Holly E. Ordway

The reviews look much better now with the white space adjusted and the justification removed.

I finally put my finger on something that looked "funny" about the page that lists the review titles. It used to say what the recommendation was, next to the title, and now it doesn't. I actually liked how it was before, because it got me to read more reviews. In addition to the titles that I recognized and definitely read the reviews for, if I saw a title that I'd never heard of, but it said "Recommended" or better, I'd definitely read it.

Now, if I see a title that I don't recognize, it's less likely that I'll click on it. (Obviously, this is based on the fact that I don't generally read through all the reviews.)

So I don't know if taking that out was a user-interface decision or a design decision, but I kinda liked it how it was before

Adam Tyner

The main index page doesn't list the recommendations, but if you search/browse, the recommendations are listed just as they have always been.

There's not enough space on the page to include recommendations in an attractive way, along with the many, many features other people requested. Something had to go, and recommendations were the least essential.

G. Noel Gross

That's one click away ... (Browse all 2,XXX reviews)

http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/list....Type=DVD+Video

Gil Jawetz

I kind of think that the reviewer name is less important than the rating. People may be scanning for movies that got good ratings. I dunno. The way it lays out when:
Title Reviewer Reviewed Recommendation

are all there is really tough. Look at the longer titles and see how it wraps the title so that it is tough to read:

Lord Peter
Wimsey - The
Nine Tailors


Best of The
Chris Rock
Show: Vol. 2


Maybe it can just list title and rating so that it fits better?

Still, the section is great.

Oh, one more question: is the hit count retroactive or does it only have hit counts from the other day? I'd love to see how many people read some of the old stuff... But of course, I'm just a dork.

G. Noel Gross

What if instead of listed who wrote the review on the main page, we put the recommendation ... Carnosaur 3: Primal Species (Rent It) instead of Carnosaur 3: Primal Species (G. Noel Gross). Oops, buskerdog beat me to that (great minds?) Or, what if Geoff reworked the vertical columns like so ...

http://dvdtalk.com/cineschlock/revise.jpg

Gil Jawetz

Oh yeah, and can there be a space to type in the releasing company if it is "other"?

And "My Man Godfrery" is misspelled.

Also, should the " Latest Audio Reviews" heading say "Latest DVD Audio Reviews" or are CD reviews going in there too?

As for great minds thinking alike, great minds are apparently totally preoccupied with very small things right now!

Adam Tyner

I put the reviewer name because it's likely there'll be cases down the road when one movie reviewed twice on the first page. That'd be awkward.

Anything involving PHP/MySQL related to reviews is my territory. I'll play around with that later today. It's a little too "list-like", and Geoff and I agreed that we wanted to get away from that as much as possible. Not that the current version is much better, but...again, I'm a programmer, not a graphic designer.

No, e-mail me or Geoff and one of us will add it.

There are already DTS reviews in there, so "DVD Audio Reviews" would be inaccurate. I have the software configured so that audio reviews of many types can be included.

When you see an error like that, e-mail the author of the review or me/Geoff. Out of courtesy, it'd probably be polite to contact the reviewer first.

Gil Jawetz

Gotcha.

G. Noel Gross

I think those cases would be rare enough to chance it. The value of knowing how the disc's rated is just more important (to me) than who wrote it.

Well, we can improve the cosmetics, but I like that more info is out there, without having to click through to another page to get ratings. What we have now suffers that same "third vertical column" problem I had with the review display pages.

Adam Tyner

I e-mailed Geoff and asked for his opinions on this.

Personally, I would prefer to associate reviews with a reviewer, not a rating. I'd also really like to avoid the "list of lists" look on the index page, but I'm not at all attached to the current look and certainly welcome suggestions. Integrating the two sidebars is an idea worth considering, but I'd really like to find a more attractive and inviting way of presenting titles, reviewers, and recommendations.

G. Noel Gross

I'm certain we can improve on the look of it and also regain the trucated info. It's never going to be sexy, but I'm not sure that's really the point.

