[Open-collaboration-services] voting, rating, comments / reviews

Mateu Batle mateu.batle at collabora.co.uk
Mon Aug 16 16:11:51 CEST 2010


Hi guys,

For the meego garage project, we have a few needs more in the OCS spec 1.6:

* We need to be able to get the number of votes a content has. It is
very useful information for a content, for example it is not the same a
content which has a rating of 5 and only one vote, that one which has
rating 4.1 and 100 users have voted.

* what is the supposed behavior in the server if a user votes more than
once for the same content ? Ignored, keep the last one, accumulate, ...
? In a previous project I worked the user was allowed to vote more than
once, but it simply keep the last one. Also it was possible to recover
from the application the rating provided by the user (which can be
different from the average rating among all users).

* We are reusing the comments interface existing in OCS for reviews of
applications. Although they are not exactly the same, at least when it
comes to the rating given with a review. The current interface provided
for comments allows any user to rate for a comment. We are more
interested in that each review provided can be seen with the rating
value provided by the user who wrote the review. I could misuse a bit
the comments / review interface to more or less provide the same
functionality, but it is more like a hack and not very elegant., I
explain so maybe we can provide a better solution among all.

First some definitions. Normal rating is kind of anonymous rating, just
provide a value with the rating widget (e.g. typical 5 stars widget) and
nothing else. Reviews on the other side, need to provide a rating value
and some review text (subject and long text). All users can seen all
reviews of an application, with the rating value, the review text, the
date when it was done and the user who wrote the review.

The hack is simple, for every review we create a comment, and use as
rating of the comment the rating of the review (so the comment will just
have one rate forever). Also use the review rating as rating of the
content, so its value is considered and accumulated with the other
ratings for the application. The comment provides date, subject text,
long text, user and rating; so misusing rating we get the desired
functionality. What do you think about it ?

Also, in case a user reviews several times, it will keep the rating of
the last review for accounting the global rating, which is good.
However, we will be able to see the individual ratings given to each
single review, which is also good IMHO.

cheers
  Mateu



More information about the Open-collaboration-services mailing list