Reviews System 2.0.2 is now complete.

Although the number of changes may seem small, it actually took quite a few hours to complete this and I am much more satisfied with the system due to this update.

Here are the changes:

1. Categories to rate- I fine tuned which aspects of different product types are used to rate them. Most types of products have 20+ aspects to rate. While that is time consuming, it is a way to get things more sortable for people who want to sort products by some particular aspect. I can always fine tune this even more in the future if I or someone else has better ideas. Although it will be too late to do it after more reviews are added because I don't want to keep having people be forced to re-rate some aspects.

2. The tagging system (review links)- This was what I spent the most hours on with this update. In the past tags were simply shown on a review page and clicking a tag would take you to a link to all reviews which had an author use that same tag. Now there are many changes. Each reviewer still is allowed to enter tags and everything is the same with regard to those on each review page. However now when you click the link and get to the page of reviews there is a link at the bottom of that page to show only products which someone entered that tag for. Thus if someone wants to quickly see what products relate to the tag rather than only see which reviews have the same tag (which could have tons of reviews for a single product and get annoying in some cases), you simply click the new link to go to that next page. That page is similar to the top products page, in that it is sorted by overall rating and column titles may be clicked to re-sort by the other scores or number of views.

3. The tagging system (product links)- Now not only do review pages have tag links, but.... product pages now have them. How do product page tags work, you ask? Every tag for the product given by every reviewer of that product are all piled into a group of tags. There is a count for each tag. The 10 most frequently added tags for the product (based on those numbers, obviously) are then shown in that strip of tag links under the overall ratings at the top of any product page. Unlike the review page links, these links lead directly to the tag pages which are sorted by products rather than the ones sorted by reviews. Just as with the other page, however, you may click a link at the bottom to have it sort them by reviews instead. I think it's most useful to see the product sort page rather than review sort page, honestly, though. If nobody has entered a tag for the product it will say "None". I forgot to add this part to the actual review pages, but probably will do that later also.

4. I fixed some bugs. Although most of them will not be seen in the bug tracker because it was mainly bugs with the new features and then either 1 or 2 bugs with old features which I just don't even remember offhand.

5. Some changes on the back end to make some things perform better. One time I almost thanked people for help with the tagging system and now after I have gained knowledge I looked back and what they told me to do was absolutely pointless and a waste of coding so I did it a different way. It would be wise, however, to not add many tags to products because it will potentially slow down the system to go through a lot of tags for a product. If a lot of people already entered "baseball" for the upcoming mlb 2k8, for example, you might as well not really bother. It's ok if you do, where it will be considered a popular tag, but just don't overdo it with tags or it will slow things possibly.

As always if you have any questions, please feel free to ask. Also you are welcome to suggest new features and click on the bugs list at the top of any page on this site and report bugs with the system there.

I am "almost" satisfied with this system enough to start trying more to use it rather than add things, finally. There is a lot I still want to add, but it can all safely wait a long time and the system still be very good.

Thank You

Jason

I've been working some on this again. Hopefully will be done ina couple days. For some things I am having to do some complicated things and also the original author did some weird things in some functions.

I have the whole system turned off for today because I randomly decided to revamp the entire system by having each page set up separately instead of using the original author's setup where he was recycling the same templates for various pages and also piecing together pages from a lot of template bits instead of having it more organized and simple.

I am adding things in the process also. So hopefully I will be done in a day. Everything I am doing is somewhat easy really, but just time consuming. The only things I really need to "decide" are exact categories to be rated and also a better way to have things look. But I may just open it back without everything re-skinned for now.

Blah. I hate to do this (even though nobody uses it anyway so I guess it's no biggie), but I need to keep everything closed another day. Then I will HOPEFULLY also have it open for adding reviews again also.... but at least to view them if not add.

I've done tons of rearranging and now I am down to just needing to go through one major function and a couple minor ones to change them all over to this new style and then I have to delete old templates, make the new ones masters, rearrange a few things, add a few things, and make sure all rating categories are how I want.

I have already had a hand full of bugs in my new coding and I will be surprisedif more don't come up because I totally redid the system... Basically now each page has it's totally unique templates and I added some things and it's just a lot of new templates to keep up with and new names so I could have easily overlooked some new bugs.

This will be called 3.0.0 when I am done because it is totally rearranged, even though to members it won't look much different probably. I have spent probably 10-15 hours the past 2 days just working on this back end.

I realize I am talking to myself, but I just like keeping notes on what's going on in case someone does end care.

Basically I spent 5 more hours working on things and didn't even get 1 entire thing done becuase it ended up being more complicated than I realized and I had to learn a couple things to get bugs to stop happening.

Good news is now everything I have left should be things I can do easily though.

I really wish I could add tons of things, but at this rate I might as well just finidh the back end and finish up the features I already have started on then open it back and add other things later.

I am guessing it will be a couple more days before I am done, but maybe not.

