After more than a month of hard work, I am finally re-opening the Review System with Version 3.0.0

Not only are there new features, but I totally overhauled the back end of the system to allow it to have much better performance. I did a lot of things that only site administrators could appreciate also, such as better template names, better template setup, and better use of resources.

While there are still many improvements I would like to make to the system, I am very happy with what I have been able to do and believe that the system is much better, despite many of the features being the type of thing which will go un-noticed by the casual end-user.

I still plan to make more changes in the future, but here are most of the changes in the system in the release of 3.0

New Features

Searching

• There is now both simple and advanced searching.
  
• Simple searching will only return products with the exact name/phrase you enter. It is unable to work for words with 3 or less characters unless it is the entire product name.
  
• Advanced searching will return all products which have your word/phrase anywhere in the title, anywhere in the immediate parent category's title, or is anywhere in a tag for the product. There is no minimum of characters required. It even uses 1 less query so is more efficient than simple searching. The only drawback is you will get more results which may not be related to what you're searching for.
  
• As always it is recommended to make your search terms as specific as possible. Also note that it searches for your ENTIRE string of words in that exact order. You currently can not enter a lot of terms and have it search for each one individually or in other orders. This may be added later.
  

Submitting a Review

• The entire writing process has been re-worked. Many many changes.
  
• Enter your product title. You will then go through a straightforward series of clicks to select exactly where the product will go. Rather than it giving you a disorganized list of categories to pick from, you start by picking the main category and then are continually prompted to select the subcategories until you reach one that allows for adding the new product.
  
• If you accidentally overlook a product, don't worry. You will be given an error message and redirected to the already existing product or category which you need to submit the review into.
  
• The searching for existing products is much better. Like the regular search feature this will search anywhere in the titles, whereas in the past there was a 4 letter minimum in these searched which could cause there to be no results when there should have been some.
  
• Ability to add a new subcategory to be the parent of your product has now been implemented. It is only allowed where I set it to be allowed. Currently you can only add one when submitting a review for a music cd. This was done because in the past I would have had to add the singer/group as a subcategory myself. Now you can do it, but it must be approved by me in most cases.
  
• The entire set of pages in the writing process all has the IPB editor background to make it look nicer.
  
• In the past if you accidentally forgot to fill out part of the form, you would get an error message and in most cases lose your entire review as it was saved nowhere. Now if you forgot something, it will take you to a page with all of your entered information still in tact. However it's best if you check to be certain the form is complete, otherwise there is a chance it will be mis formatted. Also if you switch back and forth between standard and RTE editors it will possibly mess up your data also.
  

Editing a Review

• When editing a review if you forget to fill out part of the form you will not lose your changes. They will be displayed on the next page. However they will not have been saved. So you have the choice of continuing with the new data or going back and starting over totally with your original data still in place.
  
• You are now required to give a reason for edit. This is used where viewers can more easily notice what has been changed since the last time they viewed your review.
  

Link Bar For Guests

• The link bar is now there for guests, but only with the links which pertain to non-members.
  

Sorting

• Much of my time was spent on setting up sort functions in many places throughout the system.
  
• top products page/ tag category page- sort by product name, category name, review count, total views, average rating, your own rating, official site rating, or latest review date.
  
• reviews/tags/profile/all by member and other pages which list actual reviews- sort by author, date, status, overall score, reader rating, new since last visit, verdict, views, perfect rates(awards), and review name.
  
• Search page- sort by product name, category name, review count,average score, or latest review date.
  
• Category pages which list products- alphabetical, review count, overall average, each rated genre/specific category. Categories which start with an asterisk (*) are genres.
  

My Favorites

• The look is different. I still don't like it, but it's better than it was.
  
• Members with most in common- table at the top of anyone's favorites page which shows the 5 members who have the most in common favorite products.
  
• In the past if the favorites page was not your own, there was simply nothing in the far right column. Now the proper add/remove favorite button is there for you the viewer.
  
• On the linked to page which shows others with the same favorite there is also a count of common and total favorites by each member.
  

My Friends

• Tables entirely redone.
  
• Added review count.
  
• Added favorite count.
  
