5 Star Rating System, Messaging, and Notifications Added to PAA

Post Almost Anything now features direct messaging, a 5 star rating system, and notifications. We hope that this will increase engagement by allowing people to communicate with one another, know when someone has commented on or rated their work, and make it easier for readers to gauge user sentiment.

Logged in members can now send messages directly to other members by visiting any profile and clicking the link that says "Message" followed by the recipient's user name. You will then be taken to a page featuring inputs for subject line and message body. Click send and the recipient will receive a notification that you sent them a message with a link to where they can view the message. If they respond to the message then you will receive a notification of the reply. If you no longer wish to receive these notifications you can disable them in your account settings under "Notifications." You can also check to see if you have any new messages simply by clicking on your user name in the site navigation and you will see a red number next to the word "Messages" indicating how many new messages you have. For the sake of efficiency each message and all replies directed to you are marked as read whenever you load any message you received.

Logged in users can now include a rating between one and five stars when posting comments. Each rating requires a comment because we want people to explain the reasoning behind their rating. Users can only rate a post once, so if you want to change your rating you will need to deactivate the previous comment used to rate the post. You can do that by logging in, viewing your profile, and selecting the option to edit your comment. We hope that adding this will make Post Almost Anything a preferred alternative to Craigslist for classified ads because people can now see what other users think of each listing. We also think it makes the Rants and Raves section a great place for rating people, businesses, and government agencies.

Whenever someone comments on your posts you will receive an email informing you that someone commented on your post if you checked the little box that says, "Email me when someone comments on, rates, or likes my post" when your post was created. You can toggle notifications on and off on a post by post basis simply by viewing your post while logged in clicking the link towards the top that says "CLICK HERE to Edit." You can also check to see if you have any new notifications simply by clicking on your user name in the site navigation and you will see a red number next to the word "Notifications" indicating how many new messages you have. For efficiencies sake each notification is considered old whenever the notifications page is checked.

What's Next?

Next we will focus on adding the ability to like any post or comment. Unlike ratings, likes will not require you to include a comment. That way people can easily say they like something without doing any work beyond clicking the Like button. After that we will focus on recoding parts of the site to make our database queries faster and then we will enable profile editing followed by the ability to post status updates.