Man.... I put in so much effort on this thing. I worked on it for probably8-10 hours this morning thus why I am going to bed so late.

I am not even going to test to be sure what I just added works because if it has a problem I would be tempted to stay up later and fix it.

ok one more day and I can finally open things back up whether I am done with everything I want or not.

I mainly have beenw aiting because I totally reorganized things and I have to go into the DB to get it changed over and so it would have been unwise to do that before even being done. It would have meant going into the DB many times.

I JUST SPENT AN HOUR OR TWO figuring out a main function because it was complicated as to which averages were being figured up in which functions.

I now understand where each thing happens so I am going to simplify it big time and then I'll be done other than maybe adding mroe features and re-skinning a little.

Man this has been beyond stressful. I've FINALLY come to a point where I got most things how it needs to be and I simply need to do a few minutes reorganizing/renaming html bits and I may add a couple more features. I've worked so long on this lately! Oh and I need to find someone to make me some graphics, but I will open it back within a day probably either way.

DOn't everyone talk at once!

Anyway I basically took a day off today. I already have done everything really though. Not much else to do to get it where I wanted.

If anyone has feature suggestions some time, let me know though.

My main problem is I can't ever decide on what to rate things in though.

So hopefully I will be done in a day.

As usual I did finally come to a point where I know it's best to stop adding features for a while. So I just need to straighten things up and decide for SURE on what to rate each product on because I can't keep changing them becuase it messes with current reviews.

This has become exhausting and frustrating so I am doing what i have time for later today then opening it and that will be that. I'll have to add my other feature ideas on a later version because this has just taken forever. In the future it will be quicker because of my changes though.

All I MUST do before opening it back is simply adding info to one table and being 100% sure what categories I want things rated on. Then I need to clean up stats that got messed up from my testing such as my incorrect review count on my profile.

I am not happy at all with the look of it still, but oh well.

The decision that's hardest to make is what to do about rating albums. Currently you have to have the artist already in the database when adding it. So I either would need to make it where you can add that category yourself if the artist is not already there, request it be added, or mayeb have an extra field where you type in the artist and I then not have each artist as a separate subcategory.

Very complicated and no way is ideal.

I should have been writing all of this in a blog instead of posting over and over in here.

Anyway I just spent a LONG time adding a feature where for cds you don't have to ask me to add an artist anymore. I set which categories (such as cds) will allow the writer to create a new category, not only the new product itself.

I think I am going to stop letting groups have their reviews auto approved if they create a new category or product though... It's fine to allow some groups to bypass approval for a review itself, but I don't want people adding categories without me even noticing. So I will just make it where if you add a review to an existing area it will be approved right off, but if you are adding a new product or category/product both, it will need to be approved by me where I notice when new categories are added.

I MAY make it where new products can still bypass approval, but DEFINITELY I can't do it for category also or people will be adding a lot that I possibly won't notice.

This feature was extremely complicated to add, so I need to test it later today.

I may open this later today or may decide to add more features and release it in a day or two. I would "rather" go ahead and open it back though so I may just do it within 24 hours and then still add things the enxt couple days, but raise the version number.

Took a ton of time to fix bugs with the new methods of adding reviews.

Really only 1 more feature I want to add, 3 bugs I need to fix, rearrange things on product pages, make final decision on what to rate things in (I may just err on the side of caution by putting a lot of things to rate on and then if I change in the future it would be DECREASING so it would not ruin any reviews' stats), then simply clean everything up such as false stats and template bits.

So long story short, if I don't decide on any nrw feature, it will only take a couple hours later today. Then I can finally take a break. Yay.

Now now, keep down the excitement!!!

Anyway should be done later today. Just need to clean a little up and add a table. I found so many more bugs lately and also I see places where unnecessary functions are run. It's happened tons of places already where it was running things to get info already stored.

Gonna be done later today finally.

If I don't finish this within 24 hours then Aaron's favorite player isn't Kevin Brown.

I had to do an EXHAUSTING amount of tests to be sure all of the checking works properly. So now everything left is simple , but hopefully I will add 2 more features later today also. I don't think they would take long to add.

I'm so frustrated. Really I "think" the only bug is that certain characters can't be in the category titles that I have people rate on. But it's bothering me because it makes no sense at all how it's behaving! So I spent a LOT of hours today on a new thing I added and trying to fix this bug.

I should be done later today. I keep saying that, but I just don't keep realizing these issues will come up. Look in the bug tracker, there have been nearly 150 bugs since I took over on this system. And I did not even do bug reports for 100+ others.

Finally tested everything and all is going smoothely.

FINALLY I am down to almost nothing to get it opened back up. Need to update the database and do only VERY minor things so it will be done later today most likely.

Well I'm done, but I just thought of another feature which would come in handy so I may add that later before opening it back today.

Done.

Would open it now, but I am going to get some rest and I want to be able to type up the changes and some information.