• Added favorites in common count.
  
• Added last review date.
  
• Instead of having the ugly row of links to member pages, now there is a column with 5 graphical links. Hover over the graphic to see what it is. These icons were obtained from free icon art sites. I am not sure if I can redistribute them so if I release this publicly, I may need to get someone to make new icons.
  

Changes In Look

• front page- Larger links to products. Count of reviews for that entire category of subcategories is in (). Hover over the number and it will tell you when the latest review was added into that category. Now the link to view all reviews is in that same table and looks like all of the other links. Radio buttons for simple vs. advanced search.
  
• Pages which list reviews- Different text on the verdict images to be more appropriate to their use. When a product was added since your last visit it will now have a "new" icon in front of it. If it has been updated since your last visit, but was originally added before your last visit it will now have an "updated" icon in front of it. These icons were from free sites, but I do not like the updated one, frankly. Now the latest update time is listed under the added time. This way you can notice if something was edited at some point.
  
• Review page- There is now a cool table near the top showing the entire history of the review. It shows every time it was edited and also the original add date. From now on if you need approval it will have separate entries for added date and approved date. The date shown in normal tables and used when determining whether it was added since your last visit will be the approved one. But if you ever want to see when you actually submitted it, you can simply look at the review page. In the future I may add more to that list. Please DO NOT edit reviews more than necessary. It creates a new row in a table each time you edit it and it could get loaded up if you edit too often and I would need to add a feature to prevent editing it more than x times if people do that. Tables have also been redone a little.
  
• Product page- In the past, the product pages had different templates for each table. So it was hard to rearrange them. Now I was able to put it as one template and I can rearrange it any way I want. I am trying t find a way to put product description into the top table without it looking bad. I also may end up changing it all around where a lot of that info goes on another page. For now it looks like it used to, but arranged a tad differently and a link to go down to the reviews and skip past those other tables.
  
• Many changes in look in other places also
  

Review Points

• Now points go not only into your points total, but also a "review points" total. This way we can keep up with how many points came from reviews system, just as is available for the sports betting system. I will probably list the person with the most points on the front page some time.
  

Back End

• Many foreach loops and queries were unnecessary. I have sorted those all out to improve functionality.
  
• The Stats Page now uses only 14 queries, whereas it was previously using 29. So major improvements resource-wise there.
  
• In ACP now you select whether each category will be used for products, regular categories, or a subcategory parent of a product which allows reviews. This makes it much easier to put the proper categories on certain pages and drop-downs.
  
• Template system totally redone. Much more organized and easy to change the way things look now.
  
• bug fixes- Just look in the bug tracker. Almost 100 bugs have been fixed in the past month of me working on this. Some were quite major.
  
• Many functions were redone in the files. They were either separated, combined, or omitted totally, depending on which was most efficient resource-wise.
  
• Many more changes. So many I just can't even remember them all.
  

Notes

• I have thoroughly tested most of this. I fixed so many bugs and did an unbelievable enormous amount of tests. it was very tiring. The enormity of this system makes it where bugs can get overlooked. If you notice bugs, please submit them in the bug tracker area.
  
• It is nearly impossible for something weird to happen when adding a review. i did many many checks. The only way reviews could be duplicated or weird things happen is if someone purposely wants to mess with the system. Even then I think I was able to prevent most of it. People will obviously be punished and not be able to write reviews for some amount of time if they intentionally hinder the system.
  
• I lowered the flood control time to only 5 seconds. This is because it was making it where searching would not allow going through pages for x number of seconds and if it's more than 5 then people would never be able to go through results properly. If there are no bad things done, I will keep it the same or lower it. I would prefer not being forced t raise it by spammers doing things to take advantage of the low flood control time.
  
• On this site reviews are now worth 200 points instead of 100 because some products have 30+ things to rate and it is a quite tiresome process to add a review sometimes. However, keep in mind it is paying out 20 times what writing a new post pays out. I may alter the points for review plus or minus in the future.
  
• I soon will add a help section for the review system.
  
• There are still some unresolvable issues currently which I will attempt to rectify at some point in the future. For instance, using spoilers in a review messes up the table.
  
