First off, I would like to apologize for screwing up the dates in the RSS feed
yesterday. It was due to a really silly mistake that one single PHP file didn't
make it to the server (despite repeated uploads). So everything tested alright
on my machine, but it didn't work properly on the server. Took me quite a while
to figure that out...

With that aside, I would like to announce the single biggest change to TPFC
that has happened for awhile, possibly EVER! Yup, this one is bigger than
comments, voting, even the edit function. It took me many weeks of head banging,
hair tearing and sessions on the toilet seat to figure this one out. At times,
I wished I hadn't started, 'cos I became so obsessed with it I had very little
sleep during all that time. My day job suffered (I am glad the end of the year
is not exactly the busiest time for me...). My wife complained. You get the
idea...

I present to you, the ADD function. *drum rolls*

Yes, now TPFC takes a giant step from mostly dictatorship to budding democracy.
With this function, anyone can add applications directly to the database
without going through me or the other mods, who are always busy, sleeping or
simply not that impressed with the submitted application. Now, you can do it
yourself, directly.

Well, that's all very liberating, but wouldn't that impact the quality of the
portable apps in the database? Well, with some rules in place, I hope not.
Please hear me out.

First off, anyone who has joined the forum for at least a week can add
applications directly to the database using the new 'Add Entry' function
located at the top-right of the page (after the username). However, the
application goes into a private "favorites" list and not the main page. In
order to make it to the main page, the application needs to accumulate a
sufficiently high score to become "public".

Here's how the scoring process works. Each member is given a rank (0 to 5)
based on his forum activity and the number of submitted apps that made it to
the main page. For example, a user with 50 posts with get rank 1. A user with
two public apps under his folds will also get rank 1. A user with both will get
rank 2 etc. The rank appears as a little number ("R1") above the username in
the top-right corner of the page. The maximum rank for a user is 5 ('cos
absolute power corrupts absolutely).

Every member is able to add an app in the database to his favorites list using
the "This app rocks!" button (he can remove it using the "This app sucks!"
button). The score of an app is the sum total of the ranks of all the members
who have added it to his favorites list. Once the score>=10, the app becomes
public. (The score of the app is displayed after the popularity score i.e.
XXXXX/YY, where XXXXX is the public+member rating, and YY is the member-only
rating).

Now to put things in perspective, there are only 70+ members who are rank 1 and
above. There are 17 members who are rank 5. So it takes at least two members
with rank 5 to push an app to the main page, or significantly more for lower
ranking members. So I believe that provides a sufficient vetting process for
pushing quality apps to the front.

The way to display what's in your favorites list is to enter "[Username]"
(without the quotes) in the search box. For example, if I type "[Andrew Lee]",
I get all the apps I have added to my favorites list, plus all the apps I have
personally submitted. I can even search my favorites list by typing "[Andrew
Lee] jpeg". This will search for "jpeg" in all the apps on my favorites list. I
can also look at other user's favorite list in this way.

More importantly, I can look at all the apps (public + private) by using the
special "[@]" operator. In this way, I can see what are the apps recently added
to the database and decide whether to add them to my favorites list (after
testing for portability, of course).

Note that because the scores are not available for existing applications yet,
they are currently supported by a "superuser" with a "10" score (because
otherwise, the main page will be empty with this new system). Once actual
ranking become available gradually, I will withdraw the artificial support,
which means some of the existing entries in the database (hopefully the
not-so-good ones) will disappear from the main page.

I suspect many submitted apps will remain as private, while the few good ones will
surface to the top. Anyway that's what the system is designed to achieve, and we
will tweak the system where necessary to achieve this objective.

I hope you are as excited about this new system as I am. For existing users who
are mainly consumer of the information generated by TPFC, nothing has changed
for them. But for more adventurous users who have always wanted to participate
in the TPFC information production process, I hope this feature is one big win
for all of us.

We'll see how this one goes, but from what I'm seeing it looks very promising!
Thank you very much!

P.S.: is it just me, or this really is a unique feature (on the whole www)? :)

P.P.S.: you say the rank is displayed to the right of the username as "R1" for example. But I have a "L" instead of the "R". What does this mean (if anything)?

