Risk-Based Searching-currency exchange,non-payment,partner rating,delinquency...

[Guest]

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[Skimmis]

At the moment the default settings on nuclear spike only shows 16 loans from bolivia of 837 loans online.
A bit boring if you have 25% of portofolio in Bolivia loans.
Should / could the default settings be somewhat altered?

[Skimmis]

partner rating 4, partner del less than 1, , show loans with currencyexchange yes, showloans without no payment protection yes
gives 355 loans

[Skimmis]

http://www.kiva.org/lender/rinkuhero

Kiva Nirvana

Would bee great to get help from http://www.nuclearspike.com/kiva/ to find loan to countries or MFI's i dont have in portefolio.

[nuclearspike]

This is a great application and is pretty much a must have for any serious Kiva lender.  I just discovered the analyze lender button and it's pretty neat... It helps be better visualize the length of my loans and the impact that has on the money I get back every month.   

My suggestion would be for the risk based loan search is to add optional filter for portfolio yield %'s and profitability stats that kiva now makes available on the loan pages.  I'm not as much interested in but perhaps other people would like to be able to identify loans that are not pre-disbursed.

Thanks, I'm glad you find it useful! Until kiva publishes that data of the yields through the APIs, I would not want to have to manually keep it all up to date. I've already emailed them about it, if you want tools like mine to be able to have access to that information, email kiva and request it.

[nuclearspike]

Longing for an update of this wonderful tool
http://www.nuclearspike.com/kiva/

Skimmis: well, I have something for you...

I'm currently in the process of a major re-architecting. The current nuclearspike version you have the link for downloads everything to the browser directly from kiva for every user that visits my site. I've restructured it so that now I have a server that sits and pulls new loans from kiva all the time and has all the data ready in a format that my browser-app wants. What this means for the user, is you get what I call "Live Filtering". As you play with the knobs, the list updates immediately.

If you want to check out the new site (it's still in early development stages so don't be surprised by disabled options or occasional downtime as I upgrade), go here: http://www.kivabank.org (if that doesn't work, try http://kiva.cloudapp.net).

I'm migrating features from the old app over. Currently the new app surpasses the old app's search capability, but currently doesn't show descriptions, large pictures, extra partner details, etc. All of that is coming. I first wanted to get it to a functional state and then I'll expand from there. It also doesn't have the Lender Analyzer either.

What's New?

• There is no need for a search button anymore, everything gets searched immediately as you move the controls. Every 4 minutes it seamlessly refetches fundraising loans from my server in the background and updates the list.
  
• New option to limit by full repayment date
• You can now control the sort! Either by Repayment (previous version's only method), Newest, or Amount Remaining.
• Keyword search: will match lender name, partner name, country, sector, activity, use. You can type parts of words like "nicar repai" and you'll get Nicaraguan loans with "Repair" mentioned somewhere in the Use/Activity.
• Secular/Religious Filter: The Atheist group maintains a list of MFIs that actively engage in proselytizing. I allow users to either remove those partners OR limit to only those MFIs.
• Delinquency, Default, Repayment, Still Needed, Group Size sliders Minimums and Maximums are now all are adjusted to fit the data. The old version wouldn't let you find loans with a delinquency over 3%, now you can turn the Delinquency all the way up to the highest reported rate, if you choose.
  

Ultimately, the idea for the site is that you go on the site, save filters for every type of loan you're interested in, then select what to do with that search, which could be RSS feed, Email Alert or even allow the site to auto-relend for you based on your prefs (that will, of course, have to go through quite a bit of testing before I release that).

Excluding loans you've already lent to is coming soon... I really want that.

At this stage, do not report issues. I probably already know about them, there are many things on the to do list...

Enjoy!
Paul / nuclearspike

[David2051]

Hey Paul, this is really great!  I tried to get to it the other day and couldn't, which made me hopeful...  Once I was able to get in I saw you had some new features for us.  I love being able to see the big picture and the full text listing.  That's awesome.  And the About page made me laugh, though I am easily amused.  I was surprised to see that the defaults now basically show all loans, rather than a safe or conservative subset.  Anyway, thanks so much for all that work you are putting into this!   

[nuclearspike]

David,

I'm glad you like it! I finally resolved the issue where it would only stay active for a few hours at a time so I don't have to keep restarting the site a couple times a day anymore. I should have waited to announce it until after I'd resolved that issue.

The reason why the defaults are unrestricted is that my approach for the new site is that it allows any type of search, not just safe searching so I didn't want to assume anything about the reason the user came to the site. I have a button under the criteria that switches it to a safe search with one click. But now that you can search by keywords, you may just want to find a retail loan in Peru that is paid back within 6 months, without any concern about the non-payment liability or partner rating. I had originally had it much more restrictive but so few loans were coming back (sometimes none) that I  wanted to give the user the decision about how they wanted to search.

I'm eventually going to allow users to save their criteria so they can just use a drop-down to quickly flip between their saved searches. To start, I'll just save your last query to your machine and use that as the default when the site first loads.

I've begun testing the alerts engine. For me, I like to find > 4 rated partners with a 3 month turnaround  (I don't care about the sector, gender, country, etc) and I'm getting emails when my server discovers those (within a few minutes of them being posted). My server will even log into my kiva account for me to get my balance and stop alerting me when I don't have any money to re-lend.

Thanks for promoting the site in your signature!
Paul

[David2051]

Oh, thanks for pointing out the buttons at the bottom.  I didn't notice them because my window isn't big enough to see them.  I maximized my browser and hid some tool bars and then I'm able to see the buttons, and just noticed for the first time also that the buttons for putting the loan in the basket and checking out were down there.  I thought you hadn't gotten to those features yet...  I still cannot see everything at the bottom of the window, the information on the MFI is cut off, but both scroll bars are the entire size of the window, so I cannot scroll down.  This is in FireFox 3.6 if that matters.
In Chrome there are no scroll bars at all and with less area used by Chrome itself, I can see the entire KivaBank screen.  Yeah!!  
In IE8 there is only a vertical scroll bar but it doesn't scroll either as the bar is the full size of the window.  I do think this is very exciting work that you are doing! 

[Diane R]

I'm not seeing my previously-set criteria preserved over instances, I have to reset everything each time I visit the site (or refresh a page!).  Using Chrome on a Windows XP machine.

--Diane.

[nuclearspike]

David,

Yeah, I don't have it auto-sizing to the browser window yet. On my Mac laptop with Firefox it cuts the bottom as well. This is on my to do list.

Diane,

I have not yet added the feature to save between refreshes. My wording wasn't very clear on that, that feature is not there yet, but is coming.

Paul