I dunno guys, there's just this huge abundance of shithouse paranoid/puppets/mortal throne/whatever reviews that do nothing but add layer upon layer of redundancy. Why on earth was the "if there's heaps of reviews, a new review had better be fucken good" rule retracted? Do we really need another 30 reviews of of Time I? Of Puppets, of Illud, of Filosofem etc? It struck me as a really good rule in that it basically kept people away from classics until they cut their teeth reviewing a bunch of other stuff.

And really, that's the best argument for it. Dunno bros, I'm sure there's some reasoning but I sure as hell can't pick it. If people want to read 200 shitty reviews about Reign in Blood, they have Amazon, not metal archives, know what i'm saiyan?

You and Zodi should be pals or something.

The idea is that it's unfair to people who came into the game late. Being born 50 years after Gutterscream and Napero shouldn't be held against somebody who wants to review. Yeah, we get redundancies and noobs who should really learn their shit before embarrassing themselves but it's just seen as a level playing field. I hate accepting the trillionth Rust in Peace review as much as anybody but it's a side effect of a fair principle, in my eyes.

A lot of the issues the M-A populace has with the less experienced reviewers, I think, is due to the amount of historical explanation that goes on in these reviews. I understand that sometimes that's necessary and even maybe encouraged in order to give a bit of context on the album, but when you're doing it for a band like Judas Priest everybody's already pretty familiar with the history here. A lot of noobs tend to go on and on about what "the lay of the land" was like in metal like 20-30 years before they were even born instead of just telling us what they think about the music. That part's usually reserved for the last couple of paragraphs when it should be the main feature of a review.

I don't think adding a new rule would really help nor putting a soft cap on it as was done before, but maybe making the "factual accuracy" rule a little more rigid might help with the process? Iunno.

The perspective held by the owners is that we don't reject reviews as long as they fulfill the requirements of the rules.

That said, and this is mainly in response to you RapeTheDead, we still hold those rules to a certain standard. The review must be written well, with good grammar and formatting. The review must be reasonably factual, with at least some semblance that the reviewer is putting in the effort to try to convey the truth. And, most importantly, the review must focus on describing the music of the album. I emphasized "focus" and "album" because they're points worth keeping in mind that people often forget and neglect. It is not OK if a review spends more time talking about the history/artists of the band, or the non-music characteristics of the album, but only tangentially talks about the music. If it doesn't focus on the music, it is not acceptable. Likewise, it is not OK if a review goes on and on about the musical style of other albums, the band, or even other bands or the genre as a whole, but neglects to spend much time if any on the music of the album being reviewed. Some people feel they can get away with writing reviews for the band as a whole and tacking the review onto a random album, and that's not acceptable either. It's a discretionary gray area, for sure, but we do try to be fair in our assessments, and we often work together in judging reviews. But if you do see reviews that don't meet this criteria, let us know.

I don't have a problem with the number of reviews, only with the sheer incompetence of most of the reviewers who have recently submitted reviews for what seems like all ~30 or so albums with 25+ reviews - basically Sabbath/Slayer/Metallica/Megadeth/Pantera. I'll respect that my colleagues think most of these reviews are acceptable and they do all of the work in the review queue now, but there are quite a few reviews consisting of retarded rambling and regurgitated opinions that I'd nuke en masse if it wasn't for others recently accepting them. I've removed some of the more egregious offenders, but there's no point in going through a couple hundred reviews that have recently been approved from the same ~8 shitty submitters if the status quo is that they are acceptable.

Is there a Languish Here Forever queue? One that mods can filter out of their viewing? A passive aggressive alternative, in other words.

The band queue? But, no, it is our duty to judge everything that passes our gate and ends up in our sights, even if it is a terrible review or a really, really shitty "pagancore" band.

Letting things languish forever would probably also drive the more OCD mods insane.

Welcome to the sane asylum. Napero's over there with a lot of beer.

I can only speak about this issue as a user, so make of it what you will. Been using the site for quite a few years, even if this account is pretty new so I remember what it was like back in at least '07 or '06 or so. But anyways, here is the way I see the fundamental issue.

