Redesigning the Reviews Page

[Morrus]

Erithtotl has kindly volunteered to help redo the reviews page. I plan to start from scratch, and to combine both the reviews page and the d20 System Guide into one page. Both use the same info, and having them separate is kind of redundant.

This is being started about now, and is taking place over the next week or two. Feel free to post your opinions, requests, issues, aches, pains and relationship troubles here.

The new page will be smoother, faster, and less buggy than the current one.

We'll try to accomodate everything that you suggest. Remember - this is a new design from the ground up, so suggesting alterations/amendments to the current page is rather pointless.

Oh - in response to the question that will no doubt be asked at least several times despite my answering it here - no, the current data will not be lost.

 

[Erithtotl]

Hello!

Hey this is Erithtotl (Ian, actually ). I'm thrilled to be helping out the best D&D site on the web.

The reviews will be the first thing we tackle. The priority is getting it running smoother, faster, and reliably. We may also do some quick interface tweaks to make it more useful. I'm thinking of putting in a simple search box, and a product by alphabet, and maybe some filters, so you can be more specific in what you want to look at. I'm totally open for suggestions. Some ideas might be used later while others might go in the first draft.

I don't intend to stop with reviews, and we'll slowly make the whole site a smoother, more integrated, easy to use system.

So let the suggestions fly. Try to split up any comments into reviews specific and other future enhancements. Also, let me know what you think are the absolute most important things about the reviews section and the way it works.

Ian

 

[Morrus]

Here are my initial thoughts:

1) A list of upcoming products sorted by date.

2) Breakdowns of products by 'type' - adventure, rulebook etc.

3) Replace the top ten lists with a single top twenty list? Add a top ten publisher list?

4) Initial screen for each publisher more reminiscent of the current d20 Guide than the current Reviews page. One page per publisher, click on products for more detailed info, image etc.

5) Amend the calculation for a product's score with some obsure Einteinian formula which also doubles as a theory for time-travel.

 

[Tuerny]

Two things.
1. A list of the top ten rated publishers.
2. For the authors of a review to be e-mailed when they get a comment.

That is all.

 

[Psion]

Okay, where do I begin?

I have been musing over how reviews are done, and here are a few of my thoughts.

1) the existing page is too hard to browse. About the best key the visitors have to browse is the top ten guides. Othen than that, they have to know what product they are looking for.

How to help this, I'm not sure, but maybe you could, in addition to the top 10, botton 10, top 10 D20, top 10 adventures, you could make:

a) last 10 -- or last 20 -- products released (or last two months, whatever)
a) top 10 non-advetures, top 10 free products, top 10 downloads, etc. Maybe a top 10 gallery.

2) The reviewer list is too long to be on every page. Perhaps the top 10 reviewer should be on every page, and then you can jump to a page that says "browse by reviewer, etc."

3) While the recent move to cutting off anything below 7 is understandable, it goes too far. There are many good products that just don't get reviewed as much. In the past, I recomended cutting out the top and bottom review... this won't work. This won't work for the same reason... there are a lot of products that just don't get enough reviews. Anyway, what I am thinking now is that the top review and bottom review should be weighted by 50%. It doesn't matter if you only have one or two reviews since the weighting comes out in the wash. We can still hold them out of being listed until they get 3 scores, but 7 is too much. 5 at the very lowest.

4) I think I have suggested some weighting schemes in the past. First, Morrus expressed that the staff reviewers could be weighted heavier. Second, one of the major problems that cause abberent review ratings is someone doing their first review ranting and/or raving.

So, what I think is that you can do this: Weight the reviewer by a factor equal to the square root of their number of reviews, with some "cap", which I would say should be 16. This would give a weight of 4. Give the staff reviewers a weight of 5.

Another possibility is to do as above, but subtract one from the final weight. This can give a weight of 0 for someone who has only done one review. Ah, well...

5) Another threshold you might consider is weighting or making a cutoff for short reviews to the effect of "everybody has said it better, yadda yadda..." Not sure about that one.

Those are my initial thoughts.

 

[CRGreathouse]

5) Amend the calculation for a product's score with some obsure Einteinian formula which also doubles as a theory for time-travel.

LOL! I didn't think our search for the perfect formula was that complex... the geometric mean of the product of the man and the median, or Sqr(Mean*Median).

It decreases the effect of a single extreme vote, while still letting the abberent vote count for something. Example:

Votes: 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5
Old method: 3.90
New method: 3.95

Votes: 1, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5 (same, with an extra vote of 1)
Old method: 3.64
New method: 3.81

When the votes are close (as in the first example), the two methods have similar results, but when one stray vote is included, this proposed method minimizes its effect on the total score. This works both ways - a stray high vote is also minimized.

All of this is transparent to the user; the new method is still an average, though not a "typical" average. The results are in the same range as the original vote.

This could be combined with Psion's weighting - though I'd go with Min(Sqr(Reviews),4) rather than Min(Sqr(Reviews)-1,4); staff reviews could have a weight of 5.

 

[Morrus]

Two more things which occur to me:

1) Links to errata, enhancements, previews etc. for each product.

2) Allow publisher access to add those links? Would they use it?

 

[NeghVar]

Let me know if you want revised graphics...like a true transparent gif version of the larger WotC logo...

Later!

 

[Suzerain]

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[Suzerain]

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