Customize Comments and Ratings Preferences

Customize Comments and Ratings Preferences

How To Customize C&R
Customize Ratings Images

Comments and ratings attract more visitors to participate in your site. Why? It's easier to "comment and rate" than to create a page. So think of commenting/rating as the "onramp to C2." The next step is to create a page for your site!

However, comments and ratings are not a good fit for all Site Concepts or for some invitations. If you have invitations asking people to share serious feelings or difficult experiences, for example, commenting and/or rating may be inappropriate.

So you have the option of offering comments and ratings, or just comments, or of not offering comments/ratings at all.

You can change the display order of submitted comments. You can display them sorted by Ratings (highest ratings to the top) and then subsorted by Date. Or you can display them by the Date only.

You also have the option to display the date for all comments, or leave them without a date. Choose to date them only if you have an actively commented page. Otherwise, dating can make the comments of a rarely commented page look, well, "dated!"

You can even "brand" the comments as part of your site by customizing your ratings images. If you have a coffee site, use a coffee mug. Have a site about ghosts? Upload ghost graphics.

All of these are set per invitation to give you the greatest choice for your site.

Note: All changes will appear after your pages are rebuilt, which usually takes at least 30 minutes, and sometimes longer.

Important Note

Although you can add links to comments when managing them, Link Fix It! will not report any broken links added to comments. So be certain that the HTML is correct, and that the link goes to a solid site that won't disappear in a few months.

How To Customize Comments and Ratings

Directions for Use

Click on a button under "Publishing Options" to select whether to show Comments and Ratings, Comments, or none.
Click on a button under "Display Comment Submission Date" to display the date or not.
Click on a button under "Display Order" to display by Ratings and then Date, or only by Date.
Click on Customize Commenting to save your changes.
Click on Cancel to escape without making any changes.

As mentioned above, comments and ratings are set for each invitation.

Publishing Options

If you want both comments and ratings, do nothing. This is the default for each invitation.

If you want to have comments, but no ratings, click on the second button. This will let your visitors leave only comments for submissions to this invitation.

If you prefer to have no comments or ratings, click on the third button. All commenting and rating will be disabled for this invitation. Comments and ratings will be deleted from every page using this invitation.

Click on Customize Commenting to save your change.

What Happens to the Comments and Ratings?

If you choose not to show comments and ratings for a page that previously had shown them, SBI! does not actually delete the comments and ratings from the database. It just deletes the comments display from your site and rebuilds the submitted page.

If you change your mind later and re-enable them, all the existing comments and ratings will return to their associated pages, and the link to the comments page or comments section will be added back to each submission page.

Note: Any comment added while ratings were turned off (with comments left "on") will have 5 stars (or other graphic -- see below) automatically if you turn ratings back on.

Approval

If you want all comments to go live without your review, use the default. If you want to review all comments so that you can make a decision whether to show them or delete them, select Make comments go live only after my approval.

Requiring approval of all comments means more work for you (reading each comment, possibly editing it, and then publishing it, or even banning it). So we have Quick Approve, a tool that puts all the comments that require approval in one location.

Click here to read the Quick Approve help.

Since Approval is an invitation-by-invitation option, you can have some invitations show comments immediately, and require review of others before publishing them.

Page Display

If you want comments to appear on a separate page, use the default. If you want them to appear at the bottom of the submission page, select Comments appear at bottom of Submitted C2 page.

This option is per invitation (all submissions per invitation), so you can have one set of submissions with comments on separate pages, and another set from a different invitation with comments on the submission pages.

Display Order

The default for ordering comments is by Date, with the newest comments first. Click on the second button to display them by Date, with the oldest comments first. Click on the third button to display them ordered by Ratings (highest ratings first) with a subsort by Date (newest comments first). If you have Ratings turned off, you won't want to use the third option.

Display Comment Submission Date

Some submissions may not receive many comments. A year from now, one or two submissions with comments dated today will look stale. You can elect to turn off the date display by selecting the second button. Otherwise, do nothing. Date display is the default.

Note: If you choose to display no date, the Display Order (above) will still display them by Date, unless you change to Rating. If you choose to display comments by their Rating (see above), they will still be subsorted by Date even if you choose not to display the Date.

Customize Ratings Images

The default image for rating submissions is a star (along with a half star, which is used for ratings averages). You can upload special graphics that help you build your brand (ex., a basketball for a basketball site, or a rose or shovel for a gardening site).

Important Reminder: Image customization is per invitation. If you have more than one invitation, you can customize the images for one, some or all of the invitations.