Hey guys,
Firstly, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, this only offers the chance of a significant finding given it’s only checking about 5% of SNPs in the human genome. However, given the low aggregate cost, number of members who had already taken it, and potential reward of striking gold, we believe it’s very much worth doing. Just want to make clear this isn’t a guaranteed thing - more of a long shot. A little down the road a full GWAS would be excellent, but low patient numbers presents a real difficulty.
Back to this idea: Anything is possible with time, expertise and money. As you know propeciahelp receives no money and only continues to exist because of the hard work of the staff.
It might seem as if it would be simple to add features but there’s a lot going on under the hood. While we integrate a number of pre-made features to the forum where we can, out of the box solutions cannot work to integrate and manage data structures in existing software. For the survey - aside from the huge development effort for the thing itself, which was thousands of hours on my part - we essentially have constant management between two distinct layers of software and their databases via an AI assigning tokens, checking new users, placing in back end and front end groups, et cetera. It would have cost many thousands and is completely bespoke. It took ages.
We can’t achieve this idea via additional software realistically, it’s not worth our time presently and we have to focus on other projects we need on the road asap. Saying that, one way we could achieve this which is feasible is if a moderator would want to maintain a group on the forum side by manually checking submissions weekly. I believe this would be feasible owing to the slow drip of submissions, far slower than the survey.
If a moderator would want to volunteer they can ping me and I’ll set a group up with an auto-awarding flair.
Best
