i say ditch the xp bar, or make it a more subtle feature, like a small percentage in the corner. or maybe a small xp circle

If it ain't broke don't fix it, Tom. How am I supposed to upvote my stuff multple times?

I wonder if reviews with no score will count towards getting something noticed. I think that's the only potential problem I see here, because I might be one of those people going scoreless with reviews (On Metacritic, I always pay attention to the top and bottom reviews, not the aggregate scores. I think those are more important). I don't think it'll be too much of a problem because unscored review sentiment will probably be close to that of the scored reviews, though.

I don't see any other problems though... Steam has the ability to change reviews, which helps if, say, the PC port of FF XIII is trash (first example that came to mind :P) but gets better later. In that mindset I think the 15 minute edit limit is a bad thing there. I think that 'releasing' the review edit button once for each uploaded edit by the content creator like someone suggested is a GREAT compromise, though. You can have a field in the publish form for the current version and have them change it whenever they upload something new, and have the reviews display the version they apply to.

For the 20 XP on the weekend in different timezones... I dunno, allow the user to change their time zone in their profile? And if they change it, they forfeit the current day's chance for EXP (the way some video games handle clock changes).

At 1/12/15 02:16 PM, test-object wrote: You're the one rambling and ranting. If only you'd calm down for a second and don't take every argument as a personal insult, we'd go a long way, Psychopath. I only skimmed the thread (and your post) beforehand, but now I looked in Tom's post a bit deeper, I have a more informed look on it.

Wait a minute, you just now read the other posts and you have the gall to claim that I'm the one rambling? You've just admitted to having zero context on which to form your opinion before shitting it out of your mouth and you have the gonads to tell me that I'm confused? Given that I'm clearly more informed than you are, how could I be the one rambling? You're a fucking idiot and yes, what you wrote was an insult, to my intelligence.

Well, apart from "dynamic" being a buzzword as opposed to being an actual argument, I definitely think reviewing isn't a competition.

Way to ramble on once again without recognizing the context or the meaning of what I said. Good job on that reading comprehension, bro. In case you haven't notice, I don't vote five or zero as a review, I do it to change the score.

It's a way of telling an author how he or she could improve their work and it is their choice to do something with it or not.

No it isn't, it's a method of expressing your opinion on content, constructive or deconstructive, objectively or subjectively. Almost nobody, myself being among the exceptions, writes a tutorial or even constructive criticism in their reviews.

Roger Ebert wouldn't have chosen the profession he did if he wanted to be competitive.

Who fucking cares about Roger Ebert?

Furthermore:
-There are 2 ways to judge a movie which is pointless busywork.

You're lazy.

-The current system allows people to only upvote their own work and continuously zero-bomb others, which is dumb.

It's their choice.

-I'd love to hide my score in reviews.

You're a coward.

Numbers don't matter anyway when it comes to rating an author's work anyway.

Neither do words if you put them in the right order.

-I don't care all that much about XP right now, to be frank. Maybe this system would breath some new life into that?

If you read the other posts, you'd know that a good number of people are confused by the nature of the new system, which generally means that no, it will go on ignored and suffer as a consequence.

It's a metaphor, pumpkin.

No, it's a hyperbolic comparison.

Don't get your panties in a bunch.

Who's insulting who now?

Even if it's nothing, it's worth having taken a look at certain aspects of design. You seem awfully against even the slightest amount of introspection.

Fuck you and your ad hominem, you self unaware moron. I'm against stupid, pointless and arbitrary changes made in the name of "progress", another buzzword that doesn't mean much.

Hold on, what?

@TomFulp So instead of going up to 5.00, movies can go up to 10.00 with this new voting system? And the score is only based on reviews? Will all existing movies have their score changed, as well as having their vote count be restarted and all reviews removed? Also, when will you start to use this new voting system?

(BTW, I suck at head explosions. And the character is Font Size from the Webdings series.)

At 1/12/15 09:42 AM, TomFulp wrote:

At 1/12/15 09:35 AM, DjGubkafish wrote: Also are you saying that we can edit our reviews and votes or just votes? I think we should not be able to do that cuz people gona troll

The plan is to allow review edits but we could log all previous review content. There are cases where developers fix issues with their games and reviewers would like the opportunity to update their review based on that.