• Some future plans include: description and editor's choice text on product pages, area for writers to add a tips section to their reviews, ability for members to upload product pictures themselves, allow sorting by genres/details for products in an entire category rather than only a specific subcategory, be able to sort reviews by update date, maybe show a graphic on favorites page for mutual products, TOTALLY change the look of many pages, and other things.
  

Review System 3.0.0 was released at 11:59 P.M. on 7/11/08 simply because I wanted to officially have its release date be 711.

Please utilize this system, as many of the cool features and averages are only useful if a lot of reviews are added and more than one per product (by different reviewers).

Thank You

Jason

I think I forgot to mention I made it where in dropdowns the rating categories are alphabetized now (through me doing it in the admin control panel, they aren't auto lphabetized) and also I made it where the tables showing the ratings now order them from best to worst. So you can simply glance at the rating tables and get an idea about the game. For example for my latest review of MLB 2K8 just by looking at the 2 tables you can tell that it does not fit into a variety of genres and it has a lot of mediocre ratings for specifics in the game itself (a lot of green on that table).

I have more ideas for things to add, but it's frustrating not having enough activity in the system so it makes me want to take my time adding things. If it were active with a lot of people I have more ideas to make it even cooler. I love thee system, quite frankly. I even like how it looks in some areas.

The following is a nice example of how I changed tables where products are ordered: http://www.gottalk.com/index.php?autocom=r...wcat&cid=47 Notice that column for specific rating? If you select one from the dropdown down below it will fill that in with the rating type you choose. I think that is quite cool if I do say so myself.

I think I am going to add two features I've wanted for a while:

1. Tracking- Be able to track reviews or products where you can see when a product you are interested in has new reviews or you can see the last time a review you're interested in was updated. You can already see these things if you pay attention, but for those who don't look at things often, you could have them all right there on your tracking page.

2. Requests- Request that unreviewed products be added and reviewed. Maybe someone has used a product you are interested in, but feels there is no audience interested in reading a review about it. Now you would be able to let it be known you're interested and someone may be nice enough to review it for you.

These shouldn't take long to add. I thought about trying to add the tracking system in right now, but it may take a couple hours so I might as well wait. I won't have to shut the system down for any of this anyway.

I am going to optimize this to run even smoother even though it is working very well as it is. Will only take a couple minutes whenever I do it.

I am still looking to add a couple more features some time, but it's got about everything that could be wanted. Unless someone thinks up another cool feature for me to add.

I am also deciding whether it's best to keep this only for this site or sell it to others for their sites since it's not as active as I would like on here currently.

Blah. I better shut this down temporarily because some programmers suggested that I doa few things to optimize it.

I will just keep a copy of the current files in case these changes don't work out so well.

I think I have tested the new way enough. But since I already am working on it, I might as well try to add a couple new features. Hopefully will only take a day. I think they would be fairly simple honestly.

Opened this back up. Not really any new features, more like optimizing, bug fixing, and preparing it for release to the public in case I do decide to sell it.

Few minore feature additions. Still deciding whether to add the tracking and request pages now or release it and add them later. Probably will release those features in a later version because I am exhausted from working on this.

Had to close this just for a little while because I was working on something and ran into a bug. It would not affect anyone, but I am trying to keep stats as they are until i fix that bug and change the stats back how they need to be.

Closed temporarily as I change over the whole way the system is set up. Shouldn't take long then I can reopen it before I even add the new features.

I have made it through almost 5,000 lines of coding in my changeover to a better setup. So hopefully I will have this done later today and opened back.

Probably will be a few days before having the new features though.

After a lot of hard work, I have opened the review system back up.

Please report bugs in the bug tracker area of this site if you notice any. I had to go through almost 8,000 lines of coding totally redoing everything and so it's likely I did a typo or some other human error somewhere.

Most changes were to make the system run much faster even when it gets a lot of reviews in it. So it was more of a preparation for the future. Also a lot of changes were made to allow it to work on other sites in case I sell copies at some point.

I plan on adding a few new features this week and then will officially call it version 4.0.0 since it was so majorly changed on the back end.

