Thank you for your response, I was looking forward to it.
First an most of all: monetizing functionality.
This is a big issue. A reviews system would be nice to have for our members, but if its only something for members to play with then the interest to invest is much lower.
If such software will provide the functionality for webmaster to make money on, now thats a whole different story. If the software will make us money then its much easier to invest. IMO an addon that enhances the end user experience I'd value at $50 license. But an addon that not only is an enhancement to my members but also brings in money, that is worth many times that amount.
I haven't run a review site and I honestly am not a part of any either. That's why I've been trying to get the most detailed, broken-down list as possible. I understand monetizing it is important, and something that brings in money is way more valuable than something that just costs money. So let's try and get the money features worked into my list in a similar break down that I made.
The demand for reviews software is intertwined with the needs of sponsors, advertisers and affiliate sales.
Please make it easy for sponsors and advertisers to spend money on our sites. And for us to place affiliate sales links in reviews. Monetizing functions are found in
this list and includes: a 'claim listing' option, paid listings, buy featured listing, affiliate links like amazon, etc.
I'm not really sure where they would spend money. What would they be buying? I get paid listings, I can work that in. Pay to get your item 'featured', bubbles up to the top of the list of all the free items. Claiming a listing I'm gather would be like if someone enters my store as an item, I would want to show ownership? What's the difference between paid listings and featured listing? Affiliate links! there's one that was actually in my feature list
.
Your list seems to cater to author based product reviews which is useful, but excludes location/organization based reviews. For example with your functionality list its possible to have a member post a review of a product and other members can comment on this. But consider the setup of the mother of review websites:
www.tripadvisor.com tripadvisor does not have one review per thread but has an unlimited amount of reviews per thread. So there is no real thread author. The rating average for the listing is the average of all reviews.
I was using physical products a lot in my examples but I did call them items for a reason, custom fields should make it possible to enter any type of..... item/thing, person, place, thing, etc...
So instead of an item basically being a forum, and each review being a thread, and then having responses as posts. You'd rather have section/sub-section be the forum, the item be a thread, and each review be a post? That's fine. I'm not set on doing it any particular way, you guys are buying. You can pick the entire functionality and user interface. That's why I broke it into each section: viewing sections, viewing products, viewing reviews, and the same with creating.
Regarding link structure, I'd not focus on membername ID at all. Why not do it like amazon.com and tripadvisor and let each review in a thread have an unique title. Then use the structure:
/reviews/id.review_title/
Rich snippets is important for SEO as this microdate will make the reviews, ratings, details, etc visible in Google searches.
Rich snippets are fine, I will include that. I'm not worried about the links, I just need to know what type of structure you guys want for each part. Viewing a category, viewing an item(product/store/whatever), viewing a review.
Another point of interest is scalability and server resources. I currently have 11000 reviews. The highest number of concurrent users so far is 22000.
Not a problem, XenForo is optimized and makes it easy to optimize your plugins. I'll deliver cached content where applicable. I'll defer the recalculation of ratings after reviews are submitted along, etc.
Escrow allows us to work with strangers. As we have seen many times in the past things happen and developers do disappear for various reasons. Escrow provides a form of safety for developer and client.
I have not yet found an escrow service which allows group buys.
Yeah, I get the point of escrow, I just can't find a website that will work for it in this situation. I'm perfectly fine with it and would actually prefer it if we can find a platform.
Possible milestones:
- beta release. i.e. version 0.x.x (20%)
- release of bug free version with limited functionality set. i.e. version 1.0.x (40%)
- release of bug free version with expanded functionality set. i.e. version 1.1.x (40%)
Two things: I was referring to the rewards for investors, like what you get at each price point. Minimum investment being the price of a pre-sale license and working upwards. 2) I'm find with releasing the money in segments, I would however like it to be more like 30%, 40%, 30%. By time 1.0.x is released, most of the work time wise is actually done. 30% is still a significant out there. However, as over 70% of the time has been put in I feel getting 70% of the money at that point is reasonable.
Also of the stuff you mentioned, the main part that actually adds work is the paid listings and paid featured listings. I have to integrate payment methods, handle processing of the claim, etc... that is going to increase the desired overall goal amount. I don't really care about the license amount, that's all the investors call really.
Depending on the exact details of how that will function (admin tools, user tools, etc), I'm going to probably need to raise the goal $500.
For future note, this doesn't just apply to Alfa. If we do end up getting this project going. If there's features an individual wants that the rest don't. I would be willing to make custom modifications.