I don't think it has to do with review quality entirely. When a lot of reviews aren't top notch the fundamental problem gets worse, but I would like to formulate the problem as follows:

For releases with 15+ reviews, the usability of the review page tends to turn to shit irrespective of the quality of the reviews. This gets worse when the average length of the reviews is pretty long. But that is not the root cause of the usability problem. It also gets worse when the average quality of the reviews isn't top notch. But this is also not the root cause of the problem.

To illustrate this, we could use the the review page for Wintersun's Time I. It has a ton of reviews. 34 of them. And there are both positive and negative ones, all mixed together. There are quality reviews all mixed together with the shoddier ones. Some are very long while others are shorter. Let's disregard that for now, however, and just look at the volume of all this.

I copied all the text on the review page aside from the headers and put it into an office program (LibreOffice in my case) in order to get some data on this. I knew it would be bad, but it's worse than I thought it would be. The content of that page takes approximately 30 seconds to paste into a document on a slightly above average computer. It fills 56 standard A4 pages. It's larger than my graduation thesis was, and that one contained images and graphs and what not. This is all text and whitespace used for formatting. So what are the numbers?

The Time I review page totals in at around 31000 words composed of around 180000 characters including whitespace or around 140000 characters excluding whitespace.

This seems like a lot already, but what does it actually mean? Let's find out.

Wikipedia tells me the following:

followed by:

and finally:


If we disregard the part about proofreading on monitors and consider reading reviews on MA to be on par with reading printed prose (it's probably not, but I have no data for standard reading speeds on modern monitors), what does this give us? Let's count for a while. We have a character count of about 140000 characters of we disregard the whitespace. This brings our word count to 28000 words if we use the established "a word is 5 characters" definition. If we say that a person reads 275 such words in a minute (middle ground for the provided values), we can estimate the amount of minutes it would take to read all that, assuming it is true. Actually, let's make counting easier and round it to 280 words.

We get a time-to-read of 100 minutes for all the reviews on the Wintersun page, or 1 hour and 40 minutes (seeing as I've made some generous assumptions, I might give it up to another hour extra if I was to guess). If you just read it from beginning to end, that is.

In this time, you could listen to Time I two and a half times.

This obviously is not 100% proportional to the amount of reviews in itself, but more to the amount of reviews coupled with their length. It's still too much to get through if you value your sanity.

Now that we've established that it's quite an undertaking to get through the reviews of Time I, where does that leave us? Well, not all of those reviews are going to be worth your time (pun unintended). Some are going to suck. Others don't really suck but don't say much that half of the reviews on the page don't already say. The reviews are sorted in the pretty arbitrary order of submission date. One review has no real relation to the next one except for the fact that they were written at approximately the same time, or to the one that came before it. As a user I can not sort the reviews in any way. This means that as a user, I have no way of knowing if a review is worth my time except by at least skimming through it.

Regarding the ones that suck, a reader could at least hope that they are terrible enough from the start that they would be easy to dismiss just based on the first few sentences. But in my experience only the bottom 5-10% of the barrel of MA reviews are like that. Let's now say I want to read reviews of Time I. What does this mean to me. We have established that it would take me 1 hour and 40 minutes in somewhat ideal cases to get through it all. How much time can I avoid wasting by filtering out stuff? This is not an easy question to answer systematically, and I realize the numbers are going to seem a bit arbitrary, but see this as some kind of proof-of-concept approximation.

For me, the bottom 10% of the reviews can (hopefully) be dismissed quickly within the first few paragraphs. Let's say I get maybe 1 reviewer in there I don't like and dismiss right of the bat as soon as I see the username. I've managed to dismiss 4-5 reviews really quickly. Where does that leave me with the rest of the 29-30 reviews? I have to get more picky. Let's say I dismiss a few others too, like another 10% of them that make only a slightly better first impression than the worst ones, and maybe 2 of them that I just dismiss because they are too damn long. I've managed to filter out 5-6 more. I've managed to filter out about 10 of the 34 reviews thus far.

And here we have it. These are the ones I can easily pass any kind of judgement on without reading them. The other 24 I would have to read. Let's make the generous assumption that these reviews are of approximately equal length, and that this length is close to the average of reviews for the release. I still have somewhere around 99000 characters that I can't easily judge without reading them. If we use the same reading speed as before (I suspect mine is lower), I still have 70 minutes in front of me. I could almost listen to the entire album two times.

