Review Moderation & Trusted Users/Reviewers [DONE]

[Gambit]

After seeing this heated discussion, I decided to throw in my last 2 cents. I`m commenting on all posts, starting from 2 pages ago when I last checked this thread, and following with the following posts. Don`t blame me for commenting on something which was already solved, since I take each post as an unique opportunity to reply to.

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Gambit's suggestion was to have a group of reviewers who can vote other reviewers into their group. Reviews posted by these users are shown in a more prominent place and cannot be voted on. The TRs in this scenario are a closed group and an elite, but they can not influence anyone else's reviews.

Not exactly. Someone else (requiem?nwa?) came up with that idea, and I didn`t say I either approved or disapproved them, but that I didn`t know what to do about it. I only said it would be an option to have a TR review in another color, or another place, but I didn`t really approve it since it would cause too huge gaps between those and regular reviews.

Such a system has already put in place in the form of the "send message" link below all reviews. So far, however, I've only gotten a single feedback message for a review.

I did I have given out a few messages to a few users to tell them about the errors they made in their reviews, or to encourage them to write more after I believed they did a good job in writing them.

For you and me and anyone who cares about animes and the AR community enough to stick around, that's true. For the average newbie, the ranks do have a whole different meaning, because they tell him/her who's probably got enough experience to answer thier questions.
If you sit everyone with >500 posts in a room and ask them questions about what they think of a certain studio, anime, seiyuu or - hint, hint - review, the average of all answers yelled at you will be very trustable, even tho there are some users in the group who are mostly spammers.

That`s why I said that the TR`s are also allowed to suggest other people as a TR. Think of those people who haven`t posted/reviewed that much, but because of their existing reviews it`s obvious that they`re trustworthy/reliable. Of course the other TRs will have to vote whether that person will actually be able to avoid the regular application.

How public will TR-decisions be?

Not public, there's no need to. If denied, the review author gets notified via his myreviews page and disappears from the TRs' open reviews list. If approved, the review is added to the anime's review page. The names of the voters and their votes are kept hidden in the DB for moderators to have a look into suspicious cases.

So you say that citizens shouldn't review politicians decisions?

The 'citizens' don`t complain about there being moderators who do their jobs without telling the 'citizens' what they`re doing, discussing or even deciding? The thing you want is an AniDB without mods, or a forum without any mods, and that`s not anarchy, that`s chaos. And how much I appreciate most of your ideas, I`ll be fervently against chaos the way you want it.
Edited later, okay - you didn`t want this chaos, but instead you want to be able to see all reviews. The thing is, we already mentioned that it`ll be a bad thing to show all bad reviews since there will be more bad reviews than good ones and you`ll have to find some way to make the good ones visible. Looking back at your previous opinions, you didn`t even want the reviews to be rated, which would result in a second AnimeNFO, where the good reviews are hard to find and you`d have to read all reviews in order to understand which ones are good. That`s why we implemented this rating system, but since it won`t work on the long term, we`re changing it again. And again you`re opposing it, not because of the ideas we have about it, but rather to prevent the rating itself from showing good reviews over bad reviews.
In short, you want to see all reviews, good and bad in a mixed order, which makes it harder for people to determine which review is good since there isn`t any rating for them. Remember that there are people who don`t have the time or patience to go through 5 reviews of each 100 words and they really want to save some time when they want to read a review.

On the other side if you have a review that should be deleted you have MODs for that, and if you have somebody registering bogus accounts you have admins for that.

And until recently, we didn`t have enough mods to cope with the creqs, let alone the reviews. And although I hate to admit it, the mods aren`t used to read reviews, let alone value them since I`m about the only mod who writes reviews. Which means I`m the only one who knows which reviews are valueble and which ones are not as valuable. That`s why I like the TR-idea, because they don`t have the power, but do have the knowledge to approve or disapprove a review, resulting in better quality reviews.
Even better, if the TRs will be only able to approve/disapprove depending on their beliefs, you won`t be needing a rating system at all anymore. But since we`re lenient, we don`t only allow perfect reviews, but still allow decent or just-not-bad-enough-to-be-deleted reviews - and then a rating system by the TR`s will come in handy to determine which are really good and which are just decent.

You don`t know who creates bogus accounts, since you`ll have to monitor them, and I thought that`s a bit too paranoid to go through with that. After all, we don`t want an policeforce who`re doing a Big Brother-scan on every user in order to determine who`re creating bogus accounts.

And again... you're asking for a system before something ever happened. There is no problem with the current system

I think it`s better to evade a crisis than waiting for one and then panicking how to solve it. I`d rather see such a problem resolved before it occurs. Otherwise you`ll end up like MicroSoft, releasing patches all the time, just to fix the stuff they knew but didn`t want to fix because it wasn`t necessary at that time.

If you follow with this, the first thing to do is to forbid current top reviewers and MODs to be elite reviewers. Start looking for new ones without conflict of interests.

Ano ne ... as we already stated a lot of times, the reviewers and mods are not an elite. Mods just happen to be to have more rights than others; the only way to get an elite if they behave like a closed group-elite. And so far I haven`t seen anyone complain about that.
And how are top reviewers an elite? I as the topmost reviewer, what more do I gain from being an elite anyway? The only thing I have is that I have more reviews. Hell, if you see that as an elite, you`re also an elite for posting that much in a forum, which makes you an elite in the AR-forum. So, you`re not making any sense with your elite-bashing.

Wrong, a MOD doesn't confirm posts to be available for other users.

