I have a site for a hobby im working on that has restaurant reviews on it. I want users to be able to add new restaurants in as well as edit the info on other restaurants which they may or may have not added to the site. I am not sure what the best way to approach this is. I have a few options I have thought of, but I'm not sure.
Only allow restaurants that are on say google places
main concern with this approach is if a restaurant a user wants to go to isn't listed on google places then what
Allow users to manually add in restaurants and check google places and fill in pertinent info like address phone if not on google places then let user add all info in manually... if is or is'nt on google places still have to manually accept restaurant to the site
the main downside of this is I may have to spend tons of time making sure a restaurant is real or isn't real
Anyone have any ideas?
also i am running rails should i just use a versioning gem to achieve the request an update so that way i can moderate updates or new restaurants...
I am no Ruby guy, so I will not comment on that part. But depending on the size of your user base I would solve it by user moderation or do it manually. If you haven't got that many users moderating the new entries should be feasible and if you got many users it should be possible to accept any new entry and then allow users to flag bad entries like it is done here on SO or on foursquare or Facebook Places.
Of course you could choose to accept anything available on Google Places, but only allowing entries that can be found there would make it annoying for users to enter new info which would discourage them from doing so.
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From what i've been able to discern so far, Firebase/Firestore seem like the perfect platform to use for an app I am writing. However I can't quite connect all the dots when trying to design my backend. I am hoping that someone will be able to give answer a couple of basic questions about the use of FB/FS.
With my app, a user will be able to share a small piece of data with a select group of friends. ie if the data is to be a To-Do list, the user would create the list on his device (iphone only) and then invite a small group of friends (probably less than 10) to share that data. The friends would have read-only access by default, however, the user can assign any number of them to be "admins" which would allow them read/write permission. When any changes occur to the data, all "friends" who have access to the data will be notified (by some means - push notifications etc). They can manually sync or setup the app to automatically sync. It seems like FB/FS can be used for this right out of the box. However there are a couple of concepts that I can't get my head around.
The database I setup is accessible by ALL users of my app by default. It's not clear (at least to me) how I would set it up so when a user creates (in this case) a to-do list and invites 5 friends, only those 5 friends can access or even know about that data. This is main stumbling block in my development path.
Regarding invitations. I read in the FB/FS documentation that invitations and notifications are among the many features available. I'm not clear on how this will work if a) the recipient doesn't have my app installed and b) how the inviter would get feedback when the invitation was accepted or declined.
Any guidance that anyone is willing to share to help me get started will be a huge help and will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
You can create new privates collections inside the main collection, and set different rules for access.
Check at: Firebase Firestore get private fields
I'm making a web application in Rails 4 that is going to allow users to create trips. These trips are going to be built dynamically using Google Maps API based upon user input. IE, users can create different waypoints and locations that they visited. I want users to be able to add waypoints and descriptions about particular stops.
But I want these locations to be stored so that there's a search function where users can search for different regions such as around a particular address or state.
I'm not looking for anything overly specific here, I just want an idea of how to set it up.
What I've thought of so far is that Users create trips which have many waypoints that in turn are models. I'm not sure that is ideal however.
Thoughts? Even a link to a post I might have missed is helpful. Thanks.
Edit: In case anyone runs across this problem in the future. I went with Google Map's Directions API. It lets you pass in waypoints as an array of objects. I used JavaScript to add waypoints as necessary and then allowed the user to submit to how the map looked. Then, if they liked it, they submitted the trip form which logged the input values into the db as attributes to the trip object.
I need to develop an application which should help me in getting all the status,messages from different servers like Twitter,facebook etc in my application and also when i post a message it should gets updated in all the services. I am using authlogic for authentication. Can anyone suggest me what gems/plug-ins i can use..
I need API help to get all the tweets/messages to be displayed in my application and also ways to post the messages to the corresponding services by posting it from my application. Can anyone help me from design point.
Walk through what you'd want to do in your head. Imagine the working site, imagine your webapp working before you start. So your user logs in (handled by authlogic) and sees a textbox called "What are you doing right now?". The user fills in a status message and clicks "post". The status message appears at the top of their previously posted messages.
Start with the easy part. Create a class that posts to two services. Use the twitter gem and rfacebook to post to two already defined services. In the future, you'll want to let the user associate services to their account and you would iterate through the associated services and post the message to each. Once you have this working, you can refactor or polish the UI a bit to round out this feature. I personally would do the "add a social media account to my profile" feature towards the end.
Harder is the reading of the data (strangely enough) because you're going to have to figure out how to store it. You could store nothing but I suspect you'd run into API limits just searching all the time (could design around this). I would keep a little cache of posts associated to the user's social media account. In this way, the data model would look like this:
A user has many social media accounts.
