ocPortal Tutorial: Feedback, and Running an interactive community
Written by Chris Graham, ocProducts
ocPortal allows you to create a highly interactive site if you desire, with numerous features for user feedback at your disposal.Most major content in ocPortal can be:
- commented upon
- rated
- given track-backs (this is defined and discussed in the 'Advanced news' tutorial)
Table of contents
Enabling
We recognise that many websites owners will not wish to allow users to affect the state of their website: because of this, commenting and rating may be enabled/disabled on a site-wide basis. They are, however, enabled by default. To disable the elements of the feedback, check-boxes are given in the 'User interaction' subsection of the 'Feature options' section of the main Admin Zone configuration page.In addition to site-wide control of feedback, it may also be enabled/disabled on a content entry level. For a piece of content to support rating, for example, that content must be configured for rating, and ocPortal must have rating enabled site-wide.
Feedback commenting is very similar to, and actually implemented as, a forum topic being attached to a piece of content, and displayed beneath it. To allow users to comment on ocPortal content, in addition to site-wide commenting any commenting for the content entry being enabled, the named comment forum must exist; the default comment forum name is 'ocPortal comment topics', but this is configurable in the main Admin Zone configuration page.
Rating
This content page demonstrates rating and comments |
This does not really matter, as statistically the extra ratings will even out. That is, unless there is a trend between changing IP addresses, and/or re-rating tendency, and the chance of making specific ratings other than average ones. This seems unlikely, and rating is not likely to be given such importance for it to matter.
The reason we have designed ocPortal like this, is that we did not want to lock out guests from making ratings. We could not really rely on sessions being able to identify guests in the long-term, they have no member-IDs to block, and storing rating history cookies would invite mass-abuse and cause inefficiency (as all cookies get passed across the Internet connection with every page view).
Our own forum does not allow poll voting by guests, and hence more serious rating/poll situations may be handled there.
There is a 'main_rating' block that you may use to allow any Comcode page to be rated (by placing the block on the page).
The comments block
There is an ocPortal block named 'main_comments' that allows any Comcode page to become a page with it's own comments. This is a very useful feature, usable for purposes such as:- a guest-book (see the default 'guestbook' Comcode page)
- documentation where users may make comments, adding to it, or directing staff to make improvements
The feedback block
ocPortal also includes a feedback block, 'main_feedback', that allows you to have users leave messages that other users can't see. It works via a hidden comment topic, and is very useful as a way for staff to get private feedback without resorting to support tickets or e-mail.The shout-box block
ocPortal includes a 'shout-box' block, which is essentially a little portion of your menu that can be used for members to place short messages. Like all blocks, the shout-box is of course optional. The shout-box is tied to a specified chat room, which by default, is the 'general chat' chat-room.Polls
Initially there is no poll, so the poll block displays like this |
Adding a poll |
The poll block, once a poll is chosen |
Please read the 'rating' section of this tutorial to see how re-voting is restricted for both the poll and rating systems. If a user chooses to view poll results before voting, they forfeit their vote.
Any numbers of different polls may be shown on your website if you choose to select them using poll ID number as a block parameter, rather than relying on the standard selection mechanism.