[Gerard1968]

A posting can't be of use to everyone, but it should be of use to a few. Posting a comment on an album such as, 'yeah, love it', doen't offer a great deal of foresight, it merely reiterates the valve of a ranking. My cynical side, which is more than just one side, thinks these posts are just 'point chasing'. A relatively simple solution would be 1 point for a short post, 3 or 4 points for a certain number of characters, not too many as that would encourage lengthy post with too many adjectives for readers to wade through. This should persuade contributers to offer more comprehensive & constructive opinions, short critiques, factual points of interest, a quote from a lyric etc. Software could identify those 'pointies' who create a lengthy, yet generic, opinion that they just cut and paste to their favourites. The advantages are two fold: declutter threads by cutting the amount of posts that equate to a rating, and help site users with more information on a band they're researching; plus, by writing a decent amount you will become more self aware with regards your own tastes and how they have evolved, consequently improving your posts, and possibly your own self esteem. Ultimately we would have an improved resource that should encourage higher usage, and new members. Ergo the site owners get more advertising revenue!

[albummaster]

Agree with you. The system was meant to be self-policing in that comments could be up or down voted as 'helpful'. However, in most cases people are not using this in the manner intended and using more to concur with a point of view. We've debated here before about ways to improve the quality of comments, awarding more points for longer comments isn't a foolproof way of doing things as you say (templated comments, repeated words etc). It is something on the list to allow people to write reviews rather than comments e.g. a comment flagged as a review which could then have its own thread of discussion and the best ones could be showcased etc

[Romanelli]

Here's a thought...just a thought.

What if comments had to be approved before posting to an album/song/chart, and before points are awarded? You could set criteria for what the basic limits of a comment should be. All comments would then go into a queue, and be gone through by a moderator for approval/disapproval. These would be looked at not based on the opinion expressed (deleting a comment because it's disagreed with would be wrong), but on a basic criteria set by you. I think that going through this queue would be pretty quick to do. Once approved, comments would post and points would be awarded.

As well, (if possible), it might be a good idea to send an automatic PM when a comment is denied, explaining the reason for the deletion. This would help to discourage people from doing multiple one word comments, and would help to educate users. The deleted comments could be held in a queue for a week to allow rebuttal from the user. If no rebuttal, then the comment would be permanently deleted.

I think that this could go a long way towards improving the quality of comments on the site, and could completely take care of the problem of comments like "Good album", "Liked it", Dislike", etc..

As well, it would maybe be helpful to allow moderators to work reported comments.
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I'm leaning on the threshold
Of her mystery
And crashing through the walls
Of dying history

[Romanelli]

Just pulled up the list of Latest Comments. Just on page one, which contains 10 comments, 7 of them are obvious copy and paste jobs. We could, with the above suggestion, take care of this swiftly without delay, and the user would know already not to handle comments in this way.
_________________
I'm leaning on the threshold
Of her mystery
And crashing through the walls
Of dying history

[albummaster]

Just going through the suggestions forum and noticed that I'd missed this for some reason. I understand the general idea here that moderated comments could only appear and these would be 'approved' quality comments, but I think this might put people off contributing and act as a barrier to general conversation which also takes place in the comments. The longer term goal is to allow users the ability to post their own reviews which would carry a bit more status than general comments and maybe then comments could carry less weight and attract less flotsam.