I’ve just fixed a small bug in the Carsurvey.org comments pages, which may result in old comments reappearing in RSS readers.

Basically XHTML (which Carsurvey.org is), doesn’t allow for the name attribute of links (used to jump to part of a long document) to start with a number. The previous numeric name attributes have now had the letter c added to their names, which makes everything valid, but may cause RSS readers to treat the updated feeds as if they contain new comments. Apologies to anyone who gets caught out by that. It’s a one off change, in order to make the pages fully validate.

This change also applies to the motorcycle and mobile phone sites.

In response to a member’s request, the links in the members area to earlier comments have been improved. The link now shows the number of existing comments, and if no comments already exist, the link now points at the review itself.

Nothing major, but I’ve altered the left column width to allow for slightly wider ads there, while removing the header and footer ads from most pages. This should make for a cleaner site.

As long as the ad revenue doesn’t crash, I’ll make the same changes to the mobile phone and motorcycle sites in a few days time.

Following on from the recent comment filtering feature, I’ve now added AJAX voting for both the comments and reviews on Carsurvey.org and related sites.

Basically this means that for all visitors with modern browsers (IE5 to IE7, Firefox, Safari, Opera and similar) who have JavaScript enabled, their votes will be submitted without them being taken to another page. All that will happen is that the voting buttons will be disabled, and their vote will be submitted without the page reloading or changing.

For anyone who doesn’t run a modern browser, or who has JavaScript disabled, the voting process will remain unchanged, and will result in a page change when you submit your vote.

My intention is that this change will make voting faster, and if that results on more votes being cast, it should help improve the quality of the content on all the affected sites.

I’ve just done a bit of cleaning up of the smart car reviews on Carsurvey.org. The manufacturer name has been changed from the old MCC Smart to the current name of smart. In addition, I’ve grouped the fourtwo and city coupe reviews together, and I’ve changed Roadster to roadster. All this will have broken some links and RSS feeds (sorry about that), but should make the smart reviews easier to navigate in the longterm.

On Carsurvey.org and related sites (mobile phones and motorcycles), it’s now possible to vote on whether a comment is on or off topic, without being a member. On the reviews with lots of comments, I’ve added “On Topic” and “Off Topic” buttons to each comment. The total of on topic and off topic votes are compared to decide where each comment should be displayed.

I’m trialing some In-Text advertising on Carsurvey.org. Basically this is double underlined links that will appear in some of the reviews and comments. Hopefully this is going to be subtle and won’t distract from the content of the site. If anyone has any strong feelings about its implementation, please leave a comment or email me.

Because of the large number of off topic comments that have recently appeared, I’ve added a feature to enable the filtering of comments according to whether they’re related to the original review.

If there are enough comments to justify splitting by relevancy, the “On Topic” comments become the default view, with “Off Topic” and “All” being offered as alternative views.

Currently only the members and myself can vote on whether a comment is relevant, but my intention is to open this voting up to everyone in the very near future.

As a starter, I’ve trawled through some of the more active reviews, and have done a first pass at filtering the comments.

As usual, any feedback is welcome.

Following a request from a member, I’ve now added the ability for members to configure how many reviews and comments they view on a single page.

Existing members can change from the default setting of five per page, by changing the value in the Update your details page within the Members Area.

Carsurvey.org and related sites (motorcycle and mobile phone) now have the following new RSS feeds:

• Site wide comments
• Reviews and comments by region
• Reviews and comments by manufacturer
• Reviews and comments by model

Hopefully that should make it much easier for people monitor specific areas of the site that they’re interested in. The feeds are available through links, feedicons, and RSS autodiscovery on the relevant pages.

As a technical aside, these feeds are not being generated live, but are generated once an hour (for the site wide and region feeds), or once a day (for the manufacturer and model feeds). This is intended to keep to any rise in server load to a minimum.