Advice sought on notice board

[jon llama]

My site is a Japanese language guide to London.

It will include a list of available accommodation, and I'd like visitors to the site to add their comments on any hotels they have stayed at so that others can get a first-hand and reasonably neutral impression of what each place is like.

I wondered whether it would be possible to do this in the form of a notice board. Could anyone suggest some suitable (preferably free) software that can do this.

Alternatively, if I'm barking up the wrong tree, I'd appreciate it if someone would tell me.

Jon (honmanoLondon.com)

[Justin]

You might be interested in our free guestbook...

Hope this helps.

------------------
Justin Nelson
FutureQuest Support

[jon llama]

Thanks
I'll give it a try.
jon

[Armand]

Hmm... could use something like Gossamer Threads Links (free)... there's some modifications that can be added to allow users to their own reviews and such.  Of course this is if you feel comfortable with cgi and making modifications or such.... it might also be too much... I don't know.

[jon llama]

Thanks for advic
First I've heard of gossamer threads, but I'll give it a try.Suspect it may be a tadge over my head at the moment, though.
Cheers
Jon

[Dan Kaplan]

I was thinking of recommending Gossamer Threads, but I think DBMan would be a better choice than Links, although both have their pros and cons.  One thing, both are only free for non-commercial use, which is often difficult to ascertain.

The guestbook would be the simplest, but I don't think either it or a forum would be a good approach.  By the time your reviews get large enough in number to be of much use to people, they will be too large and unorganized to be usable!  That's where a searchable/catagorized database is likely to be of much more use down the road.

Dan
[This message has been edited by Dan Kaplan (edited 05-25-00@10:49 am)]

[Armand]

Thanks Dan for correcting me on the Links free thing...running a non-commercial site, I often forget about that part.  

[jon llama]

Ta for the tips
I hadn't realised the different language character set would pose such a problem. Perhaps I'll have to scale down my ambitions for the moment. But I'll try some of the scripts recommended first.

Jon

[Stephen]

if it's reviews you're collecting and you'd like a simple solution i may be able to help you. i'm on the verge of releasing a Customer Review Manager (called MAGPIE). it's not free and it's not SQL-database oriented. however, it has the following advantages:

(1) it's designed specifically to enable reviewers to leave opinions and rate "items" that you, the administrator, have specified (hotels in this case) and uses a 1-5 star system.

(2) it utilizes a flatfile database so you don't need to have access to an SQL server (although i expect to release an SQL version at some future date).

(3) you don't need to know any CGI or perl to run this thing, just access to a cgi-bin area like the one here at FQ, and the perl5 interpreter.

i won't be releasing the program probably until next week(?) because i'm putting the final touches on my web site, but i'd be happy to send a trial version your way now if you'd like to receive it (trial version automatically expires after 30 days). all i need is the domain name of the site on which you'll be running it, and your e-mail address, both of which you can e-mail me at magpie@randommouse.com

the only potential problem i see is that the program is English-based and won't currently suit anyone hoping to run it with foreign languages. i expect to address that problem one day, but that day is far off at the moment, and the better alternative in that case would be to grab something like one of the Gossamer programs and EDIT it directly to output the foreign character set (big job).

currently i'm tweaking the software and i still have documentation to write, but the administrative control panels have lots of info in them, so you can learn about the program reasonably easily by installing it and studying the panels.

Stephen