This overhaul sounds pretty good!
And if you're gonna make it possible to edit a review, it would be pretty cool if (after a review is edited by the author) you can click on an ''unedited version'' button and see the original review.

Please consider using the current review + voting scores as part of the base for the new score system. Otherwise you'll have thousands and thousands of submissions without any votes or less than 5 votes. The users that left their vote would have used the new review system if it had been in place back then. It sounds unfair to turn their votes invalid for no reason and it would be unfair to the artists who earned a relatively good score and are suddenly left with I dunno... 4 votes?

I can't imagine anyone going through some hundred let alone thousands of submissions to vote on them. And I can definitely not imagine the army of users you'd need to re-establish realistic scores for a majority of the submissions hosted on NG doing that.

Sorry I don't want to sound overdramatic, but I really feel this could demotivate a lot of users, especially those who don't have a huge fanbase and had to wait one or two days to get their flash through judgement in the first place.

I really like the 20xp on weekends idea lol. Voting that scores over all the content will be interesting. I'm pretty upset I can't make it to MAGFest. My first son is due on Jan 26. Hopefully I will still be in the area next year and I can go.

I love this website, unlike youtube or deviantart it gets better with every update.

At 1/12/15 02:27 PM, TomFulp wrote:

Nope. One concern that I mentioned earlier in the thread is it could result in low quality reviews, so tough to mess with that... Although we were also talking about incentives to encourage artists to write more reviews. :P

I suggest something more involved or expanded upon with the "Helpful / Useless / Abusive" criteria. In fact, I noticed that the red "Useless" reviews disappeared a few years ago... Maybe there could be a return to that function, because clearly there's some unseen rating pool behind each review. Hell, I would like for there to be no more mystery. If its an extremely useless review, how many people voted Useless? If its an insanely well received review, how many people agreed and disagreed? Make those polls visible to the individual review in question...especially if in the future, they'll have the option to edit what was said.

(Is there going to be an edit log in similar fashion to BBS Post's edit log?)

Abusive reviewers already get penalized with their Whistle rating, correct? Maybe there could be some incentive to write helpful reviews, as long as its not just a meager sentence, but several well thought out paragraphs or something... a "Character Minimum" criteria?

I think it would be neat to see if there were any way for reviews to have an affect on XP farming. Before I could animate or submit art, that was really my only utility to this site when I first started out many years ago... aside from voting, of course.

The overhaul plans sound like an excellent idea! The new look is straightforward and will probably be a lot easier on the minds of newcomers. An increase of reviews is absolutely undeniable as well, so that's all good to me!

At 1/12/15 09:42 AM, TomFulp wrote:

At 1/12/15 09:35 AM, DjGubkafish wrote: Also are you saying that we can edit our reviews and votes or just votes? I think we should not be able to do that cuz people gona troll

The plan is to allow review edits but we could log all previous review content. There are cases where developers fix issues with their games and reviewers would like the opportunity to update their review based on that.

I'd like that. There have been times where I go back to a past review and wish I could have tweaked things. The changes to voting also sit well with me, so no complaints here.

At 1/12/15 03:20 PM, TomFulp wrote:

To answer some of the questions of "why now" - as we work towards a new adaptive layout, every page of the site will need to be re-written.

i hope this doesnt mean another site will be ruined because of this smart-phone or whatever trend/craze
recently, or more like the past years, most of the active websites destroyed their whole layout and look completely just to adapt to these uh... devices.
i hope this isnt a priority over all the people who would want to have the same newgrounds they knew and got used to, and couldnt be without. i know i couldnt come here if it looked something like the current youtube, or other sites with an annoying static top header that follows the page and overly huge buttons. i even made a topic in hopes someone can help me revert these changes, as im not viewing things from a damn smart-phone...

will we be able to view the site EXACTLY the same way as now? except with the changed voting..?

At 1/12/15 09:44 AM, TomFulp wrote:

At 1/12/15 09:42 AM, Sectus wrote: I'm guessing that it will work the same as the forum post system, or perhaps with a shorter time you can edit.

Or maybe I'm wrong, I dunno. I just don't really think it is a good idea to allow for review edits.

If we decide long-term editing is bad, we COULD try doing the 15 minute window and just allow a long-term score edit option to reflect a change of opinion.

Who's opinion of a submission is going to change in 15 minutes? I was thinking maybe the review and rating could be changed if the submission file has been updated.

Also, will this new voting system force us to write a review before voting and depositing xp? If that's the case, I think we should get a max of 20 xp every day, for putting in the extra effort to vote.

This sounds amazing Tom!
I think it's a great idea to improve the audio/art review xp, more people will give reviews in those portals now.

At 1/12/15 04:56 PM, Jojo wrote: So EXP (and B/P) will still determine voting power? If so, will it retroactively affect a submission's average score? For example, if a submission has a score of 3.5, and I give it a 4, moving it a bit closer to 4, say 3.75, and then my voting power goes up, will it affect the score, moving it closer to the score I gave it, say 3.875?

As long as EXP (and B/P) still influence voting power, I have no problem with this system. Although, I'm going to miss the ability to influence scores with multiple votes.

XP and B/P would still impact voting power. Here's an interesting thing though... We would most likely log your power at the time of your vote, so in the record, it has your vote score and vote power. This way, whenever a new vote is cast and the score is re-calculated, it has quick access to all the previous data vs doing a ton of user lookups. Also, since the whole idea of XP was a judge of how experienced you are in the world of NG content, it would make sense that your freshman votes continue to have freshman power.

However, if you edited your vote, that would presumably log the new XP. So suddenly there's this desire to go through and edit all your votes whenever you level up... Maybe that is something we would just automatically do, when you level up it would go through your voting history and update according... Might feel cool to know when you level up, you elevate every vote you ever made.

Sounds great to me. I think some people will always object to change or refuse to take the time to understand it, especially with the internet. I remember when people thought splitting up movies and games and creating a different portal was a bad idea, but it's paid off. The new voting system will be a little weird for a month or so, then it'll pay off.

Onward and upward! No concerns here. I love the idea that this system will encourage people to vote on new things!

I like the proposed system!

Sorry @TomFulp, I had to do this :3

This also means that overly hyped artists such as myself (lots of friends votin five on every fart you do) will experience a drastic decrease per submission statistic. It's going to be a wonderfull wake up call for those who got alittle bit too proud ?)

Hopefully this will make us work harder for those four or five stars. :D

I think an overhaul is a great idea and if I'm honest it's about time. Great idea having XP across the board, I'm in!

At 1/12/15 05:54 PM, RealFaction wrote: I wrote in her thread, and @TomFulp I tell ya, instead of my yearly Art Inspired Music Contest this year, it'll have a spin for the Anniversary theme. Newgrounds Anniversary Inspired Music Contest. Would basically have people cover old songs possibly and draw inspiration from old NG artwork until a certain cutoff year, or hey, maybe flash movies or anything old really.

Awesome!

I LOVE this voting proposal, voting system needed an overhaul ages ago. That's a great way to finally smoke out the zero bombers! I am all for this, been wanting to see review scores push the real scores for a long time. Go full speed I say! It will give more people a chance :)

Hopefully we can pull of something that maximizes happiness for all!

At 1/12/15 09:27 AM, TomFulp wrote: Voting System Overhaul Proposal

Please respond with feedback!

As someone in the top 50 (not that that anyone cares about this now a days anyway), here's my two cents:

The new voting system will be universal for all Portals (games, movies, audio, art).

That's a fine idea, I think it'd be best to be able to have a simple, identical system for everything, makes the experience universal.

You will gain 2 XP for each vote, with a max of 10 XP daily.

That's fine too, it wouldn't affect the old school guys, and would make make it more attractive to new users.

On weekends you will be able to log up to 20 XP daily.

I'm mildly against this one, if we're changing things around, I'd prefer to keep things simple, but it's not a biggie and quite a few people seem very enthusiastic about it.

XP is logged instantly, no more five vote minimum requirement.

As per above, this is absolutely fine.

All existing score data will be backed up but no longer used. Review scores will become the new existing score data.

That seems a bit of a shame. I know that there's quite a few submissions that currently have highly distorted scores, but it is a lot of accumulated effort that will, inevitably, go to waste; it's an imperfect system, but it does a decent enough job and, like many have said, as the number of reviews is smaller, it'll affect a lot of poorly reviewed movies, although there's solutions to that.

