Rob Dob said:
Hi,
Does anyone know of a good, cheap, prefereably free ,net control that I
can use that will aloow users to not only rate something i.e.: 1-5 stars
but also post comments on whatever they are rating. i.e. a possible a
picture.. etc.
Thanks,
I built such a control in-house but it took about a month of development,
QA'ing, cleaning up, tweaking, etc. Keep in mind, it's not as simple as it
seems, if only because:
a) A comment thread needs to be associated with something, i.e. an article.
b) The users' info needs to be retained. Cookies work, but if the users are
already logged in on your site you should store the user data on the
database.
c) Retaining a thumbnail image of the user requires you to host the user
data on the server anyway, unless you just expect the users to keep
referencing an external URL to a thumbnail graphic (cookies can be used to
pre-populate this). But I don't recommend that, because thumbnail images'
dimensions should be imposed by you, and you also run the risk of hacks,
attacks, and privacy invasions by allowing users to reference external URLs
for images. Rather, you should load the image on the server after having
loaded the image into a bitmap (System.Drawing.Image) to validate that it's
indeed an image and to impose the thumbnail resizing.
Good luck,
Jon