G. Noel Gross

That's all I really wanted. My intent wasn't to slam Aaron, only to illustrate my frustration ... it's only natural, given the personal time we each invest, to want our reviews to be read. That means spending more than 48 hours on the main review page before slipping into database obscurity -- only to be unearthed by search engine. I have the least reason to squeek than anyone, I suppose, but I'm not ashamed to do so anyway.

Videohound is an excellent outfit. I hope that works out!

Geoff and Aaron rule. I'm in awe of you both.

Gil Jawetz

What's this about Video Hound? Give us the scoop!

GeoffK

After I iron out the details I'll give you all the scoop about Videohound.

- G

Gil Jawetz

New question: The dvd covers at the top of the review page seem to exclusively show Anna Kournikova, Citizen Kane, Godfather, The Simpsons, and Star Wars I now. Didn't they used to pull from a much wider variety of recent reviews?

And how does the New Review linnk on the top of the forum pages work?

Adam Tyner

There's a hidden flag Geoff sets when approving reviews that can mark certain titles as 'featured reviews'. The review loader gets all featured DVD video reviews from the past 30 days and checks to see if that number is less than a certain specified number (4, as things are set now). If the number of featured reviews is three or less, the script randomly selects four titles from the past 30 days and displays those. However, right now, it seems as if exactly four reviews are marked as featured, so the same titles are being displayed.

There are several ways to handle this. I can:
<ol><li>wait until October 11th, after which point, if no additional reviews are marked as featured, things will return to normal<li>I can increase the number of featured reviews to look for before moving onto all recent reviews<li>I can unmark those current reviews<li>I can remove that code outright</ol>Let me know what I should do and I'll do it...

Gil Jawetz

Assuming you're asking the general public, I wouldn't tell you what to do (it's not my site). I only was wondering because I remember seeing all sorts of random reviews advertised up there and i think it helped bring people to weird movies that they wouldn't have found out about, even reviews that were off the front page at that point. But whatever way Geoff thinks is most effective is the way he should go about doing things. I'm all for diversity.

Adam Tyner

I went ahead and unmarked those four reviews. I'll remove that code next time I send Geoff an update.

Gil Jawetz

Ah, that's cool. Now it's pulling a nice mix.

You know, I was wondering if it might be interesting to have one of the images be something like "Classic Review" or something that specifically pulls from older reviews, just to keep them in circulation. I think people do find out about a lot of movies they wouldn't normally know about through these reviews. I dunno.

Another idea I had that no one responded to was adding a Review Search feature to the Price Search box in the forum pages.

GeoffK

I played around with adding a review search box near the price search box, but I couldn't work it where I liked they way it looked. What I DID do was add a link to the DVD Review DB from the pull down menu and we rotate covers for reviews at the top...

Gil Jawetz

You wouldn't want to do something like this?



The "go" button frees up some space and having the button say search is a little redundant.

GeoffK

That would shfit the main part of the forum down another row, and I've gone to some legnths to keep the forum up to where it is. Also the double search box looks really cluttery in that spot.

Thanks for the idea, I'm open to ideas just trying to find the best fit.