What do you think?

Looking good, Adrian. Put me on the list. ;)

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Is the carousel implemented in your demo somewhere?

Demo site is running Beta 2.
I added it in Beta 3.

Adrian, purchased, downloaded and installed Beta 2 this morning as I like what I've seen so far so I thought I'd give it a go. However, the back end didn't seem very intuitive and could do with a bit more explantion as to what does what. Did what I could and guessed some entries, went to insert a post in a test forum and the whole thing imploded!

Any chance of a bit more documentation to go with it? :)

Why don't you post this in the proper support forum?

Chris,

Do you have something ready?

Can you please give the link ?

I keep thinking there is some exclusive group that only has access to GARS. I've been going to that site for a year now and there is never anything happening?

You are right, people who have bought a license.

Thats too funny!
Maybe there are two different GARS sites? I can't see a legit demo or any info on GARS confirming its ready for vb4. I'm guessing its the owner of GARS) asks if we are interested but provides no link (confirmed). So we need to google GARS only to find a site with dated info and a goofy download link requesting money for what?

For those familiar with your GARS, this may be a no brainer but for those not, is it ready for a production site? From my perspective, GARS appears to be dated and unclear if it is ready?

Anyone care to enlighten the unfamiliar, I'm interested in something that works for vb4. Out of all the hype here, It appears Adrian is the real deal.

Cheers!

That looks pretty awesome!

I posted my wishlist here:
http://www.forumsmods.com/threads/33...-threads?p=104

To make things a bit clearer for you.
GARS was formerly developed by thevbgeek and because he couldn't spend the time to continue development and support he's given the site and products over to Morgan(Calorie).
Sadly at one point the support and development stopped and the latest working version is for 3.x.
Last thing she has done was a non working beta (alpha) version for 4.x.
But nonetheless GARS as a product is still her property and not a free add-on.

Thanks you for the explanation.

Personally,
I'm not looking for a fee add-on here. I don't particularity care what something costs as long as it works and fits into vbullein 4 without major problem. Does GARS? no one seems to know.
A bit more transparent for GARS would be a cool. Asking people to buy into it without any info is pretty strange.

Nobody is asking you to buy it, I even don't recommend it because right now it's not supported and development has stopped since a long time.
For me, the best way to go is the forum mods product, it comes very near to the gars functionality and if all bugs are ironed out it could be even better.

I'm only commenting on GARS because someone else in front of me asked for a link. The Product Review mod is okay but is setup for xml importing. This is fine for some types of reviews but for the products I am dealing with, never have xml feeds available. I need the ability to be able to copy/pastes content when creating the product in the CP. The only way to do this with the Product review Mod is raw html. That would take for ever.
Copy/Paste , I can add very fast by highlighting, and dragging into the editor and save. Its fast enough and works this way. If it had that, I would be all over it.

Unless someone has rewritten GARS, its dead. The official site does not host a working version. There are 3 possible solutions (in no particular order):
1. TedS his Product Review Forums (vb4)
2. Chris his forthcoming reviews software (vb4)
3. Forumsmods Advanced Content System (vb4)

All 3 addons are in development. Ted has released the most recent version two days ago. Adrian (forumsmods) has released a beta. And Chris is working towards a beta.

Teds product is vB4 only.

Yes, my bad.

Hi,
The can user add her own page {side} to the catalogue? Wants to buy the product, where can I test?
Sorry bad English.

Hey everyone, Alfa1 had messaged me about the need for reviews. We will be integrating product reviews into this add-on, Make Money with a Prosperent Powered Product Search Engine, in time, we have a few other small features we are working on for it at the moment. So keep an eye on that thread and watch for upcoming updates and place the current version of the product search engine on your forum.

wow this is coming along good. Where do you buy it ? This has many applications for my forum. I have a review sites of shoes and a review site of parks and would love to have google map integrated to post near the pictures

anymore news everyone?

Is this only in vB4?

Chris and Adrian: are your projects still ongoing or have you stopped developing your reviews software?
Please post a status update.

I am developing the Beta 3 which will be released next week and includes new features.
In the week, I will be updating the demo site.

ForumsMods,

I was going to purchase your product the other day, but your site has been down all week. Should I be concerned?

This week, PCRE was updated to 8.21 version and it does not work well with vBulletin.
For this reason I decided to close the forum until it is fixed.

Hi! This is a fantastic idea. Pardon me if these questions have been answered - I read up all the posts but my confusion still stirs.

A few questions to Alfa1 :

1) I'm just confused as to what I am to visualize. Is the review system going to be presented on the cms or forums? Or is it customizable to our liking?

2) Has a coder been selected for the review system (pertaining to the functionality list by Alfa1)?

3) I'm just curious why an author rating has to be separate from the overall input. Is there a reason why the author needs to have their own rating presented as opposed to being included in the public/overall rating?

I'm also waiting patiently for ForumsMods's demo to be back up so I could figure out what would work best for my site. Thanks!

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.