad, it appears your sig image not updating was a one off issue. We were able to manually request the image be rebuilt and it's showing the proper number of fuel-ups now (5). In the future, if any of you all have this problem, please follow the instructions here which basically tell you to click edit and then save a fuel-up to tell the system to rebuild your sig image. As for the P.O.S. vehicle, I did some preliminary research and could not find anything blatantly obvious that it's spam so there is nothing I can do at this time. Our current system only allows me to ignore an entire vehicle, not individual entries which look suspicious. Thanks for pointing out that entry though, it's helpful to review and take notes. We'll find ways to promote the value of trusted users and demote the value of potentially spammy contributions but that won't be for a little while. For example, if someone signs up, loads in a bunch of back dated data on their first visit and never shows up again, that follow the normal/natural patters for fuel logging. I'm not going to get into details about our plans on how to identify unnatural behavior because I don't want anyone to research my posts and find a way to game the system. Just rest assured it's on our To Do list and we'll find some clever ways to identify spammy contributions. The POS example is a great way to also showcase why we should allow users to view data in various ways. For example, If you have a new vehicle and we have a small set of cars in the database (for this example lets say there are just two vehicles in the database). If one of them has 4 fuel-ups and is averaging 20 MPG but another has 16 fuel-ups and is averaging 40 mpg the current setup would simply take these two and divide by two giving 30 mpg. Another way to analyze this data would be to take all 20 fuel-ups and average those which would give the car a 36 MPG. Now there are issues to this latter formula as well as it would weigh the vehicles with more fuel-ups with more weight then a vehicle with less fuel-ups and in many cases a person who logs for a ongoing period of time might be a more conscious driver then an average Joe and thus their great MPG would skew the stats. My guess is that we'll come up with an algorithm that will identify statistically significant outliers and remove them from the formula. From there well do some math on fuel-ups from all vehicles combined along with the math for each vehicle and their respective MPG and then blend these into our official estimate. We would provide distribution graphs, scatter plots and other visual/raw data values so it's easy to see more then one way to look at the data.

ScubaDad, how did you add your last fill up? Was it using the GasTracker+ app?

ScubaDad, just a quick heads up that we are looking into this issue about your signature image. Hopefully we will have this resolved soon, I don't think any update will be needed on your part. What you have in place should work. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I found you doing a search for Fuelly mentions in recent weeks. I'm planning to try and reach out to our members on their "home forum". I am a forum guy through-and-through and know how often I turn to my forum buddies to discuss something. My forum friends often point me in the right direction pretty quickly. So my thinking is that Fuelly needs to go where our users are, read what people are saying, ask questions and learn how we can make our product better. I agree about the charts and data, it should show you numbers for how ever granular you want to filter things. I am hoping we can also define some other interesting stats from our data like distance per tank, average time between fuel-ups, Average cost/mile for driving (once again you could filter by locations such as state, southern states, northern states, etc. View averages by month, etc and mixes of views so you could view performance of a hybrid in northern states (ie. colder winters) by month and view seasonality in the charts. The idea is that we have all this data, lets try to find some interesting ways to show the data so everyone can learn from each other. As for bogus leeches, we'll work on some algorithms to find them. My background is with online forums (like this one) and we've found some pretty effective ways to find shills in the forums and will use some of those techniques as well. Our goal will be to develop an algorithm that understands a patterns for a specific make/model and can alert us to a potentially bogus user. I think we'll get pretty good at spotting them and removing their data from our calculations... I agree about seasonality and geographic location. We are planning to handle this data by collection location of fill-ups from mobiles. For example if fuel-up #16 was in Minneapolis and fuel-up #17 was also in Minneapolis and the time between fuel-ups looks "normal" then we can assume you have been driving in your home town of Minneapolis. From there we can request local weather info and append the actual temps in your area for the days between Fuel-Ups. We'll then have a profile where you can tell the system when you normally drive and it will use this data to determine an average temp for your fuel-up. We'll constantly look for better ways to gather accurate data, for example, once we have an ODBII reader it will know the exact times you drive and we'll get even more accurate temps. Temp is important for any batter powered vehicle. Yes, that's exactly what the "new foundation" is going to be. We'll be rolling this API out internally and then to the public. The data will probably be provided under the Creative Commons Attribution Required (non-commercial) license with some type of rate controls for new accounts and then unlock the volume once we understand how someone is going to use the data. We want the data to be open and available but we also want to protect it (for example, unethical uses, etc). We'll have to find the right balance.

Hey there, I just wanted to let you know that we're listening and plan to incorporate your ideas into a future release of Fuelly. Right now we are working on a new foundation that will allow us to iterate faster in the future. We're also working on a better next gen version of apps (iOS and Android) as we feel it's important to have a native solution which is as fast as possible to log your fuel-up at the pump (with an offline mode for syncing when a connection is available). The apps will be connected to the new back-end foundation. We are planning a better way to organize vehicles by using VINs and/or drop downs with more granular fields based on a reverse VIN type query where we can ask owners which options are on those vehicles as well. As this all comes together we'll have the data to allow users to drill down with more granularity. When it comes to Median vs Average, we'll probably allow users to filter and see both. We'll also look at ways to analyze stats based on all fuel-ups for a specific search, not average for a single car and then average for that specific make/model/options. We'll be setting up an Ideas section soon so you can add your ideas and vote them up. I'll also stop by here to read your Fuelly related posts so feel free to post your ideas here, I'll read them. Thanks for being Fuelly members, it's amazing what we can all do together!