ok, I am opening the reviews/favorites system and need to explain some things about it where everything is understood. This will be long and probably boring, but it's late and I currently can't really get it all worded well.

It's honestly actually probably better if people tell me to set up the product names where all you have to do is type in the title and then write the review. But for now I have it where you can submit the product name yourself if it does not already exist...

I also may change the layout of the reviews page later on and switch some categories around.

I understand it is lengthy with all of the things to rate on each product, but just take your time and you don't HAVE to write a long review, although it would obviously be better.

RULES:

1. Don't plagiarize or I will suspend or even ban.

2. Use spoiler tags for spoilers. A spoiler is basically something which people won't typically want to know before viewing the movie, game, show, etc... (mainly story spoilers) The easiest way to do this is by using the spoiler button in the posting box when writing your review. Put the opening spoiler tag (spoiler in [] ), then the information, then close it (with /spoiler inside [] ). Click the blue word Spoiler for an example.

Click For Spoiler

This is an example.

Also, use the adult tags if they are eneded (such as for some quote).

3. Try to be careful when choosing where your review will be placed. Read the "submitting a review" process below carefully. (for example, notice movies is broken into 2 subcategories, so you must pick one of the 2 for yur category... don't pick "movies" for it).

4. Don't write bogus reviews! Simply tell your honest opinions.

Submitting a Review

1. Click on "Reviews" near the top of any page.

2. Click on "Write A Review" above the reviews database area.

3. Type in the product name in the text box. Be careful with spelling.

4. On the next page, if the product is in the list, select it and go straight to the page for writing the review. If not, then select "New Product" and the next page will ask you to choose a category for it.

5. Choose the category. All of the main categories have subcategories. So do not select movies, video games, etc.... Go all the way down as far as you need to and pick the furthest category in the tree. For a Nintendo game, you would go all the way down to Gamecube or another console name, rather than simply selecting "Video Games" obviously. Also type in the product name in the text box. You will then be on the posting screen after submitting.

6. Type in a review title.

7. Type your review. (you can format it any way, just like posts).

8. From the drop down select whether you would recommend buying, renting/borrowing, or staying away from the product.

9. Put an overall score for the product. It can have 1 decimal place and must be between 1 and 10.

10. For each of the other things which are to be rated (this is designed to be in-depth) rate between 0 and 10. Don;t use decimals on these because later I ams witching those to dropdowns and they won't have decimals in them. Only rate it a 0 if it does not apply in ANY way. A 0 means it is non-existent, NOT that it is bad. Once you're done, click submit. Depending on your group, you may have to wait for staff to approve the review.

Features

1. On the forum index page, the number of reviews is listed.

2. On the opening review page, there is a search feature. It works best with words of 3+ letters.

3. Last 5 reviews is shown on that same page.

4. When reading a review you can click on the menu button on the upper right and rate the review. It is pretty much a cimbination of how well the review is written, how helpful it is, and how much you agree with it. So you could rate one well even if you don't necessarily agree with it if you think it is a brilliantly written review.

5. Every time you do rate a person's review, it is averaged into his/her author rating score. Then the top 5 reviewers are shown on the front reviews system page.

6. On the bottom of that same page it tells how many products, how many reviews, and which member has written the most.

7. Clicking on any member's name brings you to their review profile. From there you can find their author rating, see all of their reviews, and see their favorites.

8. The "favorites" are favorite products, not favorite reviews. On a category's page which shows the products, you will notice a button that says favorites. Click that to add it to your list. Click again if you ever want to remove it. There is a limit of favorites you can have per MAIN category, so you may have to remove some sometimes to be able to fit them all how you want.

9. Click "my favorites" on most pages in the system to see your favorites. From that page you can even find out which other members have your same products as favorites!

10. You receive 50 points per review then 50 more each time someone rates it as a 5 star review. Please only rate reviews as 5 stars if they are VERY good, in your opinion.

11. Your post total will go up by 1 for each review (once approved) since these are just like posts overall.

12. Some groups must see the announcement message at the top of every page in the Reviews system and some groups will be able to avoid those.

