Comments system and reviews

[albummaster]

Yes, this is kind of in response to another thread, but this is a thread about BEA.

Does the comments system on BEA need to change? What improvements would people like to see?

At the moment, on each album, band, chart and track page, members can leave comments. Member comments are not restricted to reviews (even though many of them are). A lot of the comments turn into 'chat', which is fun for a lot of people, but maybe puts other people off from leaving reviews, so maybe BEA needs to do both?

I'm thinking that maybe BEA could separate 'chat' style comments from reviews, and present both separately. There seems to be good rationale to do this, some reviews get hidden amongst the chat and it's difficult for people to pick the reviews out. Also, some people appear to want to be able to write reviews, but think BEA doesn't currently provide this platform.

So, this is just to see what people think about this.

[RFNAPLES]

Sounds good. Also would appreciate more formatting options in the reviews, perhaps even html in addition to wysiwyg.
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Top 100 Greatest Music Albums by RFNAPLES
Bubbling Under The Top 100 Greatest Mus...y RFNAPLES

[albummaster]

I think bold and italics could also be allowed, but I'd hate to see a multi-line comment entirely in bold (that's the reason for no formatting at the moment). Always got to cater for the worst case, unfortunately.

[RFNAPLES]

How about a spelling and grammar checker?
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Top 100 Greatest Music Albums by RFNAPLES
Bubbling Under The Top 100 Greatest Mus...y RFNAPLES

[albummaster]

I think this is best done from your browser using something like ieSpell (or equivalent for Firefox/Chrome/Opera). These work across all websites, and I don't think BEA could offer anything better than a specialist add-on.

[Xavygravy]

A separate reviews tab sounds good.

Perhaps you could have a separate column for "No. of Reviews" in the Member calculations, and count them for double.

[albummaster]

Yes, I think that something like that would be done if we go this route.

An issue from the other thread is editorial control over which reviews are presented and also the overall mark to be awarded. On BEA, the overall mark is the average rating and which reviews are posted first could be controlled by community vote via the 'helpfulness' votes in much the same way that other sites do (e.g. Amazon).

BEA does not have an editorial voice as such, and I'm not sure it would benefit from having one. Other sites do this well already e.g. Pitchfork, but they are mainly reviewing current/fortchcoming releases whereas BEA has more of a historical focus and is therefore looking at things in a different context.

[GARY]

Sounds good to me.

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I owe $100,000 and wasted 4 years of my life.

And all I got was this silly hat



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[GARY]

I don't know why any drastic changes are required to have reviews


It could be similar to your album of the day albummaster.

People could simply do a review for it. Or one that they so chose.


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I owe $100,000 and wasted 4 years of my life.

And all I got was this silly hat



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[albummaster]

Yes, there's nothing to stop people posting reviews already. You can write anything in your comments, and what is s review if it's not a type of comment? In addition, your rating is already shown alongside each comment making it quite clear what your opinion is of an item.