Your input needed: what user review upgrades would you like?

sothis

Forum Moderator
Anime-Planet Founder
Developer
For the last few weeks I've been working on a plan to raise visibility of the user reviews - the site reviewers unfortunately have mostly moved on to other things or don't have time to write reviews anymore, and the /reviews/ section tends to look a little barren because of it. Rather than getting you new site reviews once every few months, I'm working on ideas to make the user reviews more prominent and useful for everyone.

The user reviews will not change to visually look like the site reviews - it's a totally different publishing system, and since the site reviews will stick around (even if new ones aren't coming in), there does need to be a visual distinction between them anyways.

But, I'm open to any and all ideas on small changes you'd like for the user reviews, that would make them more helpful.

Things I'm already planning on:

-Adding a 'reporting' system for one liner reviews or obvious trolls, or obvious "i'm putting a bunch of garbage chars in to beat the min limit", or major spoilers. Note that reporting something because you disagree isn't why the tool should be used (and I'll have something built in to disallow reporting if users abuse it)

-Adding the <3 button. As with all other user content on the site, there will not be a </3 button. Good reviews will bubble to the top by using this button. Hopefully I oculd code it so the most <3 ones bubble to the top in the reviews tab, also

-I may also add the voting buttons in the site reviews (funny, helpful, cool) as another way to surface good content

-A reporting system for review comments. There's been way, way too many aggressive, rude or mean comments in reviews recently, and I have begun to enforce this more strictly. Review comments are meant to be respectful and should only be your own opinion on the anime or manga, not on the reviewer as a person. Judgement statements like 'you are misleading people' or 'you are trolling' (just for having a different opinion) aren't ok either - everyone is entitled to their own reviews. So I'll have a way to report individual comments as well.

-The /reviews/ homepage layout would shift around to focus on more frequently changing user reviews and stats, since they change daily

What else? While I can't dedicate a huge amount of time right now to big new review features, I'm interested in any little changes or upgrades you think would be helpful for you.

NOTE: this thread is asking for suggestions on the user reviews feature only, not general profile requests, site requests, etc ^_^
 
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Lol i just wanted to ask that myself .
If we could get more themes would be nice, or if you could give us the option to upload our own themes (like our profile picture) that would be awesome :drool:

Mvg
 
i'm confused, how do either of those suggestions matter for user reviews?
 
All, the thread is asking for suggestions on how to improve the user reviews feature
 
perhaps - suggestions i'm looking for are things that are actually in the reviews feature though. voting, reporting, etc :) different site changes (themes, profile upgrades, etc) are outside of the scope of these changes
 
I think their trolling...

anyway What i would suggest (although I dont know how much it would interfere with your current plans)
4M4U2.jpg

somthing like the above, although you could prolly make it more pretty i just did it quick
and I dont know how your changing layout so you could implement it better

but thats my idea anyway, having a random review visible as soon as you go on the anime page
 
*away with the above comments quickly*
Different themes just for user reviews is pointless. Done.

I can't really think of much on the spot. The things suggested in the OP seems perfectly fine for me.
 
I actually like the ideas you've suggested, Sothis. A <3 button would be simple, yet effective in seeing what people thought of "x" review.
 
I like Zound's idea - having visible reviews for an anime when you go to the entry and maybe a line or two from the review. Or maybe even one random visible review and one random visible blog. I know this is kind of a suggestion for entry layouts more than user reviews but I definitely agree with user reviews being more prominent and this just seems like a great way. A <3 button could be just as abused as a </3 button, people would <3 shitty troll reviews if it was rating their favourite anime 10/10.
 
i think the likelyhood of people <3'ing a shitty review is pretty low compared to how often itll be used for the right reason. the reverse is definitely not the case (ive seen this play out on other prominent sites before) - generally people mark thumbs down/disagree/etc if they disagree, way more often than 'this review is bad'
 
as a side note on the entries, eventually we'll have a new entry design (thats in the distant future), though we planned on doing something similar, for recommendations, not reviews :) but, sometime soon i plan on getting rid of the tabs anyways and having the content stack (a few items from each, with a link to see all for the rest)
 
Maybe instead of having one box to write a review, have multiple boxes for each score. So people will have a box to type their opinions on the story, an area to talk about characters etc.. I was just thinking that would get people to write more. If people aren't given some guidelines, they might just talk about one aspect, and ignore important topics.
 
I think you got the lock down on this one sothis, i cant really think of anything else other than what you said.. i agree with coffebreath, if you are to put some reviews on the side like in Zoundx example, then keep it down to the first line - dont want to give away the series just from having the whole synopsis and all the spoilers in the review staring at you before you even get a chance to read/watch the title.

or have the thing soiled because of people who rate to strongly for or against the series- being a fanboy/girl and thusly trashing a separate, legitimately good series..

either way whatever you do will undoubtedly kick many asses, o shining highness i praise theee :drink:
 
Perhaps add a seperate agree/disagree function, apart from the love/hate function? (I have no idea how difficult that would be to code.)

"Elite" User Reviews
What about some way to make specific user reviews become site reviews (or something comparable at least)? ie, Some kind of "featured review" (not just a random review nor "top voted" review, but something that would actually get set apart from normal user reviews, either with site reviews or in it's own seperate category).
The underlying concept would be to fill in for the lack of official site reviews by making certain exemplary user reviews take their place.
The idea would be that a given review would get "elected" either by some sort of user submitted nomination or by getting more than {X} votes, then it would get "promoted" to some elite status (probably remove the ability to edit it, to prevent someone from using it as a spam method).
In the nomination method, people could submit someone else's review (not their own, for obvious reasons) for consideration, then a mod could look it over & decide if it's good enough to be an "elite" user review (this would take less time & effort than writing a review themselves, so hopefully some existing site reviewers could do it, even if they don't have the time to submit reviews of their own anymore).
In the voting method, there would be a set threshold, which would be significantly higher than "normal" good user reviews get. (So if the normal vote range is from 0-100, the threshold might be set at 500.) Reviews that get say 120 votes would wind up on the top of the rank list, but ones which get 500+ votes would get bumped up to "elite" status. This "elite" status would remove them from the ranking list, while simultaneously inserting them into the site reviews list.
 
But indeed, getting rid of the "comment" reviews would help a lot.
I think there should actually be a demand for a certain amount of structure even to user reviews, such as that you'd have to write something about everything: story, animation, sound, characters, for example. However, I've seen really good reviews written differently too, albeit somewhat few.
It's just frustrating with these "reviews" that aren't any longer than this very comment here.
 
I think their trolling...

anyway What i would suggest (although I dont know how much it would interfere with your current plans)
4M4U2.jpg

somthing like the above, although you could prolly make it more pretty i just did it quick
and I dont know how your changing layout so you could implement it better

but thats my idea anyway, having a random review visible as soon as you go on the anime page
For the record i was not trolling and i never will i do not commit any mindless bullshit as that thank you very much ;)
 
I think their trolling...

anyway What i would suggest (although I dont know how much it would interfere with your current plans)
4M4U2.jpg

somthing like the above, although you could prolly make it more pretty i just did it quick
and I dont know how your changing layout so you could implement it better

but thats my idea anyway, having a random review visible as soon as you go on the anime page

you know i was very serious when i said that. I am not someone that do trolling. That's a waste of time.

mvg

Unforgiving
 
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