A social media account has many posts. (cache)
Of course, now you need to schedule the caching of the posts. This could be done manually, based on an event (like when they login) or time based. So when the update happens, you load up the posts for that social media account and the user will see the posts the next time they hit the page. For real-time push to the client's browser while they stare at the screen, use faye (non-trivial) and ajax to pull the new posts to the top of the social media stream view.
The time based one is tricky because you'd either have to have a cron job run or have rails handle it all with a gem like clockwork. But then you have to leave rails running. I've also solved this by having a class in /lib do all the work and a simple web call kicks off the update. But it wasn't in a multi-user use case. So that might not work. In any case, you'll want to have some nice reusable code for these problems since update requests can come from many different sources.
You'll also have to deal with the API limits. When pulling down content from twitter, you won't get everything. That will just have to be known by the user or you'll have to indicate a "break in time" somehow.
The UI should be pretty easy (functionally anyway), because you know which source the post/content is coming from. It'd be easy to throw a little icon next to the post to display which social media site it's coming from.
Anyway, good luck, sounds like a fun project.
I've been working on a web app that could be prone to user abuse, especially spam comments/accounts. I know that RECAPTCHA will take care of bots as far as fake users are concerned, but it won't do anything for those users who create an account and somehow put their spam comments on autopilot (like I've seen on twitter countless times).
The solution that I've thought up is to enable any user to flag another user and then have a list of flagged users (boolean attribute) come up on a users index action only accessible by the admin. Then the users that have been flagged can become candidates for banning(another boolean attribute) or unflagging. Banned users will still be able to access the site but will have greatly reduced privileges. For certain reasons, I don't want to delete users entirely.
However, when I thought of it, I realized that going through a list of flagged users to decide which ones should be banned or unflagged could be potentially very time consuming for an admin. Short of hiring someone to do the unflagging/banning of users, is there a more automated and elegant way to go about this?
I would create a table named abuses, containing both the reported user and the one that filed the report. Instead of the flagged boolean field, I suggest having a counter cache column such as "abuse_count". When this column reaches a predefined value, you could automatically "ban" the users.
Before "Web 2.0", web sites were moderated by administrators. Now, the goal is to get communities to moderate themselves. StackOverflow itself is a fantastic case study. The reputation system enables users to take on more "administrative" tasks as they prove themselves trustworthy. If you're allowing users to flag each other, you're already on this path. As for the details of the system (who can flag, unflag, and ban), I'd say you should look at various successful online communities (like StackOverflow) to see how they work, and how successful they are. In the end it will probably take some trial and error, since all communities differ.
If you want to write some code, you might create a script that looks for usage patterns typical of spammers (eg, same comment posted on multiple pages), though I think the goal should be to grow a community that does this for you. This may be more about planning than programming.
Some sophisticated spammers are happy to spend their time breaking your captcha if they feel that the reward is high enough. You should also consider looking at a spam server such as akismet for which there's a great rails plugin (https://github.com/joshfrench/rakismet).
There are other alternatives such as defensio (https://github.com/thewebfellas/defensio-ruby) as well as a gem that I found once which worked pretty well at detecting common blog spam, but I can't for the life of me find it any more.
We just launched and are looking to better understand where the users who are converting to registered users are actually coming from. We can see our traffic sources and referrals via Google Analytics and our other web statistics programs, but in volume, it's difficult to tie these specifically to which users in our database have converted and from where.
We have several "goals" in Google Analytics setup to better help track conversions, but what are others doing to associate user signups with inbound traffic sources?
One thought we've been kicking around - capturing the referral on the first page load and pass it along in the session into the registration form where you store it into the user record.
Any other solutions that are working successfully for you?
Thanks!
Indeed, I would suggest storing the referrer in the user record. Then you can write some code to sensibly draw out additional data from the URL. For instance, you could parse Google URL's to determine the keywords used to discover your site. And your code could detect things like referrals from ad runs, specific SEO campaigns you're running, or partner deals you have going.
It would be beneficial to spend some time building an admin-only page to visualize these conversions to help you better learn what is working and what isn't. And when things are going well, such a page is encouraging for the whole team!
Capturing referral is a good start. You should capture it to persistent cookie instead of a session so that if user returns tomorrow it still has the same referral information.
I've created a gem to automate tracking and saving referral infos. See https://github.com/holli/referer_tracking for more info.
Some notes when designing tracking (I've tried to catch these with the gem already)
It might be better to save tracking data to separate table. So that when you delete user account you won't delete information about how that user account was created. You get the answer like "where does bogus user accounts come from?"
Save also cookies to db. If you are using Google Analytics you can parse Googles cookies to get additional information about the visitor. Like the number of visits or campaign information.
It's good to save also user_agents etc to be able to differ between mobile and desktop browsers etc.
In the end its good to visualize the information and conversions. But in the beginning its hard to know what data you want to visualize and how. So try to capture as much data as possible and then later decide how to crunch that data with scripts.