Don't think I didn't notice that now when a DVD image shows up along the top ... it's clipped from the text list. Now, that's danged specific. Heh.

Adam Tyner

Oh, definitely -- I just want to go ahead and get it the best way possible now so I can move onto other projects.

Yup! Another new feature I didn't mention -- if you click on a reviewer's bio and then click on 'e-mail', there's an e-mail form that automatically fills in the name of the title being reviewed. Also, the random images are specific to the area being visited. If you're browsing/searching audio reviews, you only see random audio reviews up top. There's also Javascript *********** stuff for everything I added

Gil Jawetz

Here's some more suggestions although I'd imagine that they'd be a huge pain in the ass and not a priority at all. At the end of the reviews there could be a little "rate this DVD" and/or "rate this review" like at Amazon. The former would just be interesting, the latte would be useful for reviewers in knowing how people are reacting to reviews. (I get some emails responding but not a whole lot).

Just some thoughts.

Adam Tyner

I wouldn't do a user rating thing unless I could tie it in with the DVD Talk user database. I'm not sure if this is still the case, but Geoff said earlier that he wanted to keep the review server independent of anything related to the forum.

Holly E. Ordway

I definitely agree that the reviewer's name should stay in the listing. It doesn't take long to get a feeling for which reviewers have similar tastes to yours, and then it's very helpful to scan the list and see which ones that person has reviewed.

Would it look awful to have the listing look something like this:

DVD Movie Title Here -- Recommendation. (Reviewer Name)

with the reviewer name in small print like it is on the new page? I think that it would look nicer than the original version (more streamlined) but would add an extra piece of useful information.

You could then make the listing on the "browse" page look like that, too. I personally don't think that the date of the review is a particularly valuable piece of information. Maybe it's worth having in review itself, but not as part of the listing.

As for the sidebars: I think it would look great to have the "Popular DVDs etc" sidebar moved directly below the "Hot DVD/ Columns etc" sidebar, so that it's one piece all the way on the right. I think it would look more integrated and would also provide a bit more breathing room for the review listings.

buckee1

The new review server is very nice indeed!

Liquid Death

Unless I'm missing something, when you go to edit a review, you still can't pull up a list by date, its just by title.

Adam Tyner

I'll add that in eventually, Earl, but that particular functionality is not a priority. I've already put too many projects on the backburner to write this new version of the review software, but I'll get around to everyone's requests eventually.

Liquid Death

Sounds good

Adam Tyner

I added that feature earlier today. I'm sending it with a ton of other changes to Geoff either tonight or tomorrow.

BTW, looking for opinions on something -- I integrated popular reviews, the browse links, and the search links into the main right sidebar for the index page. Should I also have browse/search links in that right sidebar when reading reviews as well?

G. Noel Gross

Seems like a good idea. It'd save hitting the back button to find another disc.

Adam Tyner

Okay, there's now navigation in the sidebar when reading reviews, bios, etc. I have the 'sort by date' option now when editing reviews, and you can now see how many views each of your reviews has gotten. Incredibly, 98.83% -- all but 30 or so -- reviews in the database have been read at least once since the new software went up. I also made a ton of other changes here and there, including a pagination error that took me 5 months to notice.

As far as integrating the two sidebars, it looked okay on my development box, but when it was put up live here, the rightmost sidebar was <i>monstrous</i> and extended far beyond the list of reviews, as seen <a href="http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/index2.php">here</a>. I tried bumping up the number of reviews to compensate, but that looked pretty awful too. Geoff and I prettied up the third sidebar, and this current layout will be it for the time being. If any of you feel like redesigning it and come up with something everyone likes, I'll sit down and work on integrating it into the system. Until then...

G. Noel Gross

Moving the "Special Offer" ad to the left-hand rail would fix it.

GeoffK

The problem with that is it puts that ad down too far on the left side, when we do get ad campaigns for that spot, typically they need to at least start 'above the fold'

G. Noel Gross

Hmmm. What if you put SPECIAL OFFER between SHOP and DVD REVIEWS on the left. That'd be the same vertical position.