I have users in my system and I want to create a reputation system where they begin to accumulate points based on a few, simpler inputs:
The ratings of their reviews
The number of reviews they have
The number of followers
I don't need it to be super complex, just functional and believable. I am seeking help both on the "math" side, but also if there are gems they do pieces of it on the user-interface and data-model side.
I would take a look at thumbs_up, I looked into it for a recent project and now wished we had used it instead of a different gem. Seems pretty straightforward.
While it's not a Rails specific book and more conceptual, I recommend the book 'Building Web Reputation Systems.' http://www.amazon.com/Building-Reputation-Systems-Randy-Farmer/dp/059615979X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1303234014&sr=8-1
Depending on what you're trying to do, lots of planning goes underneath them and the book talks a lot about the process along with other examples from Yahoo and soforth.
Related
I'm looking for some advice / guidance --
I'm working on a recommendation engine / personnel assistance app, using Mahout as the framework -
What I want to do is for new users of the app to begin by answering 5 questions and use the answers from the questions to effect the recommendation -- pretty much feeding the answers as a user-preference
I'm just not sure how to incorporate this into my code, I'm not even sure where to begin looking - I've been Googling but none of the search results really address this...
Any suggestions / advice / guidance will be greatly appreciated
Thanks
I did just that with the new Spark Itemsimilarity implementation about a year ago. You'll need a search engine for the recommendations query because Mahout doesn't have a server. I'd suggest using the new "Universal Recommender" engine template with PredicitonIO. It uses Mahout to calculate the model and Elasticsearch to serve it.
https://templates.prediction.io/PredictionIO/template-scala-parallel-universal-recommendation
PreditionIO is a framework of integrated components that provide an event server (for event storage) integration with Hadoop/HDFS, Spark, Hbase, and a REST or SDK API. All you do is install it and get the template as a plugin engine. This will provide pretty advanced recommendations queries with multiple event ingestion, a hybrid content-based method to tune results, and several methods of using popular items for backfill when no other recommendations can be made. It also uses realtime user actions for recommendations.
This last bit is super important if you want to have your users go through some training. This way they will see the benefit of training in realtime. Check this site, where I did exactly what you are talking about: https://guide.finderbots.com Notice the "Trainer". It presents you with movies and asks for thumbs up or down for as many as you care to do, then when you ask for recommendations they will be based on the realtime preferences of the user. You need to create an account first so we have a user-id.
The way I created the list for the trainer is by cluster popular items. By clustering I mean based on the users that preferred the items. Clustering produces items that are differentiated because they belong to different clusters, which means different user-sets tended to like them, and the popular ones are more likely to be known by users when they go through training. These are good things to have in a trainer.
I'm building an app to write wine tasting notes, and I have to translate this tasting framework (only the first page) into a model.
It's a lot of a data and I'm not sure about how to proceed. I tried to sketch a possible solution in this spreadsheet.
What would you suggest to do? Should I create only one model (Wine) with a column for each wine characteristic?
Thanks!
P.S. I'm learning web development, sorry if my question sounds trivial.
Perhaps not a direct answer to your question but here's a few notes nevertheless:
I'd say for something like wine tasting, I would go for a combination of selects, tags and simple free-text.
This RailsCast should give you a good introduction to the acts-as-taggable-on gem for tagging.
One thing that may be handy when modelling your DB is to look at several wine tasting 'forms' that are already filled out and see if you can see a pattern. Say for Palate/Acidity I would expect the value to be one of light/medium/high, whereas for the Conclusion/Identity it could be pretty much anything.
You'll also need to find the right balance between restricting and allowing the user input. I'd expect your users to be happier with free-text and feeling more restricted with select/radio boxes. On the other hand, it is always easier (for you) to change from a select box to free text, rather than the other way around. Not to mention searching is much easier by selects or tags.
I don't think your question is that trivial and I think you should to simply try it and see. And design with the ability to change in mind.
I'm building something like Facebooks Wall inside of Rails. It will look something like this:
Stacey S. Wants to be Friends
You've been invited to the Summer Social
Pat Replied to your Message: Hey!!!
American Pet Society has a new Post: Love Your Cat!
There are two ways to do this. I could have each of these different events write to the events database when they are created or I could pull from the relationships, invitation, inbox and posts tables and create the events on the fly.
I'm leaning towards the events database approach because it seems cleaner to just call that one table than all the other tables and then sort them correctly. Is this how you would do it?
I'm building a system with similar requirements now, and I think you'll find that the performance characteristics of the latter approach make it extremely untenable. depending on how much usage you intend to get out of the system, you may find the event table to be a performance hog during the request as well. What I'm doing is using an architecture that's basically CQS with event sourcing which builds the feeds for a given user in the background and caches them in a thoroughly denormalized fashion to make the request cycle very short.
Another approach you should look at is using Chronologic: https://github.com/gowalla/chronologic. It may save you quite a bit of effort.
By all means, it will save you from a lot of complicated queries and sorting. Go for the event table approach.
