Asylum Feedback/Support

Posted by Ed Sawyer (A) on October 6, 2008 at 18:20:23

In Reply to: RE: What don't you like about the interface? posted by Rod M on October 6, 2008 at 10:48:05

I'll speak to the classifieds thing: Frankly, I'd scrap it and rebuild it in PHP or ColdFusion. I program a lot in both of those and also some in java and Java is way more of a headache long-term for something like that. There's decent open-source PHP and CF classifieds packages I think that could be improved/modified. The trick will be interfacing them somewhat with your existing user (and images) database(s) which is where open-source is crucial.

You may want to consider if you want to host photos - probably so, if you want it to be easy for newbies. Doing so means a lot of db BLOBs or else a big file tree mess, neither of which is ideal but as long as they are truncated/purged regularly it won't get out of hand.

I'd keep ads free to build the user base initially, then maybe go to $2/ad like Audiogon did way back when.

Feedback - this could be incorporated via extending the existing user DB and the classifieds DB. (e.g. a lookup database table with users from the current DB, mapped to the Classifieds users DB (if they are not the same) with a foreign-key to a Feedback table with buyer/seller IDs and feedback itself. )

I am guessing you are on the LAMP stack or something like it. Lately I've been doing most of my work in MS SQL 2005 but MySQL 5 could easily handle the above stuff also, since it has stored procedures and whatnot. Or other DBs could work too.

The Design/interface is actually the easy part. The back-end DB/hosting/etc. is the tricky part. Especially integrating into the existing databases in the system.

Frankly I don't mind the existing interfaces much at all. It's fast to load, easy to read, and thankfully uncluttered with USELESS garbage like avatars, smileys, sigs and the other egregious bandwidth-hogging rubbish that most forum/classifieds software is bloated with. I hate all that crap. it's useless to a fault. ;-)

-Ed