So, we removed the vote score and prevented reviews from being viewed for submissions that are still "Under Judgement" the other day. This was primarily to stop users from casting votes on submissions, on the basis of votes that had already been cast on those submissions by other users. Some movies with high filesizes were getting ridiculously low scores, more often than not because the first user who had come along to vote on the movie would see the size and think, "Hey, big filesize, slow download rate. I'll give it a 0."
Lots of users complained about not being able to see the reviews. Main reason: the reviews inform you whether the movie you're voting on might contain malicious scripting, explicit content, or stolen material.
Some of these complaints were/are justified, but voting on a movie based off another users' opinions, whether they be average-vote based or review-based, is not - some people vote unfairly (i.e. without viewing the submission) and some people have been known to LIE in reviews, leading to unduly poor scores!
So, we thought of another way. You will now find a "Blow the Whistle" menu for movies that are still "Under Judgement". If you're logged in and suspect a submission of violating the Portal Guidelines, you can "Blow the whistle" on it. If enough users who have similar opinions to you, the submission you're voting on will temporarily be removed from the Portal Population, whilst it's reviewed by Administrators.
However, please do not "Blow the Whistle" on all of the new submissions you come across. We're logging everything that goes on with this stuff - any users who repeatedly blow the whistle on entries that don't fall into the criteria specified in the reports will be ignored in subsequent checks.
A quick note on how to use this: Click the report that suits which Portal guidelines you think the submission's breaking once. The window that pops up might take some time to load in peak traffic.
A couple of "asides":
1. We know about the movies that are "Under Judgement" not showing up in the listing file for the Portal not showing up. This will be fixed in the next few days.
2. Access to reviews for submissions that are "Under Judgement" will be restricted to the authors of those movies (from the Grounds Gold menu) in the next day or two.
3. I will be making some changes to the database in the next few days and will have to shut down voting for between 5 and 60 minutes. I'll most likely choose a quiet time of the day to do this, server-time wise. This is just a little pre-emptive warning :)
As always, if you have problems, list them in this thread. If you get an error, copy and paste the error - please be as informative as you can be! :)