I have a few apps written in ruby on rails and like any good developer I want high quality data about my site, such as measuring the number of new user accounts per day. I'm in the process of writing my own analytics tools, but I feel like i'm re-inventing the wheel. Are there any plugins or gems that could help me pull this data and display it quickly (graphs are a plus)?
If not, what types of features would you want in such a tool (i'll put a plugin on github if my code is good enough)?
Update:
To clarify a bit, i'm looking for business level-analytics. I already use google-analytics for my site traffic, and active-scaffold to get an admin page, right now my application has users which generate tickets and can create surveys, i'm interested in general trends in my application and by graphing new & existing user numbers versus new tickets and new surveys i can get the info that I want. I like to get general numbers, so i'm pulling all the users for the last 30 days, and then iterating over them to count how many i get per day...then i'm saving that to an array and plotting versus tickets, etc. Right i'm doing this using a home brew library which isn't very efficient, and before I put time/energy into making it better I want to make sure i'm not duplicating an existing set of tools. Or writing un-needed code.
If you post how you personally do this, and the answer is at least intelligible i'll be happy to give you a karma bump for your time.
You have three options that are all fairly easy to implement:
Google Analytics
Just include a small javascript snippet in the footer of your page and you get meaningful data about your hits/traffic. This is extremely easy, and will provide traffic information, but nothing about the internal workings about your applications.
New Relic: RPM
New Relic RPM is a service that comes in the form of a plugin. There is a free version, which gives you a (useful) taste of the features it can provide. This plugin will give you hardcore rails analytics. It will tell you what percentage of a request to a controller is spent in the model, in the view, etc. It will tell you how long each SQL call takes. This is great for optimizing your application.
ActiveScaffold
While not in and of itself an administrative tool, ActiveScaffold fits the bill quite nicely. Just create an admin namespace and create ActiveScaffolds for all your models/resources. This lets you see the data in an easy to use way, get simple counts of your rows (to see how many users you have, for example). This is a very easy setup, with little overhead.
Edit to reply to the OP Edit
There are no gems/plugins that I'm aware of that provide business-level analytics that you seem to want, as they are specialized associations between models that can't be predicted. The best bet, in my opinion, would be to roll your own solution that provides the data you want.
Probably the easiest way is to stick with good ol' Google Analytics. I'm pretty sure there are tools for more specific needs, but for general purpose analytics they are probably the best.
I work at an in-house IT department for company running 10 or so only shops of varying complexity. The shops code has been written over the last 8 years, each shop a new branch growing father and father away from the stem (I guess that makes it a bush?)
The need for more and more complex discounts, campaigns and user monitoring are growing rapidly - and changing rapidly as well (you never know what they come up with). So we have decided to write a new system from scratch and bring the different shops back together having them run on the same core code. We have considered .NET, but due to the fact that the design requirements change so fast we have more or less decided to give Rails a try. But we have some uncertainties/questions about rails.
Is Rails (stack) suitable to run to build a shop framework and who should this be organized?
We are running around 10 shops of which some are very much alike only differing in style, where others stands out in functionality, flow and content. But behind the business logic is all the same. The shops functionality is to a great extend the same as well. As an example the checkout page of one shop might display great details about VAT, discounts, P&P, etc. where as another might only show the necessary minimum.
Which approach would you take? Would you build and maintain a runable template shop with a functional superset of the shops. As new functionality is developed then merge the code with the other shops? Sounds a bit cumbersome.
In the example with the checkout page the views would differ from shop to shop, but the controllers and the models would remain the same, as long as you externalize configurations, like payment method types, and so on.
From this perspective it would make more sense just to create a repository of the views and configurations for each shop and then maintain model and controller code in a separate repository.
Would be possible to arrange the views according to shop, keeping all resources in one repositoary /views/shopname/Product. Would this make sense?
What do you think? how would you do this? Will working with rails in this way bring to much trouble?
Our campaign/discount system is growing steadily complex, both GUI and business logic. (in this view Rails seems interesting with its fast turnaround). Our discounts are property based and these properties are stored in a database row.
Making changes in the requirements to the workings of a discount is a real headache. So we are slowly replacing this property based system with a system that for each discount attaches a class (PHP) and a configuration so that each discount type has its own class and each utilization of such discount could specify some values for this class to operate on given current context (basically: what is in the basket)
In rails what approach would you take?
In rails you can easily extend your model (discount) with yet another property, migrate and you are ready (maybe a bit simplified). Could you write a base discount class that relied on a few basic properties and then write modules that hook into (extends) this class in case you need more advanced functionality?
Specifically what would this be in Rails terms a helper?
Some of this post might be a bit unclear. Please do ask questions. Also I'm in the process of learning Rails so please excuse me if don't use the right terms or if I've missed some of the main ideas of Rails.
Thanks
Michael
Is Rails (stack) suitable to run to
build a shop framework and how should
this be organized?
Sure, it can be suitable see:
http://www.shopify.com/
http://www.liquidmarkup.org/
I would not recommend it as a first project though.
Dont forget Spree Commerce as a viable solution that may or not suid your needs. On the other hand, if you want to roll your own solution, also check ActiveMerchant for payment gateway integration.