*** Review Sites Overhaul (please read!) ***

[Mockery]

So here's the deal; one of my programming buddies is gonna be helping me completely overhaul all three of I-Mockery's user-submitted review sites (classic games, movies, and music). It's simply gotten to the point where I don't have the time to approve all the reviews each week, and every time I bring somebody new on to help out with approvals, they get lazy or burnt out or what have you. The review sites are extremely popular though and I hate to think about people taking the time to submit reviews, only to wait 6 months or more before they're even approved!

With that in mind, the main goal of these review site overhauls is to make them more self-reliant. When people submit reviews, they'll go up online instantly. Admins will still be able to login and update the reviews (or delete 'em if needs be) but at least this way the sites will be constantly updated rather than waiting months for one of us to find a few minutes to approve a review.

Sounds great right? You're damned right it does.

Now, what I need from you guys is suggestions for all 3 of the review sites. Is there a feature you've always thought the review sites should have? Something missing? Something buggy? I'm not guaranteeing we'll be able to implement all of your ideas, but we'll definitely try to add in some of them. So if you have ideas for any (or all) of our 3 review sites, PLEASE post them here in this thread as soon as ya can!

Thanks!

[Black Flag]

i'm the one who got lazy!

[Emu]

Make it so users can review the reviews. On a 1-10 star basis, or something. If the reviews consistently get low scores, they could get deleted instantly. But I supose people could abuse that and vote down ones they disagree with.

[King Hadas]

If your ever gonna do it than now would be the perfect time to start up a book review site.

[Zomboid]

Sorry me and Italian got lazy with the reviewing a while back, mock

I will do another crimmus themed game review during the holidays again if ya need though :O

[James]

I would like to see a system that lets you keep track of all your submitted reviews (and possibly edit them), as well as any favorite reviews of others. Possibly a database that allows you to see all submissions posted by a certain person.

That might be asking too much, but I figured it worth suggesting.

[Chojin]

i recommend you include a support group for us people who stopped doing the review passings :<

but seriously, some sort of thing where the people not reviewing can rate the movie/game/etc themselves, and something like amazon's "Did you find this review gay?" Yeah.

Also, something so people can flag a review as being racist, offensive, etc. for admins.

[Emu]

Yeah, I like Chojin's idea better than mine. I'd still like to see some way for the system to purge poor reviews.

[whoreable]

if you could make it so people could add any album or movie by searching(pulls up a list of titles taken from imdb or cddb) then they can click to add them, that way it would be up with all the offical info for people to rate/review.

so basically the review system would be like imdb with one average rating, and many reviews under that along with comments for each review.

If i had time, thats how i would set it up at least.

[Mockery]

Haha... great suggestions so far. The only thing that comes to mind is "we're going to need a bigger boat." :o

All the programmers I know have jobs 'n what not, so even with me paying them to do these projects, they have extremely limited time. And I definitely don't want this thing to drag on for a year or whatever. Most of the ideas you guys have suggested sound really good and I wanna get them implemented. I'll see what we can do.

I might have to simply find another programmer to hire for the job. If you guys know anybody who'd be interested in the project, be sure to let me know!

[Slinky Ferret]

Hey since this is a "community" site why not get any of the people that can code in php etc. on here to give their names to you and then they can each write some code or give ideas towards it.

They do say that many hands make light work.

A few ideas of mine:

Organise the reviews by categories e.g. Games, Films, Books etc. that way categories can be added and deleted according to demand. Have a top five or top ten of the week for each category.

James' idea I think having a member system is a good way to stop rubbish being added. A spam and bad words filter may help too (simply store a list of words in a table in the database and search for thse words in a post).

The rating system is quite straightforward to do. Maybe having different icons for different categories e.g. a cd for music, joystick for games instead of boring stars.

The main problem to be considered is do you keep all the reviews? Or do you delete them/backup after say six months?

Anyway it does really sound that people really were interested in this but because of the current system they got bored. By having a membership system you have some sort of control over who posts. It would cut down the admin side of things considerably and I think may well help more people contribute more towards the site.

You may well think that I'm crazy suggesting the whole community programming thing. But I think if realistic goals are set and achieved then it would at least be an interesting social experiment. Also there are from what I've seen alot of talented people on these boards so why not make use of that talent?

[Dr. Boogie]

Well here's some stuff that doesn't work with the classic games site:



There's currently no way to delete bad reviews.

You have to manually enter in the adress to edit the reviews, whereas the old system had little buttons that you could use for that.

You also have to manually insert line breaks, which takes for-fucking-ever.

When you go approve a review, anything entered into the first two fields for pic locations is overwritten by "pic1" and "pic2" respectively.



Some features I'd like to see:

Some way for the system to check if there are reviews of a particular game and enumerate the following reviews accordingly.

An easier way to edit the reviews.

Something that would indicate if a review needs pics or a rom. Maybe something that would email the guy in charge.

Make it so that line breaks don't need to be re-inserted after the review is submitted.

Fix it so that pic locations are overwritten every time you approve/edit a review.

[Ninjavenom]

Those all sound terribly convenient. I would like to see a system where people who submit bad movie reviews get hot shrapnel shot into the faces of their loved ones.