Posted November 12, 200817 yr comment_10813 I am finally releasing version 4.0.0 of the Reviews System. I am currently calling it You Review, as I still attempt to figure out a name for it. The official release date of it is today, 11/11. I am not yet offering it to other sites though and am still fine tuning some things. I'm tired right now, but I will try to go through "most" of the new features. There are so many little changes here and there that I probably will forget some for now and will add them later. Front Page * A table of latest submitted deals. * A link to all submitted deals. * A link to all member ratings All Submitted Deals Page * See all submitted deals and sort them by various things. All Member Ratings Page * Stats of all members who have written a review. * Sort by various things. * Use the search bar to find a specific member. Skinning * A different look to the favorites page. * Photos by product names in the browsing areas of the system. ones which do not have photos have a new "no photo" image. * On an actual product page there are now icons which lead to various things. Simply hover over them for a description of what they are there for. Also a lot more has been skinned on those pages. Faq System * I always wanted an area where people can ask/answer questions or give tips. I now added that. * Get points for answering questions or if you submit a tip. It's a tad confusing, but simply answer your own "question" when submitting and it's considered a tip. Request System * Another thing I always wanted. Now you can request that a product be reviewed. It's a way to let someone know you are interested in a review of something which they may assume nobody cares to see a review about. * You can offer points to whoever will fulfill the request. Also they get some automatic points. * Give a minimum star rating of author who you will allow to fill the request. If the person has a rating lower than that then they will not get credit for fulfilling it. If you want to be sure and get a response quickly, use zero stars as the minimum. If you want to be sure a legit author responds, make a higher minimum. * If the request itself is ever deleted the requester does not get the points back and the one who responded gets their points taken back away. This is because there is no reason to delete one unless it violates some rule. * You can cancel the request if it has not yet been filled and then you will get your points back. Commenting System * Comment on reviews. * Comment on products (by clicking the link from the product page). * I finally was able to figure out how to put the mini editors on those pages and have it add them properly. Wish List * Add products to your wish list. * You can see everyone who has a certain product on their list or you can see all products on a person's list. Owned List * Add products to your list of owned products. * You can see everyone who has a certain product on their list or you can see all products on a person's list. Extra Ratings * For categories such as music cds, you can rate smaller lists. In other words, for a cd you can rate each song from 1-5 stars. You can list the song list yourself if it is not already there. * These are searched in the search function. Thus you could search for a song and get a result. Tracking * Track products * Track authors * Track reviews Profile * Use the new search bar to find a specific member's profile. Ban System * I can ban members from any of these features. Sorting * Many areas have sorting options. Pagination * Almost every page has results broken down into pages of x results per page. Stats * All of the new features have stats associated with them which are being kept. I will find a way to display them later. Information * More information is shown on some pages, including product pages. The Review * Add pros and cons to your review. * The new "worth" feature is where you can put a dollar amount that YOU would be willing to pay for a product. You must put a minimum of 1 cent. So if you hate a product and think it's not worth owning at all, put $0.01. If you think it's worth face value, put that. * More anchor links to go quickly to sections on the review page. Reporting * You can report basically any of these: review, deal, question, answer, comment, request. It took a ton of time and space to get all of those functions set up. Editor Choice Products * If a star is by the name of a product on a product page, it means I think it's the best of the best. Click the star to get the full official list of products recommended by this site. Sort By Detailed Ratings * You always could sort by a category. For instance you could sort movies by graphics to see which were rated the best in that category. Well one problem was that in music or video games there were so many subcategories that you could not compare ALL products in that area. Now there is a link to be able to compare all products in an entire root category. Thus you can compare ALL music items rather than narrowly only being able to compare cds by ONE artist, for example. Temporary Storage *If I don't think a review should be approved, rather than delete it I can move it to a new area. It will allow you to still edit it (if it's not actually reported first) and you can see the status on your profile. Bug Fixes * Many, many, many bug fixes. Back-End Improvements * Better optimization of queries. * Pretty much went through the whole file redoing things to where if I want, I could sell this and it work on other sites now. * Many new settings for the admin. There are probably 20 new settings for page limits, points for various actions, group permissions for various features, etc... Notes * The main file went from less than 8,000 lines in version 3.0.0 to more than 17,000 lines in 4.0.0. So I more than doubled the file size, thus part of why it took so long. * I plan on adding features related to "previews" of products which have not yet been released. * The comments don't look very great, but I obviously will try to make them look better later on. * I may add more minimums a requester can set. * I plan on adding a "private review" feature. There is probably a lot more I am forgetting. Many of the features I mentioned took a long time to add though. The favorites, wish list, and owned list allow you to find people who have similar interests to yourself. the tracking features allow you to see when a review, product, or author has done something new (you can see more easily when a review has been updated, for example). You can now comment on any review or product. You can request that some rare movie be reviewed and someone may be surprised that someone cares to have a review of that rare product they own. Submit tips or ask questions. Also a better look in some areas of the system. This of course goes with all of the other cool features such as reviewing in itself, counts of reviews in each category, links to deals on products, a very integrated point system, stats for top reviewers, rating of MANY aspects of a product, the new feature of being able to rate individual songs, the bias rating where you can see what an author NORMALLY rates a product as, pro and con section, the new feature for your opinion of a product's value, the already existing "tag system" to link products and reviews via tags, each product showing your rating, the site rating, and the average rating, images showing whether things are must buys or not, etc... I hope this system is used a lot in the future. I have not been able to test everything, so please submit bug reports if you notice bugs. This was a lot of coding so there are surely some bugs still in it. Thank You
November 12, 200817 yr Author comment_10815 Thanks. I still have a few things to fine tune, but I am going to just do those minor changes here and there, along with ones for sports betting. It's pretty disappointing I can't get a lot of people to this site to review things though. I would much rather it be unique to this site and active than to sell copies to other sites. Writing a review is definitely a long process if you want to write a good one. There are so many ratings I have to be done for everything. But that is why they are worth a lot of points. If the site were active someone could get thousands of points for a top review.
November 16, 200817 yr Author comment_10842 Note to myself: I forgot to make the delete and report links for comments. I also just "fixed" some delete functions, but it's so complicated how to delete and update various things when a review or category is deleted that I'm still not sure if I have it right. I was mainly trying to update the requests table based on various things...
