The Review System (Suggestion) (Save SMF)

hey everybody!

so recently we figured out that the main problem with SMF isnt exactly the lack of guides, it's the guides that are already in.

how did we figure this out? a reddit post was published, and showed our top guides for some gods. one of them was an Ao Kuang attack speed pure hp guide that got a 11-0 perfect upvote ratio. that's problematic.

so some of us banded together to think of an idea- the reviewing system! (i've added a lot of things to the original concept).

an editor/mod/vet will be able to mark a comment as a positive/ a negative review. since a lot of our editors are pretty knowledgeable when it comes to smite, they'll be able to mark insightful reviews.

the guides will directly show a fragment of those reviews, set in the top part of the guide, so it is visible to see.

there will also be a plaque which shows the bad review/good review ratio.

how do we motivate people to review? simple. there will be a system akin to the rep one, which shows the amount of your confirmed reviews.

thoughts?/suggestions? leave em here!

(keep in mind that the base idea is simply marking the reviews and making them appear directly so the builder will be able to check them out before he builds)

any comments?

I don't exactly get what you mean...

The only thing I can make of it is that when somebody comments on a guide, their comment can be chosen as a "good review", and when it does, that person gets a point similar to the Rep system.

Before I continue, can you confirm this is correct, and explain the other parts in a different way? I'm confused right now.

Idk, that kind of ruins smf's whole system. It's inherently a democracy, giving editors or higher ranked members privileges makes the whole thing much more hierarchical.

What should happen regardless is that a guide that's getting up votes would be getting good reviews as well and vice versa, adding a system for what's already essentially in place seems kind of backwards, especially because I don't see what we'd have to gain from it. The issue that I can see you brought up is that some guides with really good ratios (eg: 11 up votes - 0 down votes) are getting much higher on the popular guides list, even if they're not good guides. However, if that's the case then people should be looking at the guide and down voting it if it doesn't belong there. If we make it so that views instead of votes drive what makes guides appear in our algorithm for popular guides even more, then it's much harder for good guides with fewer views to get the attention they deserve.

well, there are a lot of people who disagree with downvoting.

I think most people disagree with downvoting because it's a way to widespread concept.

With this I mean that a downvote could mean anything.

Perhaps a downvote is "legit" and well-deserved, but maybe it's just a troll being a... well, troll.
This also doesn't help the creator of a guide either, it'll only give the creator the idea that their content is bad, and there isn't a way for him to change that because a downvote doesn't specify any reason as to why it's there.

If a reason had to be specified when downvoting, maybe the 'downvote' feature would be more used and appreciated.
For example, if somebody would go to my guide and say to themselves: "Hey, this lay-out looks bad, the colors are to much and the lines are to close to eachother to read it." They could downvote, but before the vote would be "published", they would have to give the reason why they downvoted it.

You may be wondering: "But then the comments would be sorta useless".
Right... Wrong.

The comments would still be relevant, as in my idea, others wouldn't be able to read the reason you put for your downvote, so if somebody would place a comment instead of a downvote, not only the guide creator could read it, but also others.
And, ontop of that, the "reason" you could give for a downvote would be limited to a certain number of characters, so if your reason would be to long, you could downvote with the reason "read my comment", so the guide creator can go ahead and read your comment, and read your entire essay of what you find bad about the guide.

This would, in my opinion, make the 'downvote' function more usable, less... "rude", and would make people agree with downvotes more easily.


Edit:
TL;DR Downvotes are generally disliked because they're to "anonymous". By forcing the need to specify a reason, this aspect gets eliminated and downvotes would be liked a bit more.

Okay, forcing a reason for down voting WOULD admittedly be an improvement, I agree with your reasons given. However, I don't think only the guide writer should be able to read them, it can be helpful to everyone to see constructive criticism and making the reasons private would make it more likely for trolling or other rude behavior to occur.

Could be done. But then the reason would show up as a comment, and that might cause 'double-posting'. Say somebody comments and then proceeds to downvote, that person would have 2 comments. Perhaps make a seperate tab for it? Similar to the comments but only for votes? That could work.

I've seen on different sites that have a filter system for product reviews that show who gave what rating like if you want to see how many people gave a product five stars or one star. Maybe SMF should have that clear distinction on how many upvotes and downvotes there are to see if the guide is actually good or not and a filter system to see who left the upvote or downvote to see what they say. For a little bit extra, maybe a "helpful review" badge on a specific review of the guides can also be a big jump this direction.

Hey everyone,

I'm thinking that it might be pretty difficult to change the site's current voting system. I have no clue how difficult it is to do, and it seems to be used through all MOBAFire networked sites.

As such...it might be a long time before we see a different system used. If this is the case, we should also discuss how we the people can work within the system and make it as strong and functional as possible.