Just a few improvements I think the review page could use:
1. I've been rating a lot of reviews lately, and I found that people are writing much better reviews now since the implementation of the rating system. However, I ran into reoccuring psychological problem. Some reviews are rather lengthy. That doesn't mean that they are good or bad, but for the most part they tend to be in more depth than your usual short review.
Now this poses a problem. Usually these more indepth reviews are ranked at the top, while shorter ones are found at the bottom. This is a problem because after reading a bunch of longer reviews then making your way to the bottom, you can't help but feel the shorter reviews are inferior. But the shorter reviews are NOT inferior. They are just merely less in depth, and usually adequetly justify their ratings. This I believe would lead people to voting based on review length, and that is not good.
I spoke to Gambit the other day and said something along these lines:
"Yes there are long reviews that are for the most part good. It also probably would mean they would receive a higher ranking. But on the same token, people that don't like long reviews would vote no for them and the shorter ones would move up and vice versa. So it all evens out in the end."
Though I agree with his point, it really doesn't fix the psychological problem. Since people usually read reviews from top to bottom, larger reviews are usually at the top. Shorter reviews are usually found at the bottom. This leads to people seeing a great difference in length so instinctfully people would think the shorter ones are inferior.
My Solution:
At the top of the review page, there should be 3 options. Something along these lines:
Show reviews: ALL SHORT LONG
AniDB would have all reviews shown by default, but the users can also choose to see reviews by length size if they want. This imo is a good way to prevent people from voting by review length. It is true now that there aren't a super big number of reviews, but the number is increasing all the time. Additionally, I guess there can be a option on the profile page that would allow the user to set what his prefered review length.
2. I think it would be a lot less busy work if the top of the review page indicated the amount of reviews you have voted for to the total number of reviews available for that anime. Currently you have to scroll through all the reviews to make sure that you voted for everything, and with the increasing amount of reviews/anime it is going to be a long scroll. For example, Naruto at the moment has 23 reviews... yes a long scroll indeed.
3. An additional minor improvement to have an indication of what your vote for a particular review is. Just having 'revoke old vote' doesn't tell you much of anything, especially if you voted a long time ago.
[CGI] Review page improvements [tracked]
Moderator: AniDB
What'd help is to split up reviews into two text parts: The review itself and a short abstract, two or three lines of text. The review page displays the votes, the username and the abstract, and when someone finds an abstract to be interesting they can read the full review and rate it accordingly...
You mean something along the lines of my recent reviews, where I start off with a sort of a bold 'tagline' to catch the attention ?Elberet wrote:What'd help is to split up reviews into two text parts: The review itself and a short abstract, two or three lines of text. The review page displays the votes, the username and the abstract, and when someone finds an abstract to be interesting they can read the full review and rate it accordingly...