Legacy Comments and Database...

[civil78]

I see that comments are very simple, users can’t quote, edit or remove their comments like vBulletin does. Also there is no subscription method.

Looking further inside the code to see how you build comment system, I see that you don’t use the vBulletin system. You store all messages in your tables.

You build your own system and at first look this seams good, but in the other view if you see it better this is not so good.

First, if a forum have a lot of reviews with comments, as simple threads, it’s impossible to import these threads. Also if you build an importer/converter this is also bad.

Sometimes it’s better to have this reviews in vBulletin standard system like the Articles does even in a hidden forum. Ok you can support the vBulletin 4 & 5, but with this you not allow as to improve the system after some time. Or if we want to go to another platform (like IP.Board) it's impossible to get the reviews into this platform.

For me it’s better to give the change to choose how the admin wants to store the comments/reviews, into threads or into the internal system. Or better to recreate this feature to store as threads.

I don’t know, I want to buy this product for my site but this is a big problem for me, we have more than a thousand of reviews, but first we can’t import them and second we don’t want to be “trapped” into an internal store system. This is a huge problem for us.

One more suggestion. A good feature is to give to the users to create their own sub-reviews into the same review. For example, I have a movie with title “Wolverine” and a user create one review. Some users rate (this is missing for now but I think that it’s on your plans) and comment into this review. One other user wants to create a new review for this movie. To create a new one it’s a problem into the listings. It’ good to have a system so the users to find one only result for Wolverine but to choose the review that they want to read first or to read both reviews.

One more good feature is to have a system, so admin to add a Movie into the listing with some standard info and to leave a message for the user, “Create your own review for this movie””. Communities can help with this way to build a lot or reviews or to talk about a movie or other stuff without to have a complete review.

Thanks, think about it…

 

[Dylan]

Thanks for the suggestions.
You can subscribe to reviews so you'll be notified when they create new reviews. What other kind of subscriptions are you thinking about?
I doubt I will go the forum/thread route for storing the review data. I would either have to add a ton of fields to the forum table or link some data in my own tables to the thread/post tables and it would be a mess and just as inaccessible on a different system as storing it in my own tables.
I'm not sure why you feel it would be bad to build an importer?
As far as the last two suggestions, After working on integrating with our product system, I've been leaning toward adding an option like you are talking about in the last, where the admin and trusted users are allowed to setup some core items and reviews can only be created off those. That would kind of invalidate your previous suggestion since all the reviews would really be sub reviews of the main item.

 

[civil78]

As developer I understand the reasons that you can't use the vBulletin system.

About the importer, I can build one but it will be a mesh. That’s because when I convert it all I will create a team to do that. So this team must import this one by one by adding the extra info. The problem is that I have to move and delete all the imported comments/threads from vbulletin database and this is really a mesh. My suggestion is not to store the review data and extra fields into the thread system. My suggestion is to store the comments into a thread and use the vbulletin system for it.

About the other to suggestions, I don't think that "invalidates" with the other suggestions. It will be work as an add-on feature.

Thanks again for your answer I keep watching the updates and testing the free product until I found something interest that I can buy and work with it.