13. Once you get to a product page, there is a big table at the top telling the AVERAGE ratings for overall and all of the other rateable categories for the product. At the bottom of the table is a graphic stating whether the AVERAGE member suggests to buy, not buy, or rent a product. This is all shown on the actual review pages too of course, but on those will be THAT member's ratings, not averages.

14. At the bottom of a product page you can submit good deals on the product. If you see some sale for it somewhere, post the link and price. There is a report button to report false or outdated sales, links, and prices.

15. There is a "reviews since last visit" link up there with the profile, favorites, and write a review links.

16. There is a Report button on review pages in case someone did not follow the rules, wrote a bogus review, etc... and they can be punished for that.

17. You may edit the review in the menu on the upper right of your own review page. It will then place a message at the bottom of your review letting people know it has been updated.

18. On a product page you can sort reviews based on several things.

19. On the actual category pages which show the product names, YOU CAN SORT THOSE by ANY of the categories they are rated on. This is the coolest feature in my opinion. For example you could sort all video games based on graphics. Or you could sort all songs based on lyrics. This is why there are so many aspects to rate. It then makes it easy to find the exact TYPE of product you want.

20. Those ratings are based into 2 types. One type is the genre makeup of the product. Rate those mainly telling HOW MUCH of each genre is present in the product. Only put 0 if there is truly not 1 bit of it present in the movie, song, etc... The other type is traditional ratings. For those you obviously rate how WELL the product is done in those categories.

Notes

1. Electronics: Performance = how well the product works and its reliability.

2. Movies, TV, Books: Depth = how deep the plot is. Wheras story, plot, etc... is how enjoyable it is.

3. Popularity = how popular it is to the general public.

4. for all ages = how appropriate it is for childen basically. Consider inappropriate content plus complexity which would keep them uninterested.

5. Music: mood is basically how it effects your mood. If a song puts you in a bad mood or annoys you then rate it low. I am not sure if I will even keep this category.

6. TV- consistency means most episodes are good, not just a few here and there. lessons means it teaches something.

7. Video games: gameplay is how fun playing the game is, as well as how comfortable the control setup is. Also I REALLY want to have dungeons and bosses rated, but since many games dont have those and they arent great to put in the genre categories either, I am not sure of a good way to implement those. I may add them later and then people would need to edit their reviews.

I have spent tons of time trying to get them right, but for some products I just don't 100% like the feel of the categories I have. But this system just keeps sitting here so I will worry about altering them again later.

If there are any problems or questions, just politely let me know. I have spent countless time tying to design it ut and compguy has spent massive amounts of time working to get it how I want.

Also I will probably soon add a forum where people can request certain products be reviewed and post tips on video games maybe.

A couple other notes: I am still skinning things so will make things look different later. Hardly any of the category title abrs are going to stay blue on the favorites page, so don't worry about that bad look. Only the root categories will stay blue. Several things are still to be added to this system also.

You can always report a movie in now in theaters to let me know when it is released on DVD where I can then move it to its new place.

I have a few product areas already there to try to simplify things because I know people are going to get mixed up and place products in the wrong areas if they are not careful. And for example I already put the 40 year old virgin because someone may word it wrong if they submit the title themselves. Either leaving out the "the" or spelling the word "forty" for example.

On the first page you come to when clicking "write a review" simply type "nar", "virgin", or "ocarina" for example to get to some of those products and make it MUCH simpler getting to the posting screen!

edit: I forgot if the product has no reviews yet it won't show up when searching for it at the beginning step of writing a review. So I need to not keep having products there with no reviews yet. On the final "write a review" page where you select the category, find the product in that list for now (and leave the blank below it with nothing in it).

1st thing I noticed is that I had to type in the Product name 3 different times. Once on the first screen as the product name, then again under the category name. Finally 1 last time for the Review Name. The Review name should be the same as a product name.

When I got the actual review page I didnt understand what Brand/Popularity meant or why it would require a # rating.

Other then that everything seems cool and easy to use.