So what would I do in this case?

I'd pick the first good review I found. Usually this means a recent one, since I have no way to differentiate between them without reading them and they are sorted by submission date. Then Maybe I read a couple more (3 or 4 at most, and I'll probably try to find a negative one just for good measure). Then I wouldn't touch the other 20 or so reviews. Or I'd just fuck off and find somewhere else to read about the album. Or maybe listen to it myself (depends on why I'm reading, I've mostly heard the albums I read about).

In any case, the problem remains. About 25 of those reviews are useless. They aren't making anyone happy, maybe aside from the author. They're nothing but clutter taking up space at this point, and they make finding the worthy ones hell. Usability of the service goes to utter shit. The fact that they're sorted by submission date also means that better reviews get drowned out simply because they are older.

And it gets worse all the time, seeing as more reviews are still coming in. The last Time I review is from February 2015. Give that one a few more years, and it's going to be utter hell.

But then again, the following still applies:


How to solve a problem like this? No idea. But also not really my problem since I don't run the site. Maybe it's an interface issue, and there's some clever solution that would make navigation easier. Maybe the idea of being able to upvote good reviews would help, simply so you could sort them based on the number of upvotes and get the crap at the bottom. But I don't know.

The point is, when review pages get too large they get problematic and not very user-friendly. And it drags down the quality of the service from a user perspective.

We have considered up/downvoting, in fact there was a rather concerted discussion concerning such facets a few months back. It would introduce too many agendas, and I can't say that it would translate into a wholly accurate rearrangement based on so many factors. For one, people would downvote reviews just because they don't agree with the opinion, regardless of whether or not it is well written. So a review gets pushed down based on what? Objectively stating their opinion? Bands would make accounts and upvote only positive reviews... and we already have users abusing the "Similar artists" feature for whatever reason.

It's an interesting idea, but it would just open up a can of worms and arguably obfuscate the impartial presentation of the site on the whole.

tbh if upvoting and downvoting gets added it should just be done by mods or long time users. Otherwise we get butthurt fanboys upvoting shitty positive reviews and downvoting better negative reviews.

Maybe it could be solved by a simple grading system.

Like, a review scoring C- is still acceptable on the same grounds as always. But there's a way for the reader to tell it apart from an A+ review without having to read the entire thing. And you could be able to sort the reviews by this grade on the review page so you don't always have to sort by submission date. Submission date says nothing about review quality in the best of cases (not always the case, as Zodijackyl pointed out in another thread the later Slayer reviews for instance tend to be redundant at best). The sorting to me is the biggest issue with review pages containing 15+ (or even 10+) reviews. These pages become near impossible to navigate with the current layout of the review pages since there is no good way to sort the reviews.

This is already done in some kind of manner as mods who approve reviews give out between 3 and 8 points for reviews (or something like that). So some kind of differentiation is already in place. Maybe a systematic grading system based on more objectively appraisable qualities (the quality of the writing, the credibility the author manages to establish during the review, whatever fits) would also allow others (veteran status users, maybe?) to grade older ungraded reviews.

This would allow sorting reviews based on a grade which would put most of the more shoddy reviews near the bottom of the page while the better written ones are near the top.

Such a system won't punish users for writing reviews, but gives the incitament that if you want your review on the top of the page you would do best to write a good review. You write a shoddy review, it's going to be near the bottom.

Kind of like the "reward the good behavior, ignore the bad" principle some dog trainers like to use.

But I don't know really. Just venting some spontaneous idea. Make of it what you will.

That assumes that certainly lower-quality submitters are more intelligent than dogs, which they are not. If there wasn't a tendency to coddle the reviews of idiotic children over delusions of an internal policy merit, we wouldn't be having this discussion, but there is a dichotomy of coddling and intolerance. While I have been green-lighted by the mods who accepted most of these offending reviews by roughly half a dozen morons, the problem isn't fixed until they are institutionally rejected.

This has nothing to do with the number of reviews on each album, simply the coddling of incompetent children.

