Member Reviews and Ratings are Back

@Gary Sax

Awesome idea. Can you write it up and I'll paste it in. I am de-bugging and switching my head over into writing human language is hard.

Yes your reviews are editor reviews. You are expected to conform to Michaels rating standards, which I also need to get up somewhere sometime. Do you have them?

@dysjunct

Editing reviews was one of the things I was debugging. It should work now.

You can’t have two things on the site with the same title. Also we don’t want to accidentally have two listings for the same game.

When you enter a title, you will get a list of everything with a similar title. This serves two purposes.

1. If you are submitting a board game, you can see if you are submitting a duplicate. For example you enter “Command and Colors Ancients” and see we already have a listing for “Command & Colors Ancients”

2. You are entering a title for a board game review and enter “Agricola Review” but see that there is already an article titled “Agricola Review” and also one titled “Agricola Board Game Review” so you know you have to come up with something different, and you don’t have to figure it out by trial and error, because you can see what is already being used.

So in Color crayons’s case, it was just showing him we had two articles similar titles, but not identical titles, and he could easily see that neither were an entry for the game. So all was good.

In Sag’s case, there is a Blog entitled “Hold the Line,” so since the system won’t allow identical titles we need to deal with the issue. When I finish this post I am going to go change the title of the blog. If it happens in the future, you can either tell me, or just title the listing “Game Name Board Game” and when I go to edit out the “Board Game” I’ll get the warning message and figure it out.

I want to thank all of you who have taken the time to rate games, write reviews and submit board games. I am in a pleasant state of shock over the massive number of ratings and reviews we have received in the past 48 hours. It caught me a bit unprepared. I will be working on enhancing it to meet the needs of our members. I will start with adding a link in the Site Tools menu so members can easily access all their reviews.

My hope is that this feature will give us a bump up in SEO/Google page rank, and allow me to create pages of Top Rated Games based on search query research to lure google searchers into checking out TWBG.

I also also hope it will create a low barrier of entry for lurkers to register and participate. It can be intimidating to jump into an established forum. Whereas, leaving a rating or short review, or commenting on a review is far easier.

I hope the enthusiasm for this feature continues.

Trust the board game filter. If it doesn’t come up with the keyword filter, it probably doesn’t exist. Submit it. You will get a double check when you enter the title in the submission form, in case it exists under a slightly different title.