A review system can have a very large number of categories. vbulletin has a limit in the number of forums. If reviews are in forum threads, then categories are forums. This limits the number of review categories that you can have.

vbCMS is badly structured, poorly coded, SEO is extremely bad, infested with bugs and design flaws. While a CMS would be the optimal place for a reviews system, vbCMS is simply not suited for purpose.

4 developers are currently working on their version of reviews software. Each of these coders has taken their unique approach, catering to different needs:

1. Adrian (forummods) Adrian seems to be the only developer aiming for the full functionality list. And is adding more functions with each of his beta releases.
2. Chris (ChrisTERiS) Chris is preparing a release of his reviews software.
3. Ted S. TedS has released a basic & free product reviews addon, and is slowly expanding the functionality.
4. 99SIVTEC (prosperent) 99SIVTEC is running the prosperent affiliate products network and is planning to add reviews functionality to enhance their product sales network.

While experience has shown that some projects fall through, there is already a lot of promise in the above projects.

I have requested quotes from a few developers some time ago, but received no or no viable response. With the above projects going forward, I think its fair to hold off hiring developers for now. If one of the above projects will provide the needed functionality and will properly support customers, then our goal is reached.

This depends on how the reviews are setup. If you have official reviewers, then you will have an editor rating and site user ratings.

For example: http://download.cnet.com/Calibre/300...-10910277.html
The editor has written a long review and his ratings reflect the review.
In this case a clear separation of editor/author rating and user ratings is wanted. The editors review holds more weight.

But you can also choose to just have a product listing with basic facts, and only add user reviews/ratings. Like IMDB for example: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1071875/
In such case there is no need for an author rating.
If you want to automatically fill your listings with affiliate product data (amazon or abe books for example), then the first post, will be a listing, not a review.

If you want the first post to be a user review, then you would need to either only have user reviews, or have a combination of author and user reviews. I think the first option would make the most sense.

What do you think?

Hey FM,

Trying to download the product and I got this:

Would have posted it on your forums but they're shut down. Could you just email me the install package so we can get to work implementing it?

So the reviews will be in forum threads and those threads are in categories?

Right, with your explanation about editors it's clearer now. Is it possible for more than 1 editor to rate in the editor ratings? As in, are the editors in a usergroup that have permissions set to rate?
And yes I think having both options (editor rating and public rating OR public votes only) is great, the choice would depend, like you said, on how detailed the reviews are and what we're reviewing (media, products, classifieds).

Definitely. Thanks for the clarification.

Optimally it will be in a separate CMS. Adrian is aiming for this.

If you consider that a written review has 1 author, then it would not make sense to have multiple editors rate for the author rating. Would be confusing.

Hmm ok. Maybe "author" should be replaced to a different word because when I think of an author I think of a person who started the topic not necessarily a critic/reviewer. I'm not sure if that is customizable on the Advanced Content System made by Adrian (ForumsMods).

I will add this function to the list:

• Author ratings, with pretty AJAX stars, bars and other pretty rating scales. Author ratings can be turned off.
• Member ratings. Member ratings can be turned off.

I think this is a very useful feature request.

I also added a clarification to the list:

• Google maps integration. (show/browse all vendors/hotels/restaurants on a map)

This will add functionality similar to tripadvisor and the many restaurant/hotel/store review sites.

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A question to those of you who want to use reviews to generate affiliate sales: is it needed to have geotargetting for affiliate links. For example: a user in Australia will not buy from amazon.com but will buy from abebooks. So it would generate more income to use geotargetting and serve up a 'Buy this product from Abebooks' button than to show an amazon.com link to the user. What do you think?

Thanks for the thread Alfa. It would be great If you could add the demo links for the current work in progress products in the first post. I can't seem to find any of them.

That would make sense after the first Gold release. Only TedS his product review addon has been released: Product Review Forums – Research, Reviews & Comparisons

I can only speak for our team here, but we have 6 developers and the resources to definitely make product reviews a reality. We also have the infrastructure to serve the data across a large number of sites via our api. We already serve over 1 million requests per hour for our product data across our 26 server cluster.

Thats good news. I look forward to seeing your reviews addon.