Dennis - yes, exactly! I agree with your comments. My thought is that we have a bunch of plants in the database with registered bud/branch counts and I know that these are largely (or entirely) the registered numbers as they grew in the hybridizers gardens, but the fact that we have/list specific values for them suggests that we assume there is enough consistency in the cultivars to even record such data and make it official. Therefore, I assume that we can do the same with all cultivars and come up with the 'typical' bud/branch count.
Larry - You said "That is the whole point! Yes we have a system, yes it is a good system, but no it is not getting the comments added. This is just an attempt I think, to come up with some way of stimulating the participation of people to make comments on plants they grow." ....and yes, that is exactly right! I'm trying to do something to create greater participation in something that I view as fairly critical to hybridizing.
Becky - that's a good idea and it could help. I know I have tried looking at full-plant pictures and bud pictures for different cultivars and very few entries have them; but I'm not convinced doubling the acorn reward would create as much participation as a dedicated thread would. The acorns are probably a good incentive for newbies, but I wonder if once people get enough acorns to satisfy their 'badge purchases', it stops becoming as much of an incentive.
Someone had previously suggested that we create threads for each individual cultivar, but I think that's too difficult of a way to handle this, especially considering how many daylilies there are, and it would lose participation because there would be too many threads created for people to sift through. And if it happened and we did, say, 1 cultivar per day, many people would miss out if they don't regularly check ATP, are on vacation, etc...And some cultivars just aren't very popular, so few to no people have them and there would be a lot of empty threads.
I am starting to lean in the direction of doing threads with lists the more I think of it. If we did, maybe we could just do it alphabetically (that way people can sort of prepare for the following week by going out and recording info for the next alphabetical set). However we do it, though, it would probably be best if we let people post to it for a set amount of time and then, after that amount of time, for any cultivars that were in the thread that didn't get any bud/branch/foliage information posted, maybe we could create that field on the cultivar's page and then highlight it. And maybe we could use Becky's idea at that point!
So the cultivars that didn't get responses for bud and/or branch count could look something like this:
