Here it is, my first post-P-Bot post! I believe it will be appearing below P-Bot.
There are a lot of questions right now, so I'll try to address them.
1) P-BOT! No, the frontpage will not be littered with P-Bot posts. We have set it up so when P-Bot makes a new daily post, it overwrites the old one on the frontpage. This way, he only has one post up at a time. You can still view his previous posts via the BBS archive (there has never been a way to view previous top lists before, so this is a great addition).
The one downside with P-Bot is that he comes between the top of the page and our regular news - but we're hoping users will adjust and not forget us down here. Having P-Bot allows us to present a lot more information than was possible with the small "Top 5" box in the left column (which will soon be gone). Now we can provide expanded info and extra goodies. P-Bot may get smarter and more interesting as time goes on!
The best thing, of course, is that users can now respond to the daily top five list, which is always fun.
2) RATINGS SYSTEM. This has been a BIG addition to NG, and LilJim put a lot of work into it. When authors now submit content, they click checkboxes that provide specific details about the content. Based on those checkboxes, a rating is assigned.
We will soon have some extra tools that allow users to influence ratings - most likely via your reviews. If we follow the current plan, when you review a submission you will also have the option of recommending a rating for it. If a submission has a bulk of recommendations that differ from the established rating, it will potentially be updated. All this is in the works. :)
As for the existing submissions - a lot of users have been asking, "How did you assign ratings to over 13,000 existing submissions?! And you didn't do a very good job, btw".
Well, we did the best we can, dammit! Basically, we have always had a list of "descriptive terms" that users can fill in when they submit a movie. Most authors have filled them in, while others ignored them.
Some of the terms included "nudity", "violence", "cursing" and "drugs", so we performed a broad database sweep and converted those checkboxes to our new system.
It isn't perfect, but it is a start. Expect old submissions to be updated over time. The main point is that we now have the system in place, so some day when NG is showcasing 200,000 submissions, MOST of them will be properly rated.
Comments? Recommendations?