Indeed, a mod has to correct wrongly posted stuff. So in the case of reviews, a mod should be wiping it afterwards, while it could also be rejected before and prevents people being annoyed by the wrong stuff.

A MOD is not an Elite group member but more like a "policeman". As well as aniDB mods.

According to your opinions you stated on this forum, a MOD definitely looks like the thing you call 'elite'. You don`t seem to realize that neither a MOD nor a TR are elites, unless they behave like that.
But it`s still a matter of trust who you accept as a moderator. You need to discuss in the mod-forums who you want to be a mod amongst the existing moderators, not among all users, because then usually someone popular will be chosen who isn`t really the right person to mod a forum. That`s usually what happens when you have a friend-community and people pick friends instead of reliable people as mods.
The same thing is what I proposed with suggesting new TR`s, the other TR`s still have to review and accept the new TR in order to prevent the friend-thing.

Call it whatever you want but a person who has the right to allow a review to be made or not (before it's posted to be seen by everyone) is different that a person that can only remove the content after posted.

The thing is, mods aren`t really active with reviews. The only people who`re actively reading reviews are the people who actually write reviews, and most aren`t mods. As you know how many people actually rate the reviews in a normal way (not as a fanboy), you`d notice that there are very few people who check the newest reviews, resulting in a lot of reviews which might be bad in the first place, but nobody knew about it while it already has some fanboy-votes.
If you want to make that a bit better, you`ll need review-mods, but Elberet came with a much better idea, called a TR. Since a TR doesn`t really have any rights to moderate or trash a review, they`re considered to be pretty harmless. They`ll only give out a vote, independant of other TR`s and independant of the name of the reviewer.

So for you is the same a policeman that tells you when you're wrong instead of one that tells you what to do and how to do (TR)?

That`s not quite correct. A policeman that tells you when you`re doing something wrong afterwards = mod.
A policeman that sees how you show him your plans to rob a bank, well, that`s a TR. That person will make sure you won`t be able to get into the bank with that plan (TR).
After all, you already made the plan (review) and you wish to apply it.

Anyway, do as you (exp) want... what I can do is stop using the review system, as I believe lots of people do (on the forum some people already stated that).

I believe you. Both you, kamenoko and SilverWordz (who is even a mod) already stopped using the review-system, and some of you even substracted all your reviews from the database.
Perhaps I`ll do that as well, since it won`t be any useful for me to post a review if it`ll be shown somewhere around the bottom of a review-page, where 20 bad reviews are displayed before mine. In the end nobody would see my review anymore, even though it might be a great review.

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Okay, this was my addition. I actually wanted to keep myself from reading this thread since I thought I wasn`t needed here, I believe that it might still be necessary to discuss this issue.

Anyway ... I won`t try to convince people here anymore. Instead, I`ll just await the results of the discussion, although I think it might`ve already ended with kamenoko and DonGato not posting here anymore.

[Elberet]

The whole Nazi thing pretty much marked the end of the discussion for me. I'll leave it for exp to decide what to do, or whether to do anything at all. We have collected enough ideas here, and with a little creativity it's easy to adapt them to whichever system he prefers, so as far as I'm concerned, I'm through with this thread as well.

[Gambit]

I guess I`ll leave this thread for a week or so, and then someone should lock it, since the discussion is over then.
I even wondered why I posted that last one anyway ... I didn`t intend to post anything actually.

[DonGato]

To clarify (and not let others put words on my mouth I didn't say):

- I'm not against the current review system anymore.
- I'm not against MODs but TR (in any way you present it).
- I'm ok with a second page with disapproved reviews (you asked for this in the original thread AFAIR).

If you need help you can always ask... the community is big and most are interested to help. Asking doesn't hurt.

I try to rate all reviews for animes I know (lately I had less time to do it) but will never write reviews for the reasons I stated before. In fact I removed all I did before the review system was in place.

The problem with TRs is that they are few and biased (in the proper way). I tend to prefer general audience voting over something. I did that for Plus when we have problems with a feature inclusion or removal. We don't ask beta testers, devs and translators only but the general audience, and you would get amazed about the outcome. What we all thought was totally wrong in the eyes of the general audience.

What I didn't like it in this discussion is when one commented about some reviews by Gambit or other known reviewers getting bad ratings. Well, I don't see a problem there but just something good. Other reviews were better than this ones so why we have to have them at the top?

You know well bogus accounts. They are created at the same time, they don't have series added and have small if not steady usage. This can be programmed and not being a manual task (like alerting exp of accounts created and not used after that).

Taking the ELITE issue aside, I want all people to vote instead of a couple. BTW, you say that MODs didn't vote reviews... so why they don't start to do it? They can fix the "problems" you say we're having now.

Ahhhhh... you're mixing my words TR = ELITE, MOD = POLICEMAN. I didn't say the other way around! But this is my point of view and you don't have to agree.

Choosing friends instead of reliable people is a bad thing to do. I've seen this being done in the SR and AR forum with no success. I won't comment which ones but you might already know.

A policeman that sees how you show him your plans to rob a bank, well, that's a Detective. Tell him that he is a policeman and I will see you in hail.

If you deserves to be below other 20 reviews then it's ok. Show me when you don't deserve it as this is the origin of the heated discussion and nobody came with something that justifies his position. Anyway, I read all the reviews, from top to bottom... even your bad ones.

[wahaha]

I took the liberty to lock this thread (as the tone got quite aggressive in here which already drove some readers away) and give the new discussion that started after this post a fresher start.

Please read on at http://www.anidb.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1090.