Posted December 9, 200817 yr comment_10972 I have upgraded the Review System here to version 4.1.0. Here are some changes I made in this version. I've tested most of it, but if you notice something behaving strangely, please let me know. Optimization *I got rid of AT LEAST 50-60 fields from the members table. Some I did away with totally, as they were not needed. Others I moved to a new table. *Now when you have a review, deal, etc... deleted it will update your "bad" stats in a new table. This way instead of wasting a lot of fields on every single member on the site, it will only use them for members who have used the review system AND had things deleted. *Instead of having separate counts of bad reports (bad review reports, bad deal reports, bad comment reports, etc...), now they are all lumped into one field for all reports. *Now grand totals of bad content are kept. In the past only a monthly count was kept and then it reset. Now that one is still kept and is used when determining if you have permission to add content. However the grand total is also kept. *Dropped the id field for the main two rating tables where there wouldn't be a chance of it going higher than the allowed number due to a lot of edits. *I went through the 150+ html templates and changed them to where now it is broken up into 15 sections instead of 1. So only the section which is needed for the page you're viewing will be loaded. This has seemed to cut the page loads down by a couple hundredths of a second and every little bit helps (especially when many people use it at once). Stats Page *Now instead of having 16 tables all on the same page (each having top 10s), there are 2 tables side by side with top 50s. Now there is a dropdown to change what's listed in the tables. *Now you can select ANY month since the site opened and the tables on the right will tell the totals for that month. The tables on the left still show the TOTALS overall. Keep in mind that a couple things do not have dates kept, so for those it will only tell what THIS month's total is, regardless of the date you select. However, simply read the heading on those tables on the right and you will then know if it's for the month you selected or for the current month. *Now there are MANY more types of stats displayed there. It used to have only 8 things shown. Now it has 22. *Example: http://www.gottalk.com/index.php?autocom=r...&code=stats Category Listings *Re-skinned that page to look a lot better. It now looks similar to how forums look. *It uses the board icons. If any reviews in that category or its subcategories has been added since your last visit (session) it will show the "unread" icon like the forums use (the black one on the main skin). If there are no new ones it will show the "read" icon letting you know no new reviews are in that category. *Example: http://www.gottalk.com/index.php?autocom=r...ewcat&cid=5 Product Page *Links to the pages for all members who have the product as a favorite, own the product, or have it on their wish list. These are the three "people" icons which were added to that line of icons under the product information. *Example: http://www.gottalk.com/index.php?autocom=r...wcat&cid=84 Profiles *TOTALLY redone. It looks much more professional than it did. Am I 100% happy with it? Nah. But it's 100 times better than the messy look it did have. It now has everything lined up nicely. *MANY more stats shown. More than twice as many stats are shown in that row at the bottom of the top table. Also I added a review accuracy to go along with the deal accuracy and worded the other one differently to make it more obvious that the first percentage is based off of how people rated you. *Example: http://www.gottalk.com/index.php?autocom=r...rofile&id=1 Admin Changes *Now on the pages where I decide what to do with reported reviews, deals, etc... it tells how many bad ones the member has submitted in the past and how many false reports the reporter has had. Bug Fixes *Many new bug fixes of all sorts. Please report new bugs if you notice any. Thank You
December 9, 200817 yr Author comment_10973 I already found a big bug that quick. lol Also I really want to do one tiny change to optimize (in a way), but I will just add that to the first post later.
December 10, 200817 yr Author comment_10978 Well I toyed with adding another check when adding a review, but decided it's currently not worth the time adidng it in. It would simply prevent people from adding a certain something they shouldn't add, but I will simply leave it as it is and if people try to get funny I will simply delete the review and take action. Plus it's unlikely many people will even know what I am tlaking about. I did delete some id fields form the DB and I added that to the list in the first post of this topic. Otherwise I ahven't added anything else. I thought about adding a new column of info to tables which list reviews, but I decided not to at this point, as it looks worse to me. So as afr as looks goes, in the future I do want to make those review tables look better, but I am pretty satisfied otherwise. Oh and I got rid of this "max run" check the original author had in the file. It was unnecessary, as he apparently didn't realize how easily he could have prevented an infinite loop without adding that forcing of it to stop related to the max run count.
December 14, 200817 yr Author comment_10992 Man, I really need custom fields in this, don't I? Because for booka, for exa,ple, it eneds to ahve the author and maybe the year too. But it would be easiest if I only add functionality for 1 extra field. Sigh. Also for movies it would be good to have a year in case it's movies with the same name. This is getting a tad confusing on how to handle it.
January 11, 200917 yr Author comment_11121 I've already been upgrading this for IPB 3.0, as I just hate waiting around. It's hard to do it at the moment since IPB 3 is not totally documented and is in beta stage, but I think I am getting close to having it somewhat done.
January 19, 200917 yr Author comment_11155 Tryinh to update this for IPB 3.0 is so frustrating and I like the table structure better on IPB 2.3 so I just flat don't know what to do anymore. I'm tempted to not even upgrade this forum when 3.0 is released because I'm not going to unless this review system is upgraded and it seems like a lot of work for little payoff. I'm going to put in hundreds of hours and the final result will be the same system and looking worse. Just kind of disappointing to have to spend so long to upgrade it only to have it look, in my personal opinion, worse by using their new table look.
January 21, 200917 yr Author comment_11160 Nevermind. I ended up working hard and already have it close to complete. Just a few more things to do and I will already have it ready way before IPB 3 is out. Well i ahven't skinned it yet though. So it's basically a lot of content in disorganized rows. but all the data is there. If you look in the bug tracker here, you wills ee there have eben a lot of severe bugs I had to fix on it for thr 3.0 version already though. lol
February 28, 200917 yr Author comment_11252 This is mostly done for IPB 3.0 now, but I need to tweak some things and also need to totally redo the page with the review itself. I also am going to try to implement pagination whee you can make your reviews x number of pages and the last page will have the ratings rather than them being down below the review I think.
March 3, 200917 yr Author comment_11262 lol. I confused MYSELF with my setup for categories. I spent all night making version 5.0 of this be more CLEAR in the admin control panel on how to properly set up categories. And I even added error messages in case I or another admin accidentally do get confused.... so in a lot of cases it will catch the mistakes ahead of time since certain categories can't be configured in certainw ays or they would break the string of categories for that root. I also worked on the add a review page for that version to get it to catch certain things. I really should rewrite that entire function from scratch, but I hate to overhaul it when it does work as it is, it just is messy coding. In case anyone wonders why I haven't been posting much to myself as I usually do when nobody else is posting... I've been posting in the bug tracker and fixing bugs on those new versions. lol I am hoping to be done with this and the betting system totally soon. I may add a few things and change some things, but I'm tired of working on them and am ready for them to work with 3.0. Well they actually DO work with 3.0, but I need to skin some areas and also the review system isn't compatible with mssql currently, I don't think.
March 25, 200916 yr Author comment_11336 Man I have spent so much work on this, it's not even funny. Some changes won't be noticed by people using it becuase they are back end changes, but the past few days I changed several big things on the back end. I FINALLY am about to be done. I am only planning on addding a couple mroe features and not many bugs are remaining. So hopefully I willbe done any day now. But then the next beta version of IPB has a change in the skinning so I have to go through and alter my skinning of tables also.