Also when you should this be going live?

(edited!)

Andrew, this is amazing.

It's funny, I was pretty annoyed by the RSS feed refreshing yesterday, since it screws up my unread-posts-as-to-do-list in GreatNews, but I also wondered if it meant more good changes. This is better than I imagined. I'm awfully impressed with your ingenious design for democratization. Bravo!

Now, some bugs/questions:

The main page shows my username and rank, but the "Add Entry" link just takes me back to the main page
EDIT: it doesn't just refresh the current page, but redirects to http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php

I'm pretty sure at least one app I submitted made it into the database, though it's been quite some time (thanks alot, real job ;) ) and I can't remember which it could be. Only my favorites are showing up when I search for [ashghost], so does the list only include apps added with the new "add entry" function, or should it include the existing "suggested by" apps?

Searching for anything in brackets other than my own username (I tried [andrew lee], [checker], [alephx], and even [dfsjlkfjdssdsd]) returns the entire database. As I understand it, only [@] should do that (and without any "unapproved" submissions because no one's added an entry yet).

I wonder what this will mean for .NET apps: would you prefer that we don't vote for them if they're submitted? My guess is that you would, but that you'll favor your new democracy even more.

It would be nice to be able to vote for multiple apps at once so that I could more quickly fill up my favorites list (I'm on high-latency satellite internet now - 1.5 Mbps, but each page request takes seconds).
EDIT: I can understand why it works this way, and it really doesn't take that long as long as I use plenty of tabs.

It would be great to be able to choose to view more than 5 per page for the same reason. Have you maintained that limit because of existing database/software limitations, the amount of work involved, to reduce bandwidth demands, or just a lack of interest?

Sorry to respond to all of your fabulous hard work with more requests :(

Just let it be known that I officially consider you a genius. :D

Cheers,
ashghost

One more bug I've noticed as I've been handing out votes:

When you confirm your vote, the page says "Thanks for rating <LinkToApplicationPage>!".

Those links are generated incorrectly. They should look like
http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=1529

but they actually look like
http://www.portablefreeware.com/rate.php?id=1529

@ joby_toss: ...But I have a "L" instead of the "R". What does this mean (if anything)?...

I have a "L", too. I think Andrew simply changed his mind from "R"=Rank to "L"=Level ;)

real quick post here like,



oh!oh!oh! but I'm not!
...well, i mean, its kinda what I do around here,

but hopefully these will be rather simple,
can you link these features to the forum more?
like show someones rank beside their username on the forum, even when someone is viewing the forum and not logged in?

and, can you make a link out of the forum usernames, so that when you click on it, it will take you to the 'www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?q=[<USERNAME>]&m=Search' page?

also, with that, can you make it say somewhere on the page '<USERNAMES> Favorites', because right now it just comes up with 'Search Results' which might be confusing to some people,
(it kind of threw me off at first, )

And last one,
this kind of fits in with all of new add/edit stuff,
can you add a tag to the main page to show only updated or newly added (public view) apps?

because sometimes seeing all the updates is nice, but at times i just want to see what new apps have been added lately that i might have missed because of the daily Pages of updates,
and since this voting system will probably increase the number of newly added apps, itd be nice to be able to view them without the updates in the way, and vice versa for the people that might want to see the updates without all the new apps,
(Kind of like the 'Most recent' / 'Most popular' tags)


Also, comments,



Seconded!
this is some truly cool stuff you've done here.
i'll admit the whole TPFC-wiki idea had me a little scared how the site might turn out,
but so far im happy with the way your taking things and glad it wont change Too much overall, ^-^

and quick (duh*) question,
i take it that once you add a program to the database you can link to it directly for like the purpose of posting to the forum?
like in the 'Portable Freeware Submission' section, which should probably be kept just so people can 'get the word' out about their submitted apps?
(*its a 'duh' question because i figure the answer to those is 'yes' but just wanted to ask/say something Just in case, )


anyways, sorry the the request / extra work, but yeah, ^-^;;