Now that the first actual is opened I have another thing to point out. If I click on Product name I only get the product ratings. If I click on the review Title I get my written words. IMO these 2 things should shown under the same link or under both of them.

No you didnt need to name the review name the same. If you go to "other electronics" then click on XM Radio you will realize all of the reviews for it are in that area. Every review there is for the same produict so you can name the review anything you want. You could name it "this is perfect" "I love this" etc etc... because they will already know which product it is.

Also the second time it must be entered, it is already in that box, so you don't have to type it.

I do understand it isn't the best possible way how it is now and we are considering simpler ways to set it up though. Sorry for the inconvenience. We just currently had no other alternative because we need the first box where someone doesnt accidentally make a new category which is already there (or product title actually). Then just in case they spelled it wrong in the search wee needed the list to then show up to be sure the prodiuct is not already present there.

The bnrand/popularity is just basically on a level of 10 how popular is it among the public (for a DVD player for example Sony would be high brand popularity. I really should just take brand out and it only say popularity) Anyway so a 10 would mean a lot of people like the product. For some movies, like say Crash and Brokeback Mountain... their popularity isn't high (dont get many dollars from fans) but then they win the awards... so a lot of things can be good and not popular.

By the way, in case anyone is annoyed by having tow ait for reviews to be apoproved... that is pretty much how it works on any site. Although I am having it where when you get into certain groups you will not have to wait on me to approve them. When the forum gets active, I would probably have someone else approve those also.

I assume it gave you the points and added 1 to your post total when I apporoved it, since it did in tests I have done, but I forgot to check this time.

No it didnt give me points until you approved it. I didnt notice about the post count though. I understand now what your saying about review title but now that I see it, I think its something that doesnt need to be there at all. Just naming the product should be enough of the title.

But what you're not realizing is NORMALLY you won't have to name a product. See now anyone else who will rate XM radio will simply type in "radio" on the first "write a review" page, slect xm radio from the next page's droipdown, then write the review.

As for review titles that is done everywhere. If you look in a newspaper a review obviously has some catchy title to get people to read it. What you aren't realizing is I am aiming at many people reviewing each thing. If you were the only one writing a review for something it wouldn't matter. ALthough even then you want to do some title to9 grab attention or to give the gist of your opinion in it in some cases. Things are also done thatw ay on Gamefaqs.

I am not sure I understand your other post. Were you saying it was confusing on which of the 2 links to click to get to where you wanted? Because that kind of confuses me sometimes also. Although in your case if you had named the review something it would have been a little more obvious. Maybe I should get him to either take out the product title link or else make it somehow quicker to notice which link does what.

Now that I see your description of brand popularity, I also think that is something not needed. Sony is a great example of a category 10 but how is somebody to distinguish between a magnavox and toshiba. Or TDK and Memorex.

Well it is just up to them. That is like everything else in life, people have different ideas of things.

ok. Forget the post about the 2 things being split up. I see it on the left side of the review. Maybe they can go into that black strip on top to be more noticeable.

Not sure what you mean.

Oh I see what you meant. You didnt notice those ratings were to the left of your review.

The ratings on the other page you mentioned are averages of everyone's ratings for the product. The ones on your page are your ratings alone. On products with genre ratings it is much mroe noticable becuase they start at the top of the area to the left of your posts.

Now the question is do you think I should have the ratings above your written words instead of to the left of them? Then your words would span the whole screen basically left to right under the ratings? I have considered that. As for the black title bar idea, I personally think it would be looking very bad thatw ay.

There are now colors for different scores. ALthough orange looked so bad that I amde the scores between 8 and 8.9 purple.. And 9-10 red. I wanted 10 different than 9-9.9 but not many colors look decent at all! Anything under 6 is blue and 6-7.9 is green.

This still needs some work. Mainly my deciding in how to best set up categories to rate in each product. For example in Aaron's review, so many categories are unrelated to that game. He should have rated a few things differently than 0 though because 0 means it flat out isn't in the game, not that it is bad. I need to justr ework some things to make things simpler to do.