Thanks

This is really under construction in some areas. i did a lot today, but it's just time consuming and tedious so I have a feature partly in place and yet partly not finished. Basically on a couple parts it shows things that are not even related to the feature. lol

I am so tired of working on this, but it should be fine in a day or two. After this feature I am only definitely adding 1 more feature and then will probably wait a while before adding commenting on reviews.

Got done with some pretty cool features today.

I need to redo one area and I want to add one more feature and that should be it. Unless I decide to add commenting. I will probably wait for that though.

The reason I have adding turned off is because I haven't tested it since I changed everything.

Hopefully some people use this when I am done because it's been a killer doing all of these feature additions.

I got kind of burnt out. Only a couple more things I want to do really anyay. Would be good to get feedback though, which I never get with the site being so inactive lately.

I am considering what would be best for certain parts of the system. One thing that bothers me is you can't sort music by songs because it's the cd/album which is rated. And it would be kind of weird to put in a setting to allow sorting of it.

Hmm I could though. i could put a setting whee it allows you to add a track list and then you can sort somehow based off of that. I dunno.

I could always make a category to rate songs separately, but if I do that then nobody would rate the bad ones probably.

I could even make it where you rate each song when rating an album. Maybe I will do that, but I amnot sure how I would implement it or display it.

I started adding the ability to rate songs on a CD separately..., but the problem is that the first person reviewing the product (assuming I did not already add it myself) would have to list the songs and then rate them.

Well the person may make an error. So if others review the same product before I approve the first one, it would either have to:

1. have the reviewers rate the same song list that the first person entered.

2. have the reviewers enter the song lists themselves each time until 1 is approved.

Well the problem with #1 is that the first person may have misspelled some song names or forgot some songs.

The problem with #2 is many people may have different spellings or some have forgotten songs. And I can't sit there reading each list to be sure they are correct!

I may have to just not add this feature. Or if I do, maybe I will do #2 and then put a warnign message to be sure that you type all of the songs and spell them correctly. But it would be hard to keep track of it so frankly I don't know what to do now and this would be a pretty good feature.

lol I hadn't noticed that when I totally re-did the system I ahd it set in a way where you couldn't even review a product which isn't already reviewed. So even if anyone had attempted to write a review on a new product over the past month or two (ever since I re-worked the system) it would have errored out.

I fixed that now. I also "almost" have added the feature for song rating. I am going to call it a night as far as working on this and finish that feature up tomorrow.

I got most of the new song rating function there and got the kinks out of it, but I'm stopping for now with there still being no checks in one area and also without it even adding them. So long story short, if you end up where this feature is at, entering things will have zero effect and may confuse you until I finish this last step which will take probably 10-20 minutes max.

Hopefully with 1 more sitting I can be done with most of what I want to do for now.

Just got done doing extremely tedious things and finished that feature. I haven't tested it well yet though.

There is a lot more to all of this than you would think. For example I had to go to probably 10 or so different areas of files and have it delete rows from many tables one by one when a review or product is deleted. In other words, if a review is deleted then rows for ratings of that review must be deleted, etc etc.... It's tedious. Because I have to try to remember which ones need to be deleted and where!

I would "like" to have this in a form I can call 4.0.0 later today because I kind of like releasing things on interesting dates, if possible, and 3.0.0 was released on 711 and this would be released on 1010.

Trying not to keep posting in here since it's only me posting and looks weird, but just letting people know that there is a reason the review system will only be working on the main skin. I've been changing so many things and not done yet that I wnated to finish them before going to the trouble of getting them into all of the skins.

I started working on redoing the one area of the file which is set up in a pretty bad way. I tested it and it's fine, but I have some more to do.

Hopefully I will be done with this soon and start using it again myself. I don't have much left to do unless I decide to addinh the commenting and requesting systems.... then it would probably take a couple more days than it would if I don't add those until a later version.

Ha, I now have officially posted an entire page of only my posts since nobody responded to this.

If I am in the mood to code for a long time later today then I will be done with 4.0.0 by the end of the day. Otherwise it will be done in a day or two.

I can add most of what I want in a couple hours, but I am thinking of adding one more feature which would possibly take a few hours to add and then also would need to be tested.