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

[DarkShadowBe]

Originally Posted by DarkShadowBe

We simply understood the question wrong that's all .

Now to the real question, you could use a poll button with multiple choices .
And a button for the reviewer if he wants comments or votes or nothing to be able to be said . That way nobody can start REAL TROLLING or listen to negative comments about there review if they don't want to . Oww and maybe a report button for spoiling or trolling . :)

[vernanonix]

Originally Posted by Drahken

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.

This is exactly something I was thinking of when asked for ideas. I'm definitely behind this idea if it can be worked out.

Also, why not work it so that <3 and </3 make one score? Like <3 is +1 and </3 is -1.

[sothis]

because as mentioned, people will heavily abuse </3 just to mean they dont agree with the score. plus as a rule, i wont ever have that button on anything user generated, because it's incredibly demotivating to put a lot of work into something and have people downvote it just because they disagree with the score. its a big reason there was so much angst from the reviewers at anidb, as an example. i watched it play out for years

[vernanonix]

Fair enough. What's your opinion on Drahken's idea of site-promoted user reviews?

[Bronia]

I`d like it if people had to read review guidelines before they were allowed to write a review. Just being reminded of the basic courtesies of a review- no spoilers, basic grammar, etc- might make people more likely to submit quality reviews. It annoys me to no end when I see a spoiler in a review, but I think if people were required to read (or at least skim) the rules prior to posting it would make people think twice before saying they didn`t like that part at the end when the main character dies.

Either that, or have a reminder at the top of the submit page saying something like `no spoilers!!`

[jypsyjulia]

I partly agree with Bronia. Is there any way to establish an HTML into reviews where people could hide certain parts of their review in a spoiler tag? Instead of seeing something like: I was so sad when she died, and I really felt like it took away from the story; we'd see: I was really sad when

she died

and I really felt it took away from the story. It's incredibly difficult to write a review without spoilers in it because many times people are simply stating their opinions and their opinions might be directly related to a spoiler.

As for the <3 feature: I am a big fan of that, but not the </3. I'm not sure if anyone has heard of a site called "Goodreads", but they have a similar feature where you can "like" reviews. The reviews with the most likes and most comments are then bumped to the top of the list and people see them first.

It might also be handy if you have a "Top 3 Reviews" feature. This would be where the reviews with the most <3 up go. It would obviously change as reviews are added and get more <3's throughout the history of the site, but maybe you could have it to where it would be updated automatically?

I also think it might be good to have a top 3 for both negative and positive reviews. I'm not talking about troll reviews, but reviews where people explain why they love or hate an anime. Like: TOP 3 POSITIVE REVIEWS and TOP 3 NEGATIVE REVIEWS. That way people could get an even amount of information to decide whether or not they'd like to watch an anime. If all the top reviews are negative or all of them are positive, it would be hard for the person to find an unbalanced opinion. Doing this would provide a well rounded amount of information.

Just throwing out some ideas :)

[BigOnAnime]

So does this mean the 1 paragraph/few sentence "reviews" that aren't really reviews will be gone? I just see too many of them at times where someone is like "This is my favorite anime, go watch it because it's my favorite anime." without going into anything else. No what's the story is about, no what are the characters like, no what is the pacing like, etc.

[coffeebreath]

In all fairness, user reviews have been peddled for a long time as something no one is required to put loads of effort into. There is definitely a guide somewhere that says (paraphrasing) "even a small paragraph about why you liked or disliked it would do" - obviously this still invites some sort of evaluative technique so I would agree that troll reviews should go, but short ones still be acceptable!

I think it's fairly easy peasy to write a review without spoilers but a lot of users love to really let go on their opinions about the anime and there will always be spoilers, and to be fair, we shouldn't discourage this. Some kind of spoiler system is desperately required in that respect, even if a reporting system.

[roriconfan]

1) A latest review comments list. I want to know who commented yesterday on a review that is 2 years old. We can keep the discussions alive if people know which reviews got a comment recently.

2) Some sort of scoring for reviews and a total score on one's profile.

3) Delete all reviews that are bellow 500 words and have a minimum of 500 words.

4) Remove synonyms from the review list

5) Wiki on review tips on the review upload screen. With big neon lights stating NO FANGASMS ALLOWED, BE ANALYTICAL.

And since I own everybody on review count and do a lot of analysis, read here to see what I learned over the years.
http://anidb.net/perl-bin/animedb.pl...8&blogid=39592
I adressed some of them in my latest podcast too.
http://my.spill.com/group/planettyro...confan-returns

[sothis]

yeah, please trust me when i say that putting large alerts or required 'this is what a review is' notices will not improve things, because people never read documentation

take the character mod form - we have the rules clearly linked with notes, yet people constnatly CONSTANTLY still just cut and paste content from other sites. it wastes so much of the char mods' time due to a huge amount of the submissions being that.

the same could be said for other features ive put up over the years - people rarely read things. forcing sections would mean there have to be at least a few sections but i probably wont do it, because people complained endlessly about wanting a free form space they could use creatively. community policing to remove bad ones is really the only way this will work, outside of having an editorial staff system like the site reviewers doing all of the reviews.

i'm also hesitant about auto-promoting things to actual site review status. on basically every big anime site, i've seen the top list of reviewers, and usually it's people who i wouldn't say are site level (meaning excellent grammar/spelling, concise and to the point [could be long though, but still], etc). usually the 'top' people according to the community are the ones that spew out hundreds of reviews in a quick manner - that isn't necessarily (and usually isnt) quality. while i'm sure we miss some, the site reviewers have always been on the lookout for good talent based on the community reviews, and if we see someone we think is close, we generally have them apply and become an actual site reviewer. this maintains the quality level of the 'site' ones and gives people a chance to become a site reviewer too.

if i make things automatically become sit ereviews, i have a pretty strong feeling what will happen is the prolific reviewers will automatically get upvoted based on quantity alone, and we'll have stuff in the section that i don't think should be there.

likewise, if they arent actually promoted to 'site reviews' but are just more like ';featiured reviews', i think the same thing will happen - people will upvote popular people, regardless of quality, due to quantity, and they'll get flooded.

if there's an admin step where we have a team of people (maybe the site reviewers, but probably not as they are generally MIA and i could find a group from the community), where reviews had to be approved after they are heavily voted on, or could be promoted by admins (me) individually, that might work better.

i had actually considered adding 'featured' user reviews in the past, that i could mark, but my only concern with that or any admin step is people might feel pissed off that they arent chosen, since there will be a subjective type of step involved