🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Sat, Mar 10, 2012 05:56 PM UTC:
David Howe wrote:
So my feeling is that we should have a single, consistent commenting and rating system. Having two parallel systems is confusing and inelegant. That said, I am at a loss for how to proceed. Somehow, we should keep what we have, but also add desired functionality, but as a single, comprehensive system.
I suppose we could export the existing comment and ratings into the proposed new system, and have a unified and elegant commenting and rating system. That will take more effort, but may be worth it.
That could be tricky. For one thing, comment ratings are associated with individual comments instead of with individual users. If I post two comments to a page with different ratings, I now have multiple ratings for the same game. If we exported the comment ratings, we would have to identify the latest ratings made by each user. Also, what I have in mind is specifically for games, not for pages. The rating and comment system in place is available for all pages, and even on game pages, people sometimes use it to rate the page instead of the game itself. Although I have previously proposed using a five-point rating scale, I have more recently been thinking of going with Like, Dislike, and Favorite. There is also the matter of measuring popularity, which the rating and comment system does not handle at all.
Assuming I used a five-point scale, the ratings from the rating and comment system might be incorporated into the Rating field of the Likes table. When someone posts a comment, it could show his current rating for the game, and if he changed it with his comment, it would update the Rating value in the Likes table. A comment could also report the player's experience with the game at the time of the comment. So the comment table would keep track of historical data, and the Likes table would keep track of current data. The ratings in the comments could be replaced by integers, and a separate table could be used to translate them into words. Besides entering ratings with a comment, I would provide a rating form in the header, which can be used without entering a comment, and it would just update the Likes table.
Those are my thoughts on how they could be merged together. I'm still not sure it would be the best way to go. We may want to keep them separate, using one for page ratings and one for game ratings.
David Howe wrote:
That could be tricky. For one thing, comment ratings are associated with individual comments instead of with individual users. If I post two comments to a page with different ratings, I now have multiple ratings for the same game. If we exported the comment ratings, we would have to identify the latest ratings made by each user. Also, what I have in mind is specifically for games, not for pages. The rating and comment system in place is available for all pages, and even on game pages, people sometimes use it to rate the page instead of the game itself. Although I have previously proposed using a five-point rating scale, I have more recently been thinking of going with Like, Dislike, and Favorite. There is also the matter of measuring popularity, which the rating and comment system does not handle at all.
Assuming I used a five-point scale, the ratings from the rating and comment system might be incorporated into the Rating field of the Likes table. When someone posts a comment, it could show his current rating for the game, and if he changed it with his comment, it would update the Rating value in the Likes table. A comment could also report the player's experience with the game at the time of the comment. So the comment table would keep track of historical data, and the Likes table would keep track of current data. The ratings in the comments could be replaced by integers, and a separate table could be used to translate them into words. Besides entering ratings with a comment, I would provide a rating form in the header, which can be used without entering a comment, and it would just update the Likes table.
Those are my thoughts on how they could be merged together. I'm still not sure it would be the best way to go. We may want to keep them separate, using one for page ratings and one for game ratings.
I'll let you know if I need help with SQL.