Review guidelines

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laxxy
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Review guidelines

Post by laxxy »

I think the current review guidelines might be in need of an improvement.
They seem to encourage long, structured reviews. There's nothing particularly wrong about those, except having more than one review of this type for an anime is quite useless.
When I am looking for the reviews, the very last thing I need is to see a dozen half-page to a page reviews all commenting on how those people liked the sound (or whatever), unless there was something really special about sound in that particular anime.

Actually, I'd much rather like to see 500 characters as the *upper* bound on the review length. Normally there might be a couple of particularly good and a couple of bad points in a series, two-three paragraphs should be sufficient to let the reviewer express his opinion on those, and if something does not fit in it is probably not worth saying. I'm not *really* suggesting this, but I do think that the guidelines, and the current lower bound, might need some revision.

Also, I'd like to see more people writing reviews, in particular for the series that have no reviews yet. I am sure the high lower bound discourages quite a few (most?) people.
suppy
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Post by suppy »

while I agree that most people will only read one long review I still think it's better to read one long good review instead of 5 smaller crappy ones. and we do have a review rating system for the purpose of placing the best review above the others so it will be more accessible. If you want smaller reviews, go check animenfo is what I say.
laxxy
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Post by laxxy »

suppy wrote:while I agree that most people will only read one long review I still think it's better to read one long good review instead of 5 smaller crappy ones. and we do have a review rating system for the purpose of placing the best review above the others so it will be more accessible. If you want smaller reviews, go check animenfo is what I say.
Thanks for the advice, I liked animenfo.
One can argue either way about one good review vs 5 crappy reviews -- I've read quite a few of *very* well written reviews that were just opposite to my own impressions, the thing is that the opinions are necessarily personal and looking at a larger sample of opinions helps create a good picture.

But it is definitely better to have a small crappy review than not to have any (which is why when I see only one review for a series I automatically give it a vote of 10). It is also imo better to have one long review and 5 crappy ones than to have many long reviews that are repeating each other.
PetriW
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Post by PetriW »

The problem is we did not like animenfo back when the review system was implemented, hence the 500 character limit and us deleting obvious tard reviews. AnimeNFO is apparently better now but for short reviews I recommend that site, there MAY be some feature for shorter "comment" reviews sometime in the future but I don't think that's close yet.

Groupcomments is enough to discourage me from enabling shorter reviews, too much flaming and trolling.
Gemberkoek
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Post by Gemberkoek »

The problem is you'd get much reviews like This anime is way cool! The effects are outstanding and the sound is great!

What i can imagine is a extension in the voting method. Say you can vote for graphics, sounds, voices, music, storyline (etc.) You can get a reasonable hint of how good or bad the anime is...

just brainstorming here ;)
suppy
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Post by suppy »

I believe this has been suggested before, and the reason (doubt it's the only reason, but it is the only reason I remember) it was discarded was because there already is vote spamming, and it's not getting any better ... and having that many more vote options is just asking for even more vote spam. Also, having to make that many votes for each anime will be impractical for the user in the long run ... alot of people don't even vote once ...
Gemberkoek
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Post by Gemberkoek »

I see your point, but i was referring pretty specifically to the group who do want to review up to some point, but think 500 words is just too much.
Rar
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Post by Rar »

It is possible to write shorter reviews (that's 80 words), provided you don't mind other people 'voting' them worst-thing-ever-written.
's actually much harder to write a decent short review than a decent long one, so encouraging people to write shorter reviews doesn't really make more people write them. I like the mix of long-and-short reviews many anime have - and remember the guidelines are on a wiki for a reason. :D

Rar
laxxy
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Post by laxxy »

Rar wrote:It is possible to write shorter reviews (that's 80 words), provided you don't mind other people 'voting' them worst-thing-ever-written.
's actually much harder to write a decent short review than a decent long one, so encouraging people to write shorter reviews doesn't really make more people write them. I like the mix of long-and-short reviews many anime have - and remember the guidelines are on a wiki for a reason. :D

Rar
Hey! How does one do that? :)
I can recall a couple times when I wrote a review, then got the 500-words message, and discarded it. I suspect I am not the only one.
Rar
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Post by Rar »

500 *characters*, not words. Hell, you could just stick some spaces on the end.

Rar
laxxy
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Post by laxxy »

Rar wrote:500 *characters*, not words. Hell, you could just stick some spaces on the end.

Rar
Gotcha, thanks :)
Sorry, I did realize it was 500 characters. And I see where it comes from and why now.
Still, 500 imo might be a little too high... even 300 is still more than someone who just wants to say smth like "it has cool ninjas so it rules" would be willing to write :)
suppy
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Post by suppy »

not if they have learned how to use copy and paste ....

(... don't want to give the casual tard ideas, thus the small print) .... wait .. casual tards wouldn't even find this thread ...
Merlin
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Post by Merlin »

laxxy wrote: Gotcha, thanks :)
Sorry, I did realize it was 500 characters. And I see where it comes from and why now.
Still, 500 imo might be a little too high... even 300 is still more than someone who just wants to say smth like "it has cool ninjas so it rules" would be willing to write :)
You must be kidding!
Even a short posting like yours consists of 55 words and 278 characters.
It should not be too demanding to either write or read about 8-10 sentences explaining why the author voted x for animation/sound/etc.
KaioShin86
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Post by KaioShin86 »

I absolutely disagree with this. The shorter the review the more likely it is that it contains nothing beyond "This show sux!" or "This show is soooo cool". I want to read WHY a series is good or bad, and that won't happen in 3 sentences.
Gambit
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Post by Gambit »

I think that a lot of people are ‘scared’ of that ‘500 character limit’. But, as Merlin already said, 500 characters is at most 10 lines of text. Now, perhaps it`s just me, but I think that, if you can summarize why an anime is so extremely good or bad, or even average in less than 10 sentences, you might wonder if your review is any good in the first place. I know I am prone to write a shitload of stuff about an anime, but at least most of it is about the series. I separate them in paragraphs aiming at animation, story, etc. so people can skim through it and read the important parts (the headlines) to get an impression of what I thought of that aspect.

(the above text is roughly 650 characters - now tell me that you can write a review smaller than that which is still good enough to be called a review, because I seriously doubt that. In my humble opinion this 500 characters-limit is about as much you should have to post a decent reply on a discussion-thread on a forum without being flagged as a 'useless post', so why would a review be any shorter? )

To elaborate on my reviews, I write those headlines to encourage people who don`t want to read it all, to at least read those. Oneliners, small summaries, there`s plenty of it in there for the people who want to read only short ones. So yeah, you can also do it that way.
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