I'm revisiting this thread after doing some more thinking on how crazy it is that there isn't a good clean vBulletin product/review system.

I'm curious if any of you have seen the product system that is built in to the Huddler platform. It's kind of beautiful. Here's an example of it in action: http://www.head-fi.org/products/senn...650-headphones

It has every feature that I could ever want built in, including related products, "members also have", affiliate links via API's, and member reviews. The only thing I don't see is a comparison engine.

Too bad you can't just purchase the Huddler platform and use it in the vBulletin fashion...

Yes, it looks very nice John.

Now, after two years since thread creation and more or less zero results how about collecting some money to just upgrade gars to vB4?

For me I left this continues loop, and bought iReviews (from vbcover) actually I didn't install it yet, and wish it will give me what I want.

But if you think (all of GARS users) it is better than iReviews, please give me the strong points of the GARS.

Actually, I'm ready to give money to do new product, but I wish it will use vBCMS (as new type) not forums as GARS and iReviews.

I don't think everyone wants to use gars. It looks like it would require a rewrite anyway. The best option in this case would be to have a gars importer.

The vbCMS is just terrible in every aspect, and if I did it over again I would have used wordpress with a bridge mod. I'm pretty sure most would agree and not want to use it for anything.

Whatever forumsmods was doing looked very promising, but unfortunately that project looks to be somewhat abandoned at this point.

I know vBCMS is terrible, but can be fixed.
I'm trying to fix my copy to suits my needs, wish me a good luck in that :).

GOODLUCK !!!........ Even in case that you'll not succeed 100%, your try is worth of all. I never studied programming. But I was trying... searching... testing... kicking the wall when something was not working, but I never gave up.... Be sure that some day you'll remember my words. Go ahead and trust yourself.

Thank you my neighbor :)
Actually I'm computer engineer, but unfortunately I left the programming from 10 years !!, so the plugin system and hooks and vb functions are new world for me, but I'm trying :)
Thanks again.

Well.... if everything goes well, I'll release SL (SlimLine) Reviews by tomorrow night. For those who have seen my SL Classifieds, they'll find the same simple interface, with most of the features that an average admin needs for his community.

If you expect to find different rating questions as my original (unfinished) Reviews mod, sorry but you'll be disappointed. But as I seen almost 9/10 of sites want to review specific things: eg games, books, autos etc. In this case common rating questions for all categories are ok for them.

And as a final notice. There is an old saying in my country: "Half is much better than nothing".

Chris

Update?

<a href="http://www.christeris.net/dev42/reviews.php?do=viewreview&reviewid=1" target="_blank">http://www.christeris.net/dev42/revi...iew&reviewid=1</a>
Please note that the demo is setup for game reviews. All data on the right side are extra fields so can be changes. The same for rating questions.

Looks very cool.

:-) Thank you. It got me a bit more time, as I wanted to give the same (simple) look like SL Classifieds. Almost finished the homepage:
http://www.christeris.net/dev42/reviews.php

So the only that left out are simple code (Search, What's New, RSS) and now I'm sure that I can release it tomorrow night.

--------------- Added [DATE]1368644460[/DATE] at [TIME]1368644460[/TIME] ---------------

The funny when you're using the development installation for demostration too is that you can loose your mind :-). Wasted 1 hour trying to understand why the average community ratings shows 8 while I knew that it was 7.5. And just now I realized that someone added a rating there :)

--------------- Added [DATE]1368727636[/DATE] at [TIME]1368727636[/TIME] ---------------

I just release my Reviews mod and is Free!! Sure nothing in common with the requested feature here, but is a well working slim Review system.

That looks cool, any love for vb 3.8?

vB 3.8 has the GARS system. I don't think that it needs another review system.

Oh wow thats what i need, how do i get my hands on it fella.. Will you release it free or how much to buy it from you?

All my mods are free and from now on will be also free from copyright links. Since the time that DBTech released their Copyright Manager, I've removed my own copyrights. I found their action insulting me to maximum. Their wording "Site is powered by vBulletin AddOns and Modules by Dragonbyte Tech", means that everything there is their own work. Like there no other coders in this community. So, I'm letting the glory to them. No copyrights from my side.

My hopes of dragon byte taking this on: http://www.dragonbyte-tech.com/f101/...-system-11864/

Not a new idea
http://www.dragonbyte-tech.com/f8/review-system-580/

Thanks for pointing that out. Looks like an update was necessary anyway since that hasn't been touched in a couple years.

Just a note that we have released a review mod that's currently in open (paid for) beta: http://www.dragonbyte-tech.com/vbeco...295&do=product

Lite version coming very soon :)

Do you have any links to live forums using this mod, please?

Or, is anyone else using it and willing to share a link?

I've been using another review mod for a year now on a test forum. It looks OK, but not as slick as other platforms I've seen that aren't based on vBulletin. Plus, I've had enough issues that I am not willing to risk putting it on my main forum. As it is, I am afraid to update anything on the test forum, for fear of breaking part of the plugin setup and having to spend hours searching for fixes because even the server experts at my hosting provider can't figure it out. Then dreading each contact with their support, who seems to always assume that I am an expert coder and server admin. I realize a review system is a bit more complex than a typical mod or plugin, but I'm hoping to find something more robust, with easier installation/updates and a much better moderator experience in terms of editors, layouts and approvals. Good tech support would be a big bonus, too.

So, any personal experiences with the Dragonbyte-Tech plugin or others would be great!

The site you quoted is running the mod.

Obviously, but I am more interested in third parties who have used it so I can get some independent opinions on experience with it. I tried reviewpost based on the developer's website and product information. It didn't quite live up to my expectations for a paid mod, so I'm hoping to find more feedback from more users this time.

Too bad that this project never manifested as intended. Though several admins crowdfunded a reviews solution which was based upon the same requirements. So in a way this project did manifest. Just not for vbulletin. Unfortunately.

I built my review/product directory based on VB4. Combined with the support tools behind the database I am well over 1,000 dev hours into this. The work is not hard, but the project is very large.

My next work item is to remove VB completely, and run my own forum implementation (because the site does not really need a forum).

http://www.hingmy.com

That certainly looks nice, but how does that help all the members in this thread that are looking for the mod? :)

At least I found one site using GARS on VB4, take a look.

I've been using it on vb4 for years - http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/

Nice to see that they are still able to use GARS.

Nice, but the main problem is the functionality of the rating system and custom fields that prevents most of us to switch to vB4.