I'm searched until exasperation and can not find a similar post, apologies if there is, I have my 6 yo daughter screaming fow a new app in one ear trying to vanquish an idea floating in the 'metal zone'.
Multitasking daughter and reading Hellish_Torture's review of the White Empress album 'Rise of the empress' 18/02/2015. I was struck by one thing, "this is the best review I've ever read, kudos to Hellish_Torture. Now how to vote on a review?"
Nay, there is none; now I love Metal Encyclopedia and have been reading for seemingly forever, I have and use the app if removed from my laptop; and I love (sometimes) the diversity of Metal-heads' opinions, but crap reviews are another matter (especially if they transgress pages), I love it when the reviewers use humour and/or metaphors, but unfounded opinion (especially when ridiculous or worse), just turns the colon-close-bracket to colon-open-bracket.
I understand Metal Encyclopedia is (as is the universal norrn) resource limited. However I would encourage a not dissimilar to Google's helpful/not judgement click to the review, as an aide to Metal Ecyclodia's readers/users, and undoubtably garner new users (separating ME from the competition, etc). And if one were to ask with the corect degree of technological/political-politeness, I am sure Google would share the code. If interested, I volunteer myself as the liason between Google and Metal Encylodia (for a nominal fee of: continuing my mebership at my favourite metal review local : ).

Regards and metal horns,

/Dave B

No... what...,?

Up and down voting reviews is a terrible idea.

I don't know anything about the Google example. But it's quite common for sites with reviews to have a function such as "was this review helpful?" or "rate this review". Not a bad idea, since it promotes the better writers.

But it is a bad idea. "Better" writer is subjective and opens a back door for abuse of the system. Up/down voting will never happen.

Sure, but reviews themselves are subjective. As are the simmilar artist votes.

Doesn't have to be up/down though, but like a number beside the review. For example a number such as 20, indicating that 20 people like this reivew. Or two numbers, for example 20, indicating that 20 people like this review, next to 10, indicating that 10 dislikes this review.

Or even staff-distributed highlight system like Wikipedias gold star, silver star, etc. for their high-quality articles.

Absolutely not. If it's staff only that will just add to the "ur fuking gay metl elitsm stupid ass holes and I'm gonna killz u 4 not liking my bands"

No it doesn't. People just always upvote reviews they agree with and downvote reviews they disagree with, regardless of the review's quality. This happens all the time. Sure, a few voters will vote intelligently, but they are the minority, and so most of the votes are bad.

Whether upvoting a review you agree with is good or bad is determined by the purpose of the vote. If people could up- or downvote reviews they agree with, that could work as an album rating tool for users who don't write reviews, giving them a chance to chime in on the rating an album gets.

Having said all that, I don't think that's the way to go. Better would be adopting, for example, a star-based rating system such as the ones on Discogs, iMDB or Metalstorm.

the only form in which this kind of work if only scribes got this.

This, period. That is all that needs to be said.

It could be mod-only, or based on how many points were awarded to the writer (but scribes)... But it would be tad useless in the end. I suppose that the whole point of moderating the reviews section is that all of them are good enough to be useful. The sites where users can rank reviews usually don't have any kind of moderation.

And how can downvotes affect negatively the review/reviewer? You still can read the review by yourself and decide whether it deserved the downvotes or not. Ultimately, I wouldn't underestimate people like that, sites like Reddit thrive based on people actually upvoting and downvoting good/bad comments.

Here's what will happen:

"I'm downvoting all the negative reviews for this Wintersun album because those people are just big jerks that will never understand true talent!"

And conversely,

"I'm downvoting all the positive reviews for this Wintersun album because those people are complete idiots with shit taste in music."

Why's this not getting locked? Has the thread not proven to be categorically futile yet?

You want us to be more authoritarian? We don't mind people having a discussion about policies, even if it might appear futile to do so. That said, most of the time when a thread like this isn't closed it's either because the topic has died, naturally, or we haven't bothered to check up on it. It was dead up until today, so there's your answer.

As for this particular suggestion, I'm sorry, but we're not going to implement it (as was probably pretty obvious from the comments of other mods). On top of the myriad of reasons given above, it's just fundamentally not something we really support. Our policy on reviews is that we treat them all the same: every review is held to the same basic standards and, once submitted, has the same equal relevance and position on the site as any other review. We're not going to institutionalize a practice - whether done by users or by mods - that weights some reviews as "better" or "worse" (however you might define those terms). We leave that judgment up to the individual readers of those reviews to make on their own, for their own personal reflection.

Anyway this thread has run its course. Consider the matter closed.