Posts count

[Parax]

hi @all!

After a "short" break I want to create now a new community. After installing vb, I installed vbgallery 2.3 and started to customize the settings, but somehow I miss the option that post in the gallery are counting.

Am I blind?

[Zachariah]

It does count the posts and images. It will have more integration in the postbit soon.

[aacircle]

Yeh, I'm having a problem too with the gallery vs the forum. When I manually update post count in vbulletin, it only counts the posts in the forum, and not the gallery.

Is there a way to overcome this?

[Luciano]

Just a stupid question.. (because lots of people want that)
What is the point of adding gallery posts to forum postcount...?

I meen for me.. thats 2 different things..

for me (but i speak only for myself) a gallery post is a "comment" on a picture.. like "hey dude super pic" ....

A forum post is different.. people post information for others to share.. or have questions.. or like here.. provide help..

so for me thats 2 different things.. and I somehow think its not wise to merge the 2..

Also if the count is merged.. and in profile you click on "show all posts by..." it will only show the forum posts.. so if the user only posted 1 thread in the forum and gave 200 comments on pics.. it will say 201 posts.. but when you click on: show all posts by.. it will show only 1

I think its more confusing than anything else..

but i might be wrong and there is another point..

Luc

[SHalliday]

The main benefit I see from having your member forums post count increase when they upload photos and/or post comments is that it serves to encourage members to become more engaged in the photopost sections of the site. Members quickly catch on that this is a easy and fun way to increase their post count and the benefits that go with it. As a site owner I much prefer to have our members actively engaged posting comments and uploading pictures as a way to increase their forums post count than have them post whoring to on the forums to accomplish the same thing.

This would be a very useful feature to use if we ever get some type of admin function that would allow use to reapply member comments and photo counts to the members forum post count totals after they have been rebuilt. Currentl y there is no way to do this that I know of, and as a consequence, whenever you have to rebuild your forum post count totals it will be your most active members that will be pissed off the most when their forum post count totals take a huge drop and they loose any associated ranking, titles or recognition for their participation within your community. I know this for a fact because I am going through this right now as a result of having to rebuild our forums post count totals. Many of our most active members are very upset with the huge and sudden drop in their post counts and are pressuring us to get this fixed. Well thats a good one since there is no fix available or one likely to be included in any near to distant future release. I am now actively seeking to hire a php programmer who would be willing to build these customized scripts. The problem is that there is a apparent shortage of any available programming resources interested in tackling such a project. As far as finding a solution on these mod forums, well we all know what are chances are of that happening and I am guessing if you post this in the regular forums, and do manage to receive a reply it would be one of two things. (1) being that you need to submit your request to the mod section or (2) simply turn off that feature. Well its a little too late for that since we have had it turned on since it became available and the damage has already been done. What I need now is a solution and as I have in the past, am more than willing to pay for it.

As a side note, I think it is really a shame that there are no premium support options sold with these products. I for one, would be more than willing to pay a premium fee to receive some level of support. Anyone else feel the same way?

[Zachariah]

With template hooks in place I plan to show image upload and image comments in the postbit, memberinfo with an on/off option.

The counts per user are tallied at the moment and can be displayed where ever userinfo can be shown.

ppicount - image count
pppcount - post count

Posts: 2,432
Images 1,234

EX:
http://www.photopost.com/forum/showp...57&postcount=3

[aacircle]

Showing the image count in the postbit, memberinfo areas will only add to the server intensive processes. Would be much better as SHalliday mentioned before that it was combined with a member's post count.

Shouldn't be that hard to combine should it?

[SHalliday]

Originally Posted by aacircle

Showing the image count in the postbit, memberinfo areas will only add to the server intensive processes. Would be much better as SHalliday mentioned before that it was combined with a member's post count.

Shouldn't be that hard to combine should it?

Yes that is true but what about if two fields were added to the vbulletin database member table and a cron job then scheduled to update them periodically. I think that would give the best of both solutions without causing excessive server load. I think this would be the best solution for all three photopost products that use vb integration. I was hoping the product's integration features with vb would eventually include a similar type of solution in a future release. If photopost total counts were stored in vbulletin's member database and updated as needed, then it would be very easy to implement and display the information with either solution. Just my thoughts.

Just imagine if photopost's vb integration took the same approach for other types of photopost information such as "lastest photos", "most popular", etc. The cron job runs on scheduled times and updates info in vb database tables. To display this info on vb pages would be a snap regardless of whether photopost was in a separate database or not, and without the extra server load each time the pages display.

[Zachariah]

Originally Posted by aacircle

Showing the image count in the postbit, memberinfo areas will only add to the server intensive processes.

I do not know about that.

- In the early days vBGallery counted images and posts as 1 value and added this to the forums post count located in the User table of vBulletin. The problems with this was anytime you wanted to get the total images or posts a user did you would have to run a query and count it from the gallery tables. Another problem many Admins were running into was if they did a "update counters" maintenance on post counts the data from the gallery was not updated.

Today the counts are in two rows in the same table that the forum post count is in (User table) as ppicount (image count) and pppcount (post count). This allows the gallery post and image count data to be obtained anytime a user's info is requested.

EX:
- Postbit templates
$post[ppicount]
$post[pppcount]

- Memberinfo (profile area)
$userinfo[ppicount]
$userinfo[pppcount]

[SHalliday]

Originally Posted by Zachariah

I do not know about that.

- In the early days vBGallery counted images and posts as 1 value and added this to the forums post count located in the User table of vBulletin. The problems with this was anytime you wanted to get the total images or posts a user did you would have to run a query and count it from the gallery tables. Another problem many Admins were running into was if they did a "update counters" maintenance on post counts the data from the gallery was not updated.

Today the counts are in two rows in the same table that the forum post count is in (User table) as ppicount (image count) and pppcount (post count). This allows the gallery post and image count data to be obtained anytime a user's info is requested.

EX:
- Postbit templates
$post[ppicount]
$post[pppcount]

- Memberinfo (profile area)
$userinfo[ppicount]
$userinfo[pppcount]

Exactly! It would sure be nice if PhotoPost Pro, Classifieds and ReviewPost products vb integration features work exactly the same way!

[Zachariah]

It would not be to hard to make a mod to do it.

hmmmm......
This could be done with all 3 systems.

EX: Create in User Table
- rp_pcount (Review post product count), rp_ccount (Review post comment count)
- pp_icount (Photopost image count), pp_ccount (Photopost comment count)
- pc_pcount (Classifieds product count), pc_ccount (Classifieds comment count)

There would need to be code to update columns in the user table.
and ran on a Cron Job.

IE. - Look @ photopost counts and update VB user table every 15-30 min ? every hour ?

[SHalliday]

I can manage creating the extra fields within the vb user table. It's writing the script to do the actual photopost "totals" accumulation and vb field updates is where I get stumped