Users can only vote once on each piece of content and can edit that vote whenever they want.

Hmm, this is a big change! But a quite reasonable one, I've thought for years that this was almost a necessity (although I suspect that abuse will still happen, just via spam accounts) and it should, theoretically, increase the quality of the votes, overall. Would changing the vote give XP, though? It's something to consider...

The score that shows in your review is the same score as your vote, there is just one location on the page to enter you score.

Sure, aside from losing the current scores, that's quite reasonable.

You can hide your score or submit a review without a score (many people are anti-scoring).

Would leaving a review without a score allow you to get XP? That'd be a nice touch, I'd like to do that, sometimes.

Combined voting and reviewing box, default appearance.

What you see after voting.

What you see when you click the review text field.

What you see after submitting your review.

Appearance-wise, they look fine.

Once you write a review, it always appears above the other reviews on the page, so you can see what you wrote and edit (or delete?) if desired.

That's a nice touch, definitely a good one. Just be careful as to how deal with the issue of 'deleting reviews' and then letting them get XP from re-reviewing it...

Overall, I'm fairly comfortable with these changes, but not sure how else the old-old school Newgrounders will feel... and, like someone else said, it'll be a shame to lose the Pico voting box.

At 1/12/15 11:20 AM, TomFulp wrote:

At 1/12/15 11:14 AM, Noodle wrote: Two things I feel like I've felt like NGs is lacking in the review department:

It would be nice for there to be a little more back-and-froth. I like to reply to reviews when someone has a question or a quality piece of feedback. It would be nice if we had the ability to have a bit of a discussion. There might need to be a limit or 2-3 replies, or else people would spam 100s of responses.

I think the more important feature missing is for co-author responses. In collabs, someone could say "I like ___'s part the best". I remember when I was in some of my first collabs, that meant the world to me but I couldn't reply to thank the person. In other instances (like for games), they may have a question directly for someone with a co-author credit.

The co-author response has always been an intended feature that never arrived. Hoping we will tackle that one this year.

The back-and-forth option would definitely be nice. In retrospect I kinda wish reviews and blogs were built off the same system and both were set up better for back and forth discussion.

As per a previous post of mine, and I realize this is a bit repetitive of me, this is something I'd highly encourage, to make it easier to get more interaction between the creator and reviewers, and, specially, to make it easier for reviewers to know if the creator has read the review or not...

Really like this new idea. It will stop the 0 bombers but one question, how is it going to work the submiting of content? For now I though it was at 200 votes (or something around that) you got your flash approved. Is it going to be a lot lower?
Maybe you could leave the votes as approve or dissaprove for the submitting of flash content and then the score be with only the reviews as you mentioned. (Don't know if this was already said).

Also, Tom if you checked my private message please tell me and sorry for taking your time!

Also, Tom, would this mean that users' experience should be equally changed with the new system to be based on their reviews, and not previous voting experience? To put it simply, it's something you <may> be considering implementing, although I'm not sure what the benefits are (as you've said somewhere else, you want to encourage good reviews, not mindlessly, spamming reviews, i.e., quality over quantity), so I just want to be very clear that it'd be a horrible slap in the face for someone like me, so take care when messing with XP...

On the other hand, I'm fairly sure that I'm a tiny, tiny minority, and if the benefits (such as attracting new users) out way the negative impact it'd have on us old-old school guys (who are, again, a tiny minority anyway), by all means reflect on this possibility...

At 1/12/15 05:59 PM, Vert wrote: That seems a bit of a shame. I know that there's quite a few submissions that currently have highly distorted scores, but it is a lot of accumulated effort that will, inevitably, go to waste; it's an imperfect system, but it does a decent enough job and, like many have said, as the number of reviews is smaller, it'll affect a lot of poorly reviewed movies, although there's solutions to that.

I've been wondering if we should maybe show the OLD score for any pre-existing submission that has less than X of the new votes (which include existing review scores)... So until it reaches that threshold you still see the old score, and maybe a note encouraging users to vote.

