Although I still have a lot to add and change with the system, I am now opening up the Reviews System once again. The original Reviews System was all the work of its author. However, with Version 2.0.0 all of the 100+ changes and additions were done by me.

Here are some of the changes:

1. Many bug fixes.

2. More information in tables.

3. Many new stats are kept and there is a stats page showing the members with the highest totals.

4. There is a bias score which shows the average score each member rates products. This way you can get an idea whether a review score is a lot higher or lower than the author's usual score.

5. Profile page has totally been redone to show a lot of stats. It has a temporary photo on it which will be something else at some point in the future.

6. Now you receive points for many many things such as review submits, deal submits, rating someone's reviews, getting perfectly rated by a member, and various other things.

7. Many things have been re-skinned to look better. I am still not happy with the graphics or skinning totally, but it is much better than the original author had it.

8. Your stats decrease if a review is deleted. Also if you report reviews or deals and they repeatedly are determined by staff to be good then it counts as a bad report. If I agree with the reporter it counts as a bad review or bad deal. Too many bad reports, bad deals, or bad reviews and you will not be allowed to do them for the remainder of the month.

9. I created a task which runs at midnight Central Time on the first day of each month. This way monthly totals in various categories can be reset. It then puts those totals into a "last month" set of categories where I can see who submitted the most during the past month. In the future there will be points awarded to the top reviewers in various categories at the end of each month.

10. Now there is a page to give a reason for reporting a review. In the past it abruptly sent the report once you clicked the button and did not give any other warning or any area for you to tell why the review should be deleted. Also now reported reviews' stats don't count toward ratings until I re-approve them.

11. I added a field for me to put a description of a product and also rate it as a must buy product. However at this point I have not begun to use it or display it anywhere.

12. I re-skinned some tables to have photos shown to the left of the product name. You can submit photos of products in gallery until I put in a system for you to directly submit them to the reviews system. The best size for the photos is thumbnail size, so I would simply get the URL of the auto-generated thumbnails in gallery and use those.

13. When hovering over the photos it will now tell a short description I enter for the products.

14. At this point clicking the images will show the photos in a larger size if available, otherwise it will show the same size photo. I am considering not having the photos remain clickable or link to anything.

15. There is now a Tags System for the reviews. This way reviews can be linked together thus making it easier for readers to find similar products. However, it may work better if I change it to a category tagging system and I enter the tags myself. For now I am leaving it where reviewers can tag things though. I just feel like it may be cluttered if reviews are linked rather than actual products because the same product may have 100 reviews with the same tag and then a reader will have to wade through a lot of reviews for the same product.

16. Added a link to ALL reviews. It is on the main reviews page under the search box.

17. Added a top products page. However currently it is more like an "every product" page because I have not yet been able to properly sort it by overall average scores.

18. There is a link on each review page which leads down to the ratings. Down there is another link to skip back up to the review.

19. Added a conclusion field to the add form. This is optional, but is an area to give a final decision with a few sentences where readers can skip straight to a quick summary if they do not wish to read the entire review.

20. Added more stats to the review page.

21. Totally re-skinned the review pages.

22. Added a status field to the add form where a reader can know if you are just doing a quick review before you have tested it (where they have an initial idea about the product) or if you are writing a review based on a lot of testing.

23. Separated out the category ratings and detailed ratings for each product on its add form. This took a long time to do because it was complicated. I just felt it was confusing having them all listed together.

24. Now instead of each product page only showing the average reviewer score for the product, it also shows the Got Talk Score (currently it is my score), and it also shows your own score for the product. This way you can see how your score, my score, and the average score all compare for a product.

25. Now the deals table shows who submitted the deals.

26. Security fixes.

27. Added views counters for reviews and products where you can see which ones are being viewed the most.

28. Added the rating image to show on profile page since that table does not need username in it (obviously the reviews listed belong to that profile owner).

