the product page should have a list of choices

We can't do this easily as we have thousands of options, of which Malone is just one.

We might be able to cache products the user finds 'interesting' and presenting them, but this is non trivial (and in particular would involve changing the current 'no db write on GET' policy or implementation of some other long term session storage)

Paul Sladen did some work at UDU specifying and prototyping a fancy combo-box form control for this kind of thing. We talked about how to do some fancy adaptive cacheing of the top items using a long-term storage. It wouldn't require a long-term session storage because we'd do it across all users of the system. It would require a secondary storage that can be written to on a GET.

Another option to solve the issues in this bug report is to offer a user the option to "add this product (or whatever) to my list of interesting things", store this list in the main database, and update the list using an explicit POST.

Another way of thinking about this is to add the concept of a "friend of a product", and allow people to join the "friends of malone" (for example). The UI would show products that you're friendly with, as well as those you own or maintain, with an option to search if the product you want isn't already listed.