In case people didn't notice:

1. I put links to your reviews in topic view and in profile view.

2. There is a favorites system built around the reviews system to seee who likes the same things as you.

I am going to work on some things with the system soon and also when compguy gets out of school he will fix a few things and add a few new things.

You can suggest added features, but they arent easy and he is ready to cpmplete this component to beginw ith.

(btw, I am unsure whether to try to get him to add a comments section for each product or if I should just make forums to discuss them).

There are now colors for different scores. ALthough orange looked so bad that I amde the scores between 8 and 8.9 purple.. And 9-10 red. I wanted 10 different than 9-9.9 but not many colors look decent at all! Anything under 6 is blue and 6-7.9 is green.

Wouldnt it make sense to make 9-10 green and 1-2 red? Everybody usually asociates the color Green to go and Red to stop.

I am still trying to figure things out for the reviews system. Just letting people know that is why I haven't posted some myself.

Mainly want to get it looking better and also narrowing down what should be rated for each type of product. And it looks ugly with aaron's mlb 2k6 review where 2/3 of the stuff he has it saying none and then some things are confusing. For one thing the category ratings are to show what type of product it is and he has a baseball game rated 2 for sports, when obviously it would be a 10 because that isn't about how good it is! I just ened to get that all settled and obvious what those ratings need to be.

It didn't stop me from posting 2 spectacular reviews.

Guess some people just find excuses to not get things done. For example, Look in this thread and first see when it was started. Also count how many different time it was said the reviews are open or will be very soon.

I am sick of this lying. This is the exact thing Nintendo does about their system and zelda games. Promise 1 thing, do another.

I dont control the guy who made the system.

and neither do the guys at nintendo who make these announcements. Its some marketing exutive. You both are the same. Liars.

and its still no excuse why I wrote 2 fan-fing-tacualar reviews for somebody with no writing background. Unline you who has told me many times about your writing classes in college.

Stop being stupid.

Found a problem. I wrote a review and it says it was created, but all links to it take it to a page not found. So I shut down the system until that is fixed. I am guessing it is a problem created due to my group not needing to have reviews approved and the title not already tthere, thus causing it to get screwed up.

Maybe the problem is your review was so bad that the system shut down, rather then let anybody else see it.

:spacecraft:

Maybe. I did it quickly in the middle of the night. It gives all the info people would want to know though, just not one of my better jobs of writing.

I edited the reviews system to now give 100 points epr review, 1 post per review, and I added a new category called "reviews" which will increment by 1 for each review. Thus everyone's number of reviews can be put on their profile (I will worry about that tomorrow probably). Also it will make it where someone's post count won't be misleading because someone can see how many of them came from reviews.

This is one awesome system, so I hope some day it gets active, as I fine tune it. Very evry cool system set up. Only the looks really needs a little facelift.

Now number of reviews is in profile view and topic view. Also in the dropdown in topics you can go to a member's reviews or favorite products pages. In the profile dropdown you can go to the reviews page. Further down in profiles you can click the link to the actual reviews profile of that person.

ok, I totally redid the look of the latest reviews table on the main reviews page. I made it where it shows the author's final decision graphic on the left (whether or not they suggest to buy the product) and everything else to the right of it.

I also made it where the important announcement is only on the top of the pages for beginners and validating members. Everyone else gets that taken off, thus not having that huge annoying thing reminding you of how to write a review.

I made the write a review link blue and bold to be more noticable.

I made a "home" link in that line of reviews system links, where you can quickly get back to the main reviews page.

This system is very detailed and great. I am now only looking to add a few features, make that table with the categories better. get graphics made for the system, and find SOME way to have the actual review pages look much better. The reviews themselves are so plain looking and it is annoying me.

When a lot of people start using this system, it will be great becuase then you can see who else has the same favorites as you, the products will have averaged scores instead of how it is now where there is simply 1 score in the averages, and authors will start having scores. As it is now, nothing is really useful becuase it has not been used enough. But the true greatness of the features will be evident when it is more widely utilized.