Hmm, this is a big change! But a quite reasonable one, I've thought for years that this was almost a necessity (although I suspect that abuse will still happen, just via spam accounts) and it should, theoretically, increase the quality of the votes, overall. Would changing the vote give XP, though? It's something to consider...

I'm thinking no? Just to avoid someone having a routine of toggling their five votes every day instead of voting on new stuff.

Would leaving a review without a score allow you to get XP? That'd be a nice touch, I'd like to do that, sometimes.

Getting XP to review IS getting tempting the more I think about it, since it would STILL be easier to just vote on stuff, so users theoretically wouldn't write junk reviews for XP when voting is quick and easy. Having it only give XP when you don't vote would also improve chances of not having junk reviews.

At 1/12/15 06:04 PM, Vert wrote: Also, Tom, would this mean that users' experience should be equally changed with the new system to be based on their reviews, and not previous voting experience? To put it simply, it's something you <may> be considering implementing, although I'm not sure what the benefits are (as you've said somewhere else, you want to encourage good reviews, not mindlessly, spamming reviews, i.e., quality over quantity), so I just want to be very clear that it'd be a horrible slap in the face for someone like me, so take care when messing with XP...

Existing XP would never get touched and would still be based on all the previous daily voting - we never want to do anything that makes a mess for people who have been voting every day for years now. That's why even the double XP weekend is a bit CRAZY given it is a rare change to the XP gathering routine.

At 1/12/15 09:42 AM, TomFulp wrote:

At 1/12/15 09:35 AM, DjGubkafish wrote: Also are you saying that we can edit our reviews and votes or just votes? I think we should not be able to do that cuz people gona troll

There are cases where developers fix issues with their games and reviewers would like the opportunity to update their review based on that.

This ^ is why I think a 15min window is too small. If a player spots a horrible bug in the game developer's game and scores it low and lets the developer know what is wrong in the review - it really gives the developer no time at all to fix the bug in that 15min window (assuming he isn't doing anything at that moment and is just staring at the monitor waiting for each review to roll in....). Maybe a 24 hour window? 72 hour window?

At 1/12/15 06:07 PM, TomFulp wrote: I've been wondering if we should maybe show the OLD score for any pre-existing submission that has less than X of the new votes (which include existing review scores)... So until it reaches that threshold you still see the old score, and maybe a note encouraging users to vote.

That's not a bad idea, but X would be tricky to deal with, since there's bound to be submission with tens of thousands of votes, and submissions with merely hundreds... maybe make X dynamic, so that the higher the current number of votes, the smaller X is? And if implemented, I'd definitely consider putting it on a timer, so that after a period of time, say a year, it'd expire. Maybe also leave it accessible in a separate part of the site, with just the name and the score?

Getting XP to review IS getting tempting the more I think about it, since it would STILL be easier to just vote on stuff, so users theoretically wouldn't write junk reviews for XP when voting is quick and easy. Having it only give XP when you don't vote would also improve chances of not having junk reviews.

It's not a bad idea, I'd reckon, but I share your concern about the quality of the review, it's hard enough to get good quality reviews as is here (much less in other places), and tinkering with the system further does leave the risk of making things worst...

At 1/12/15 06:10 PM, TomFulp wrote:

At 1/12/15 06:04 PM, Vert wrote: Also, Tom, would this mean that users' experience should be equally changed with the new system to be based on their reviews, and not previous voting experience? To put it simply, it's something you <may> be considering implementing, although I'm not sure what the benefits are (as you've said somewhere else, you want to encourage good reviews, not mindlessly, spamming reviews, i.e., quality over quantity), so I just want to be very clear that it'd be a horrible slap in the face for someone like me, so take care when messing with XP...

Existing XP would never get touched and would still be based on all the previous daily voting - we never want to do anything that makes a mess for people who have been voting every day for years now. That's why even the double XP weekend is a bit CRAZY given it is a rare change to the XP gathering routine.

Thanks, appreciate that you're not even considering it. But I'm not so sure if there wouldn't be some benefits to doing it, even if (being perfectly honest) I can't see any, so if someone can think of a good reason to do so, by all means raise the issue with the rest of us and we can discuss it. I can about my XP, to some extent, but I care about NG more.

And yes, making weekend XP different is a fairly big change and the reason why I'm not very inclined towards it...