I think the karma system as employed by Reddit is a good example of how not to encourage community participation and often ensures the same stupid shit rises to the top/front page.

The only way to really make the current review system easier to navigate would be to allow users to filter an album's reviews by certain ways e.g. positive, negative, length (probably something like <700 & >700, some sort of mid-point). Perhaps even have users be able to tag their preferred reviewers and use that as a filter (in this case I'm thinking more towards Steam which has your friends reviews automatically at the top of the list for a game).

Honestly I think unless someone can produce a really amazing review for something that already has 15+ it should be flat out rejected unless they can make the argument that a pre-existing review is somehow worse than theirs.

I feel like this in particular isn't all that applicable. Sure, Gutterscream and Napero have reviewed a lot of the classics, but they also save their best writing for it- both of those guys have plenty of solid/unremarkable reviews of obscure bands, contrasted with (for example) Nap's rather excellent MoP review, or his shitload of car metaphors for St.Anger.

Strikes me that these guys have raised their standards for the bigger, more heavily reviewed albums...

There should be a word/length limit as any post and/or review longer than a couple of paragraphs is a waste of energy imho.

If you can't get your point across without a couple hundred inane and arcane words referencing who knows what and with nothing relevant to the disc or thought at hand then maybe a limit on words should be enacted.

Quality does not equal length.

Different strengths and writing styles are false! If people don't write how I like then the rules need to be changed so they all do! The mods create an environment that encourages shitty people because following the rules isn't good enough! BAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWW

I suggest we change the topic to "Bitching and Moaning: The Thread"

well, it beats the "listen to bastardhead talk about himself and/or make up stories about himself" thread.

Good thing I don't have my own thread then, eh?

Look, I get what y'all're saying, I'd love it if we could do something like this too but the owners stand by the stance that as long as it would be acceptable for any random album with no reviews, we treat it equally. If some people don't like the reviews being too long or if you're like Zodi and you just hate everything then I don't know what to friggin tell ya. Maybe read reviews on other sites as a reminder that we're really not that bad here.

I just think the big problem isn't that there are all these shitty reviews, but that they're written by people who don't seem to care much about improving at all and never read this forum. So they just keep churning out utter garbage. But BH is right in that, really, in the grand scheme of things, this is a free review forum that you don't get paid for writing on, and it's really no consequence that some kid puts up a review for Master of Puppets that gets lost in the void. It's pretty asinine to read these uninformed opinions, but frankly these kids will look back in 3 years anyway and go 'man, I was a fucking idiot when I wrote that.' It's better overall that anyone can submit a review for anything, as opposed to any alternatives.

And yeah there are shitloads of way worse reviews by supposed "professionals" out there...

This is true. Users who don't use the forums pretty much exclusively get feedback/validation from mods, and acceptance of reviews is their validation.

how hard is it to make a system were the order of reviews at the amounts of points rewarded?
or even maybe have 3 tabs of reviews for each point class?

Because 98% of reviews are just given the default 5 points. Wouldn't really have a palpable effect.

Just a random thought, but suppose said voting system was available to users who have a set amount of accepted reviews, say along the lines of 50+? That would at least partially eliminate the whole downvoting because of a contrasting opinion, by having people who actually have experience in writing reviews populating the votes, rather than guys who joined the site exclusively to abuse the feature.

Perhaps instead of ranking all the reviews by user votes, the system could be that only two or three reviews with a certain number of votes are marked as "featured reviews" or something (and to avoid people voting only for ones they disagree with, maybe have one featured review over 70% and one under 70% or something).

Frankly it doesn't bother me too much, as I usually just go for the known reviewers first and maybe read one or two of the others at random. Even if it's a poorly written review, I can at least skim it and usually have a decent idea what the album is like (though I may not know how good the album actually is). At least with more reviews, the overall percentage becomes more accurate.

RE: TadakatsuH0nda

Considering the fact that there are only a few hundred users with over 50 reviews (far less if we consider only active ones) - I see your recommendation becoming nothing more than a meaningless extension of the already-established "circle-jerk" of self-aggrandizement that permeates this subforum.

Yeah I suppose that would worsen by a huge amount lol...

On the wintersun taking two hours to read thing thing, my bad.