29. Totally redid the authors table on the front page.

30. Made a friends page. Now you have a link to click which has all of your friends from the forums listed and has links to their various reviews data, such as their favorites page, reviews page, etc... The friends page does NOT flawlessly sort alphabetically though. It has a few flaws in the sorting.

31. Added a favorite link to product pages themselves. In the past you had to go back a page to the category page to add a product to your favorite list.

32. Added many fields to the sorting row for products. Now you can sort reviews by many more stats.

33. Added a reviews section to your control panel for the forum. At this point it is only links.

34. Now you receive a PM for almost anything. There were some situations where PMs were not being sent for various things.

35. Added a few locations which show up in the online lists. For example if you are writing a review, it will say "Writing a Review" in the online list.

36. Count of new reviews shown at the top of all skins, along with new images and bvlogs for those components.

37. Redirect screens instead of the annoying messages at top of pages after submits.

38. Once you add a review it redirects to your review.

39. Before a review is approved the reviewer can still read it.

40. Colors now for numbers, not just the words for rating categories.

41. Perfect 10 ratings cause not only colors, but bigger fonts.

I am sure I forgot many things added. I have spent roughly 300-400 hours on this so a lot was bug fixing and perfecting some of the skinning. I am not satisfied, so i still will be working in the future to improve things.

To see bug fixes, click on the Support link under the logo at the top of any page and you can see which bugs I fixed and you can add new ones if you find bugs in the system still.

Some critical bugs I fixed were for such things as members being able to delete OTHER members' favorites, being able to add infinite points to oneself or another, and various other glitches by knowing direct URLs.

If you have any suggestions please feel free to let me know. I currently plan to skin things in a better way, have better graphics, add a request page, add a tips page, and many other potential features. I also HOPE to move some things. I hate how cluttered so many pages are, including both review pages and product pages! There is SO MUCH information it is hard to get it all displayed and also still not have it look cluttered.

The whole "write a review" setup needs to be simplified, but it is a very complicated process so I have to wait before I know how to do it.

The absolute main thing that is bothering me is that I do not feel comfortable with the categories I have set up to rate products in. Some of them I do not like what I named them and also I am not sure I have the best aspects there.

A few more notes:

1. Here is an example of a product image setup. I did not take that good of a picture becuase I sued my cell phone, but it still is an example nonetheless. WOuld be good if everyone resizes photos also. I cut mine from 230+k to 1/10th of that pretty much.

http://www.gottalk.com/index.php?autocom=r...cat&cid=178

Hover over the photo. Also click on it.

2. For support, report bugs by clicking the support link.

3. I still may change categories around so if you write a review now, you may need to re-rate some things if I change the categories.

4. I just noticed I had added a reviewpoints field to keep track of total points received from the review system. However I forgot about it and never put in the inserts for it. I may do that at a later date and it will be easy for me to know what to add it in with for everyone.

5. I reset views counts to 0 for everything so now the views totals will be as of today forward.

6. I did a LOT of stats inserts and updates throughout the system. There is an UNBELIEVABLE amount of math going on when you add or I delete something. So hopefully we don't find any issues with it. I did test it thoroughly, but recent changes could have always messed something up.

7. Those 2 ratings shown on the front review page are just to show you how it looks now. I will delete them later. They are only test rates.

I just updated some skin templates ina minor way and applied them to all skins. I would say it wasn't enough to warrant changing the version number. On things I modify I will increase the version number by 0.01 for bug fix releases usually, 0.1 for new feature releases, and 1 for major releases. But this was more cosmetic than bug fixes.

I badly need to re-skin and change some rate categories, I think. It's tough becuase there are so many features. I want to write some reviews myself whether others do or not. I guess it will be just me doing them. lol

I still need to fine tune the categories you rate products on is why I haven't written more reviews myself. I need to figure out how I want it and then just leave it that way and be satisfied. I have a lot of things to review.

I have fixed some things and also noticed one feature I never put a link to, so i will change this to 2.0.1 later today probably. I am stuck on a couple things I need to fix first.

This was a tad stressful. Anyway I think I have it all finished, but I am tired so i will make the final changes later today.