[Plugin: GD Star Rating] Help Setting Up GD Stars

You can set voting rules for both posts and comments, and with that allow only users to vote. And for the sidebar there is a widget for displaying posts with rating that is very, very flexible.

Thanks for your reply. Could you be more specific? Where do I go to set voting rules? How do I make a sidebar display post by the rating?

PS – there is a drop down menu under Tools in which if I select “Only Users” nothing happens. After I click SET, the page reloads and that drop down menu displays “/” (forward slash sign) and all visitors continue to rate without problems. Is this the settings you are talking about? If so, is it going to be fixed so it actually works? I mean what sense does it make having it there if you can’t set it to desired settings?

Each post have own rule settings. And the main option in settings is used only for new posts. This way you can set each post individually. If you want to set all old posts, you have a bulk tool in the Tools menu for this.

You should apply for “vague talker or the year” award. You are like Barack Obama – says a bunch of stuff but none of it makes any sense.

hey there…
i am also struggling getting what i want out of this plugin
the reason GDragoN is being vague is because he now charges for support on the plugin.

The tutorials are just as bad as his answers. either that or he assumes too much about peoples understanding.

None the less, maybe the two of us can crack this thing and help eachother out with our problems…

i am trying to answer your questions…setting for wether or not star rating / thumb are in your post and pages can be found in the settings menu of the plugin.

The icon next to each tab tells you what you are dealing with. a star means star rating and the thumb means thumbs up etc…

Under the rating heading you can turn on and off stars and thumbs for pages and posts. that is [star] Article and [thumb] Article

obviously then [star] comment and [thumb] comment deatil with comment sections…

I hope that help you a bit more

Ilan

Great, i am not the only person to find the whole thing immensely frustrating then!
The plugin looks great but the documentation seems to be aimed at people who have been using it since conception. Every single tutorial presumes a level of familiarity with the plugin that i (and i would imagine many others) simply do not have.

I got so frustrated with it that i considered paying for ‘premium support’ and couldnt even do that!! You are directed to the dev4press.com site, which runs like a snail and does not have any obvious way to sign up for premium support!! You can sign up for the site (standard wordpress signup) but that reveals nothing about premium support. Clicking on any forum topic or tutorial just says access denied. WTF?

All i want to do is give visitors the option of replying to a post with a review that includes their star rating, and have the average rating from all comments display at the bottom of the post.

This should be simple but i cant get it for the life of me. I can get each comment to display a blank set of stars that can the be clicked buy other visitors (basicly reviewing that particular comment) and i can get each post to display clickable stars, which is no good because i want to only let people who leave a review (comment) the ability to rate!

Considering this is supposed to be such a popular plugin i am surprised there are no idiots guides floating about. In fact the only ‘help’ i can find is the official websites.

Support on Dev4Press website is not free, and that’s why you are getting access denied. I am really sorry about the premium support, but unfortunately, there is no other way for me to provide quality support. If the support was to remain free I would need to dedicate most of my time to it, since over 30.000 blogs are using the plugin. And while most don’t have any issues and manage to set everything up, there are many that need support. I am working on GDSR 2.0 and I invested a lot of time already, and I will invest a lot more yet, and plugin will remain always free, support on the other hand is going to be premium only.

As it is now, this plugin is so complicated that everyone who whish to use it in a decent way must pay premium support.

Docs sucks bigtime and they’re simply unuseful. This is a nice trick already used by dozen of programmers: the script is cool, but if you want to use it you must pay for support.

As soon as the 30k users will become unable to use the simpliest featuers they always used, we will se the gdrating plugin come back to free support again.

meanwhile, I’m gonna remove it from all my blogs, because I don’t want to get in trouble and being unable to fix the problem.

there are several rating plugins out there, let’s use ’em.

Thank Goodness ! I thought I was the only one frustrated with this plug in. Have been struggling with it for a week now. Add to that I plan to use it for voting (not just rating).

ANYONE KNOW OF A GOOD VOTING PLUGIN/WIDGET ?

I have a need to open a contest where posts will come in over a 3 week period ; registered users will rate it (preferably on multiple criteria like story idea, execution & flow , Language, overall appeal); I would love to disable the display of ratings for the 3 weeks ; at the end of the 3 weeks, I would like to display results , skim the top-10 for a further review by an expert in the fied..
My status so far and ANY, anyone who can help , I would be greatful..

My status with this plugin(frustrated!) :

1. After a re-install multi is working ; or so it seems. It does register the vote per the message on the sreen but I cannot see that in ‘My Ratings’ in the admin at all ; Also ANY short code I generated using builder just shows up empty for Multi ; works fine for Single (created a new template and used it).

2. I love the flexibility of the plugin but unfortunately I have to agree that it assumes the user knows the plugin and it’s inner workings. I could look at premium but to do that I need to be able to get it to work reasonably well and like it. This has been a struggle — getting it work ….

I’m looking for ways to show the GD star widget only on specific pages. How do you specify the rating widget to appear only on certain pages? For example on this blog when I click on “Free Apps” category, the top rated free apps widget appears, and here when I click on “Games” category, the top rated games widget appears.
Please help how do I do this?

First of all, sorry to bring up a slightly old thread.

to lolwiki: just add more widgets using wp’s appearance tab and set each gd star widget to display only on certain categories. (filter>article category).

to the rest: Yes, the documentation is not as good as it can be. Yes, it actually takes some sort of php skill or at the very least some patience to actually customize a website/ blog.

In most cases the problem is not with the plugin or WP devs but with users who expect to find a magic “create my website button”. Stop complaining and start researching a bit. If you just can’t seem to grasp basic php/jscript/whatnot then give up and get someone else to do it or pay for it.

So far, GD star rating is a premium, highly customizable plugin that costs $0. Before it you either had to hand-code your own or pay serious cash for a custom implementation.

With GDSR 2.0 I plan to make many tasks and features easier to use. I know that many things in GDSR are not exactly made for inexperienced users, and I will try to change that with GDSR 2.0.

Functions that are for public use are documented (more or less), and I will also work to improve that. And new plugin will offer much, much more that current one. It’s safe too say that if everything on my list get’s implemented (and it will in 2.x versions), GDSR will be the only rating/review plugin that you will need more powerful than any similar plugins on other CMS platforms.

But, it takes time and a lot of work, and that’s why support for it is no longer free. I know that many people are offended by the fact that I don’t give support for free (I get many emails demanding help), but premium support for such complex plugin is the only way it can be done at all.

I want to use the thumb up/down data for a “Most Popular Post” widget, how do I do that? I’ve been searching across the web and nothing helpful has come up. Does anyone know?

I don’t want to be an ingrate because this is a great plugin and it’s for free, but I have to say this is the most complicated plugin/software I have never used. With lack of simple feature support, I don’t know how I can be sure that I would get quality support when I pay for it.

What is ‘Most Popular Post’ widget?

As for the support, as I said many times I simply don’t have time to provide free support. I am focused on premium services for WordPress and that is not going to change any time soon.

And with all free plugins, you can always look under the hood to see what is going on. I have included info files with functions definitions, and if all public functions are grouped in few files and all are documented. That’s still much, much better than most plugins out there.