Customize Comments and Ratings Preferences
Contents
Customize Comments and Ratings Preferences
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."
However, comments and ratings are not a good fit for all Site Concepts or for all 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 offering no 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 Date only.
You also have the option not to display dates at all on this invitation's comments. 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 add "branding" to the comments by customizing your ratings images to match the theme of your site. 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 30 minutes, and sometimes longer, depending on the number of submissions you have.
Important Note
Although you can add links to comments when managing them, Site Health will not report any broken links added to comments. So be certain that the HTML is correct. If the link goes to another site, ensure that the link goes to a solid site that will not disappear in a few months.
How to Customize Comments and Ratings
- 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. Or click on Cancel to leave 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 submission page attached to 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, Solo Build It! (SBI!) does not delete the comments and ratings from the database. It just deletes the comments display from the affected pages and rebuilds those pages.
If you change your mind later and re-enable comments and ratings, all of them 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 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 at the bottom of the submission page, use the default. If you want comments to appear on a separate page, select Comments appear on separate comments page.
If you merge pages into one, each submission will have its own standalone comments page, even if you showed comments on the submission page before the merge.
This option is per invitation (all submissions per invitation), so you can have one set of submissions with comments on the submission pages, and another set from a different invitation with comments on standalone 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, do not 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 (e.g., 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.
- Design 14x14 pixel GIF format graphics in your image editing software.
- Click on Browse (Choose File if using Safari) to select the "Full Star" graphic.
- Click on Browse (Choose File) to select the "Half Star" graphic.
- Click on Customize Commenting to upload the images and save your changes.
- Click on Cancel to escape without making any changes.
Tips
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All graphics must be 14 pixels by 14 pixels, and must be in GIF (.gif extension) format. You'll see an error message if they don't meet these two criteria.
You need two images, a full rating image and a half rating image (which also needs to be 14x14). For the half rating, you can cut the full image in half horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, whichever "slice" looks best.
- Your graphics should have either a transparent background, or one that matches the background color of your submission and comments pages.
- You can return at any time and change the images. The current images (including defaults) display just above the first Browse button.