Also, Happy Thanksgiving All! ^-^



Edit: Also, forum bug?
i noticed the new guy up there 'todaysicon' has 0 post even after he's made one,
and im 'missing' a post,
IE: This post should have been 190 for me, but its 189 still,
(Edit #2: i just made another post, and my post count went up, so its working, but it seems to be at postcount-1,
Edit #3: so, i was looking at the page while logged out and seen at the bottom it said: "Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 0 guests" ...While Normally it counts 1* guest for myself viewing a page, so maybe the is a bigger overall bug? O_o
(*Not 100% Sure on this cause the last time i was able to be here was back in Oct. -_-))

(Also Welcome to the boards, todaysicon, your already being helpful )

WOW this is amazingly inovative I really hope it works out (and that the admins are still going to be watching just to make sure no shinanigans though it seems pretty locked down)

I love it

Thanks Andrew

p.s. I kinda liked the fact that every app came out in 1969 yesterday ;) LOL

My mistake. It was a toss-up between "level" and "rank" for me, so "L" means level. I have updated the code to display "R". Thanks for pointing it out.



The username is case-sensitive. I gotta check whether the username for phpBB is case-sensitive. If not, then maybe I can made the favorites search case-insensitive too.

Thanks for all your other feedback! I will respond to them laterm and fix any bugs you find. Gotta run for work now!

This is a great function, Andrew Lee.

I am not sure I understand all of its import yet.

How does a private entry get seen? Is it by forum entry?(Do they get automatically entered into a forum?) By random searches of [@] or [username]?

Are you counting no votes? (Would a vote against and a vote for cancel out their part of the rating?)

I understand if I vote against an application it would not show up for me but ...

I would like to ask if the voting includes rejection from the main database as well? (I would not recommenced this)

Will private entries show up on database searches?

Eg: would a search for appname bring up also entries from off the main page?

Would the All page include private entries?

Would it be possible to have 2 private entries for one application, or would the application name be searched for before it could be saved?

I know of at least one instance of two applications having the same name.

Popularity score seems out of whack.
eg. Akelpad - Popularity score - 3786/10.

Adding functionality seems cool.
I probably won't have any submissions that aren't already in the DB!

Lupo should be pleased; he'll finally have a chance to get some of his apps on the site.

What do you mean? The rating seems ok to me: 3786 is the actual popularity score and 10 is the auto generated score for the apps already in the database. At least this is what I understood. The new apps have to reach that "10" (from ranked users) score before making it into the database.

edit: is the bbcode disabled in this subforum?

I think that Freakazoid was referring to the magnitude of Akelpad's score, and the scores do seem a little strange.

Look at the the most popular programs:
http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?q=[aaaaaa]&m=Search&so=p
(The auto-linker doesn't work with the bracket, but that's the only way I know how to show all programs in the database, not just one category or the 500 most recent. You can just copy-and-paste the link.)

Faststone Capture has a crazy score of 97,742! Scores drop precipitously, to 15,374 for the 5th-ranked Universal Extractor.

Here's what Andrew said when he introduced the rating system:
'Currently, the popularity score for each app is affected by user activity eg. visiting the website, or hitting the download link.
The new "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" functions merely provide another way for you to moderate the popularity score for each app directly.'

I bet if they were based entirely on the thumbs up/down, they wouldn't be so skewed.

Great! But not perfect. ;)
Suggestions:
-Path portability should allow 1 more option: Irrelevant.
-Size should be optional IMO. I don't think that it's really important nowadays. Especially that it's such a poor indicator of what to expect. Cluster size varies. And for some users, possible further optimizations can be a great win...and sometimes give nothing. And something that always annoyed me - file that comes upxed out of the box is considered "uncompressed" here...

ADDED:
I found a large bug, it might affect large part of the database:

"Automatic relative path (eg. ..\..\personal\work.doc)"

Such path is relative to the working directory (unless a program uses counter-standard nomenclature). In great majority of cases, if application uses such path, it's a bug.
I don't know any standard way of expressing paths relative to it's directory, but I guess that something like

"Automatic relative path (eg. "Current Application Folder\..\..\personal\work.doc")"
would be fine.

I actually like that the filesize is listed.
I know it's not a good indicator of how much memory is used, but I still prefer lightweight file-sized apps to bloated ones.