Your opinion of the "new" reviews layout

First off, I never used PA before the current system was implemented. I feel that the current system is quite good (with some room for improvement). For albums that have over a couple hundred reviews, I don't necessarily want to sift through all of them. In general I believe featured members write better reviews. Another big deal is bandwidth. If I am interested in reviews of Close To The Edge I don't want to wait for all 800 reviews to load and I'm sure M@X doesn't want to waste the bandwidth.
My sensible idea is that if an album has over X number of reviews then only the collaborators get on the main page. However, if the album has X or fewer reviews then everyone gets on the main page. If I am interested in an album that only has a handful of reviews by collaborators you can be darned sure I'm going to look at the rest of the reviews. I'm sure this idea can be tweaked to account for the various proportions of collaborator to non-collaborator reviews.

As for the ads (since they got brought up), I'm not sure how much money will be lost by moving them fromt he middle of the page to the bottom. I'm perfectly fine scrolling the extra bit to get past them but my one gripe is with the eBay ad. This thing hijacks your mousewheel when you are scrolling down if your mouse happens to go over this part of the page. I am often annoyed by this so it would be great if something could be done about it.

Finally to answer your remaining questions, yes I think some form of my brilliant idea will be implented and no, you will never find true love. You will find someone that is good enough and, since you know of nothing more, you will wind up with that person. It will, however not be true love.

If you are not a Collaborator, there is no reason in the current system to put effort into a review of an album if not for your own satisfaction. Your opinion otherwise is nearly worthless.

I am a little perturbed by having to scroll right down past all the adverts, ebay and amazon etc., to actuallly get to the reviews...

I can't comment on the old format, but I really don't like the new one.
It seems like massive favoritism to me.

Example of one of my reviews:
This is mine - http://www.progarchives.com/Review.asp?id=241824
And this review gets a place on the front page. I'm not saying its bad, but I think it's fairly obvious that I spent more time on mine than was spent on the other.

I know the other review was written in 2004, but I still don't think thats fair. And also, I've seen the same thing happen with a lot of other reviews, where the reviews which took massively long are forced into the side column to make space for those which took less than 5 minutes, and in some of the very early cases, don't even make the 100 word minimum.

Just my two cents,
-Joel

Edited by progkidjoel - November 06 2009 at 02:40

I do look at members' reviews if I'm not satisfied with Collab reviews. They come second though (or they don't come at all in the case of albums extensively reviewed by Collabs).

Should this be a negative or a positive vote?

Don't know about true love Henry, that's hard  but about your other question: I'm not sure if I can answer this fairly since I'm a collab and thus my reviews are shown complete. But if I were a guest reviewer I would probably be less enthusiastic. What I don't really understand is why these reviews are minimized because in 9 out of 10 cases there is enough room for the guest reviews to be shown completely. Maybe it's a matter of server space or something, we would have to ask M@x for that.

Some time ago, M@x changed the reviews page so that it now by default only shows the full Collab reviews and a few minimized member ratings. Since it has been a significant amount of time since that change, I thought it would be interesting to see what PA members thought of it after working with it for a while, since the reaction at the time was almost universally negative.

Edited by Henry Plainview - November 06 2009 at 01:37