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camjr01
Metal newbie

Joined: Sat May 26, 2018 10:34 pm
Posts: 134
Location: Test Location
PostPosted: Tue Sep 21, 2021 10:53 pm 
 

I've been writing lots of reviews (currently all of them are drafts because I haven't submitted or deleted anything yet), and there are three things I would like to suggest:

1. Please increase/remove the character limit for review titles. I know this might sound simple, but there are multiple completely reasonable review titles I can't use because of the limitation. I'm not sure if the limitation was imposed accidentally or because of how Metallum's code works, but if it's because mods feel like users will submit overly long unnecessarily spammy titles (example: "this album is great, it's the best death metal album I've ever heard, I love how the riffs are technical and the band incorporate avant-garde elements and unique song structures, go but it now if you haven't already :)" as a whole review title) I might add that can just be addressed by the mods after the reviews are submitted. Just looking to the Crappy Diem thread, I can already see that the mods do a really good job at filtering through all the bad reviews in terms of body text (which isn't limited by characters), so if the mods are going to catch all the bad titles that surpass the current character limit I can only see gains to be had here. Users would be allowed to submit all their review titles that just happen to be longer than the arbitrary character limit, which they wouldn't be able to without this change.

Examples of titles that aren't currently able to be used due to the character limit:
Spoiler: show
1. Meshuggah - I [Title "A concise immense representation of the destructive power of the individual"]
2. Gnaw Their Tongues - I Speak the Truth, yet with Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die [Title "I title my album, yet with every extra word added, you get more confused"]
3. Teitanblood - Death [Title "It's too filthy, vile, and deranged. That's both an insult and a compliment"]
4. Saving Grace - The King Is Coming [Title "Every knee shall bow, and every tongue shall confess, that Jesus Christ is Lord"]


2. I know this sounds small and insignificant (even smaller and more insignificant than the last one, I apologize), it would be good to be able to use decimal values in review scores. For example, being able to score a review as "69.42%" or "33.44%". This would be especially useful if your score consisted of multiple parts averaged together

Two examples of averages like this would be:
Spoiler: show
Lyrics: 0%
Guitars: 97%
Drums: 85%
Vocals: 92%
Average 68.5%

Guitars: 54%
Drums: 67%
Vocals: 99%
Bass: 23%
Average: 60.75%


3. It would be really good to be able to utilize HTML and the potential of text to the fullest as we can here on the forums. It would be good to be able to use colored text (for emphasis, a sense of specialty to certain words or characters, formatting, and for so many great aesthetic opportunities), usage of spoilers (if you're currently dissecting lyrics in your review and you aren't putting all the lines next to each other the review gets really long really fast), embedding images or YouTube videos (or really anything else that happens to be relevant), and really just utilizing HTML to its full potential and allowing it in full for the super experienced. If you really know what you're doing (not saying I do now but I would totally learn, everything I know about HTML I learned here) I don't see why you should be limited by the current constraints placed on HTML by the current review engine here on metallum.

The reviews here are great and the review engine is great as it is (nice job Hellblazer and Morrigan), I just think these are good constructive criticisms to help improve things.
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Derigin
The Mountain Man

Joined: Sun Jan 01, 2006 6:25 am
Posts: 5997
Location: Canada
PostPosted: Wed Sep 22, 2021 12:02 pm 
 

Thank you for the suggestions, but all three points (at least to some degree) really aren't all that desirable from our point of view:

On #1, review titles really should be as concise as possible; they are titles after all. You don't have to do anything special for a title - it can be as straightforward or basic as you want - but if a reviewer struggles to put into a short sentence the general gist of what they want to say, that's usually an indication that the reviewer should reassess what they're trying to say. If you do see titles on accepted reviews that are cut-off, bring them up in the review forum and we'll let the reviewer know to fix them.

On #2, adding decimals to ratings would be overkill. I get that some reviewers might have some mathematical formula to the way they go about rating things, but I would hazard a guess and say that most reviewers don't think that way. Already the difference between a 69% and 70% review is negligible to a lot of people reading reviews, adding decimals in there is just going to complicate things for what amounts to an (admittedly) weird way of writing reviews. This is on the same level as people who count the number of riffs on albums. People that do this tend to get lost in the trees and forget about the forest, and it's the forest most people care about.

On #3, I'm not opposed to the inclusion of some tags (spoiler, for instance), but other tags would be a nightmare from both the reader's point of view, as well as the moderator's. Colored text, along with other formatting - even some that exist today, like a certain reviewer's bolding of text - is distracting. People reading reviews care about the content, they don't necessarily care about how flashy or pretty it is. The important bit is that a review is readable and makes sense. The embedding of images and YouTube videos would be awful, not just because some images and videos can disappear or be broken, or even include harmful trojans and other malware, but that would also require us to moderate the content of those images/videos too. I frankly don't want to spend my day looking over 30+ minute videos determining if the video itself is acceptable. I also don't trust users not to change the source content of the original image or video after a review is submitted to something like Goatse or worse. That's in addition to such images/videos being distracting, too. The only tag I could see some merit for including would be the spoiler tag, but in reality reviews don't really need it. A review shouldn't be a deep dissection of lyrics, one-by-one, because at that point it's an analysis not a review.

I feel like this may just be a general feeling from your post, but it sounds like you seem to view reviews much more technically than what they should be. A review should stand on its own merits through the content that is written. It should be relatively concise, but still descriptive of the music of the album, while also not too analytical to the point that the overall message you want to convey in it is lost breaking down individual parts one-by-one. You don't need to be flashy with a review since ultimately it's the content readers care about most; the use of HTML tags should supplement, not be centre stage in a review. Likewise, if you can't sum up a message in a short title or in a simple rating, than that's usually a sign that your endeavour isn't going to reach the audience you intend in the way you intend. These are all good lessons for reviews, but also writing in general.
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