So you have owned a directory for a while now ...

and you wish you could tweak your script to do things differently or incoporate some custom features. If your script developer promised to dedicate their resources to implementing your suggestions, what would you ask for?

 

A mod which will ensure that my directory comes up in the top 1 in all search engines for any directory related search

*too ambitious u think, i know.. but what the heck its my programmer who has to rack his brains on this .. *

 

smart spam filter, like those email service providers offer.

 

I'll also answer my question:

• data validation options - I'd like the script to automatically check headers for submissions to ensure the link is not a redirect. A Xenu-like crawl of the site to ensure no missing pages (404s) would also be nice.
• cross reference tools - when viewing a site in the submission queue, I'd like to be able to quickly find out what other sites in the db may have been submitted with the same email or reside on the same IP.
• regular expression checker - It would be very cool if I could define regular expressions which the script could use to see if submissions have "privacy policy", "terms of use", "disclaimer", "about us" or other phrases on the page.
• similarity checker for maintenance - might be a bit pie in the sky, but I'd like for the script to be able to crawl approved sites in batches on a chron job and compare the pages against the last crawl and flag them if they are out of a certain range of similarity

that's a start. I'll add more later...

 

That last one you suggest bernard sounds awesome.

 

I'm a modest guy.

Long time ago I was asking for just one simple thing, submission of category at the same time as url is submitted.

No deal.

Got some really big ideas, as well as some modest ones, but not wasting time asking any longer.

I started practicing being happy with what is available

 

Stay tuned, it's in the works

 

That does indeed sound awesome. But it might just flag up a lot more sites that are regularly updated and redesigned, rather than ones that have changed use.

One feature I'd find useful would be something to crawl the links and log the last time a page was changed, according to the last-modified date on their index page, then sort them by date. That would be a good way to flag up dead and dormant sites.

 

I have thought about that before, but what about blogs and other sites that change all the time. In addition to that I was also thinking of a whois checker to flag sites that have changed owners or that their domains were dropped.

One thing that I would like is a firefox copyscape extension (right click -> Check copyscape). I know it isn't a directory mod but it would make my life easier.

 

I would like a feature where you can define your own heuristics to help weed out submissions not sticking to the policy.

e.g. using regular expressions to dig out subdomain sites or deep links when they're not featured.

 

A surprising percentage of text in the source code for every page is contained the html coding. I'm guessing that a similarity checker with a low threshold (50-60%) should be a useful gauge for flagging pages that are likely to have been completely re-designed versus those with some fresh content. At any rate, if the feature were customizable (ie. admin sets the target %) and optional (as all suggested features should be), those who don't like don't need to mess with it. I personally would find it very helpful in auditing the db.

That is a great idea. If copyscape offers an API, there is no reason why a script couldn't screen submissions automagically.

BTW, the similarity checker should flag sites/pages where the domain lapsed when it (the DNS) doesn't resolve any more.

JagoHarry, yes, that was the direction I was going with my reg exp checker suggestion, though I think you took it to 11.

 

I keep hoping for this functionality too. Seems like it wouldn't be all that difficult to implement, yet even in this thread it got quickly bypassed.

 

Oops. I forgot to mention it. I agree that it is a *must* feature.

 

yes.. give the SPAMMERS a means of submitted several hundred new categories, including their links all at the same time.

sometimes you guys need to think about the repercussions prior to being the gimme gimme gimme vultures that a good majority of you are.

 

Spammers will submit whether a category suggestion feature is in place or not. This feature can help honest webmasters who are not expert directory managers/submitters an option for submitting their quality site where they otherwise would not (because an appropriate category did not exist).

Features such as these should be optional for the directory owner to use or not at their discretion. I personally would find this feature of value. You apparently don't think much of it. Different strokes.

You've got a bad attitiude Rob. Blanket statements like that casting aspersions is really not constructive. I paid for the script I'm using and I'd pay more for a script that does everything that I want it to.

There is nothing wrong with fostering discussion of features that directory owners would like to see. Hopefully some progressive script writers will hear opportunity knocking and answer the call of the market.

 

Back on topic... More features I'd like to see:

• attach image(s) - I'd like submitters to be able to upload image attachements that can be incorporated into the display templates or descriptions. Ie. logos that could be offset from the description like many directories currently place screenshot thumbnails or displayed inline in the descriptions using a placeholder code ({img1} for example).
• simple formatting codes like BBCode - to allow submitters to include bulleted lists for example. It would be great if admins could pick and choose (or custom define) the codes they want to allow.

 

Esyndicat added this to version 2 I believe

I am not a coder but if I am not mistaken there is a smarty bbcode plugin that could probably be used for this.

One more suggestion that might appear in some extent in some scripts.
Customisable plans and a shopping cart.
What do I mean by customisable plans.
1. Be able to create unlimited types of plans
2. Be able to assign attributes to each plan like : Paid (Yes/No), CSS style, Order of appearance of the sites under different plans in the frontend, length of time, additional urls (yes, no, how many) etc
3. Be able to assign different plans to different categories

And the shopping cart that would allow us to offer special discounts, promo codes, bulk discounts etc

 

Hi,
dkessaris is right. eSyndiCat does have a feature to upload images. For example you can create additional field with image type, set its width + height and it will be displayed on your suggest link and listings display pages with no additional modifications.

BBCode Hmm, our previous version had something like that.. We removed it because of some security issues.

 

Hey Simon,
Take a look at this also

Or at least allow us to charge for featured listings. Right now esyndicat 2 has a ton of bells and wistles but it is hardly usable to create a paid directory.

 

That has to depend on how well the page has been coded, for example how extensively css is used.

But it shouldn't be too much of a leap to strip the html tags from the page and compare what is left over. So you could have a % similarity for the whole page, and a different % for the text on its own. It's probably also possible to do a regexp to strip out the text and just look at the code (there may even be a function to do this in php, kind of strip_tags in reverse, I don't know). So it is possible to separate out the different elements of the page and compare changes in order to figure out if a page has been redesigned or simply updated with new text.