New Review Server!
 

It's up!

http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/

We're still doing some last min tuning, but... LET US KNOW what you think!

I like it. The separation of the reviews into DVDs, theatrical, and audio; addition of MSRP; and advanced search capability are all great additions to an already great review set-up.

My only suggestion was going to be a quick search on the Reviews home page, but then before I posted that, I saw that at the top of the page. Don't know how I missed that. -smile-

Nice job, ctyner. :thumbsup:

I played around with the new review database, and here's a few things I noticed:

You can't sort your reviews by date anymore (to edit stuff, its qutie helpful instead of looking at them in alphabetical order).

There's no longer an option to put how much we think the disc is worth (which was very hard and pretty subjective, imo, so thats ok its gone now ;)

Whenever you edit an older review, it seems you HAVE to add MSRP and the Rating, you just can't fix a grammer mistake and skip over those.

Overall, I really like the new look :)

Also, Geoff, please email me about the Sword DVD and the Bruce Lee Set when you get a minute/some information :)

Thanks :)
Earl

I forgot that I was doing that before. :) I can add that back in.

Yeah, Geoff wanted it dropped, and I was never very fond of it anyway.

Yeah, that was intentional. I'm a bastard. I would really like reviewers to go back and fill in those new fields.

Thanks! I'm a programmer, not a graphic designer, so if anyone has any suggestions for graphical tweaks, I welcome them.

BTW, all the audio reviews and theatrical reviews should be in their proper places now, and that extremely long gray sidebar on the index page will get shorter very soon. :)

Scott: Thanks for the kind words, particularly about the advanced search. When all the reviewers update their older reviews to include that new information, the advanced search will be awesome. I don't know of any DVD review site with a search nearly that comprehensive.

I like it a lot too! It's slick looking. I haven't had a chance to fully check it out and will post any comments I have when I do, but it looks good. Nice work!

Looks superb!

I especially like the addition of the "most popular reviews".

How often is that list going to update?

Another fantastic job, Adam! Above all else, I love that the DVD, DVD-Audio and Theatrical reviews are categorized. Thank heaven for small miracles. I'd swap positions on Theatrical and DVD-Audio ... but that's just me.

One thing I'm not crazy about though is the addition of yet another vertical column to the DVDTalk layout. One on either side already makes the well in the middle constrictive ... what if we inset the DVD ratings and info into the review like so? ...

http://dvdtalk.com/cineschlock/revision.html

It better economizes the space, and also gets rid of that dashed line which doesn't appear anywhere else in DVDTalk's design. I also changed the "; posted on" to a vertical bar since you do use those elsewhere.

I vote against justified type. Without hyphenation you're going to get some wacky spacing, and it's another style addition not used anywhere else on the site.

Other than a couple technical things that I spotted and Adam has already addressed ... I'm completely in awe of the achievement. Well done!

Oh, and I agree the little list of "popular" reviews is a nifty addition!!!

It's easy to switch, if there's a demand for it.

Looks nice. I'll mess around with adding that in tonight. Is there a way that the inset ratings could be more clearly separated? Maybe it could be a different color or something so it'll stand out a bit.

One of those strange habits left over from my newspaper days... I can take it out, if you'd like.

Anyone have any suggestions? I feel like there's enough seperation (you won't read one thing into another), but I'd agree it'd be nice if the ratings were emphasized more. Additional space to the left? Or put the whole thing in a light tint block like this? (use your imagination as the white portions would be tinted) ...

http://dvdtalk.com/cineschlock/revision2.html

Believe me, having been in newspapers the past 10 years, I understand. But forced justification doesn't translate well online (yet.)

The lightly tinted block was what I had in mind.

You know, in a couple of months, I'll have been designing web pages for 6 years, and I never knew you could align a table right like that.

Yes, thank you. I'd sort of gotten a system going with that after a while, but it was never exactly easy.

Sorry, I missed this post earlier. It's dynamic, based on the most frequently read reviews from the past 30 days.

Tonight I'll try to put together a way for users to see how many views their reviews have each gotten.

I always did mine based on the overall rating ... sometimes more, sometimes less in rare cases ...

Collector: $17.99-$30
Highly: 17.99 (14.99 for low MSRP)
Rec: 14.99 (11.99 for low MSRP)
Rent: 5.00
Skip: Don't give 'em

Ooooo. That'd be neat. New frontiers in narcism!

I went ahead and filled in those white spots. See what y'all think.

http://dvdtalk.com/cineschlock/revision2.html

I definitely don't like the justified type. It doesn't add anything and it creates some very weird spacing at times.

I personally would prefer to have the image and the ratings still at the top of the review, not to the side in a new column.

With the new setup, it creates an entire column of white space on the right, with only a tad bit of content at the top, so that the review itself is squeezed into the middle column next to a column of blank white. Kind of weird looking, and it forces you to scroll more; I like to get a reasonable amount of content on each screen.

Separating the reviews into DVD, Theatrical, and Audio is a good idea. I also like the "search for all of (reviewer's) reviews" option. That will be useful. The new font/color scheme for the rating stars looks nice, also.

I'll take it out tonight.

There's too much dead white space leaving it at the top as it was.

The review server is giving me problems. It won't allow me to request new screeners. I emailed my requests to Geoff directly.

What error message, if any, did it give?

Nevermind, I logged in under your account. There are a couple of things that work fine on my dev box that hiccup on Geoff's server. I'm trying to figure out what's going on now.

Cool. Should I email you my requests or is Geoff handling it? What is the system, exactly?

Geoff has already marked those screeners in the database for you. Any errors you run across would be best sent to me, but for something like this screener issue, e-mailing both of us would be your best bet because we can mark those titles manually. I can tell something's screwy is going with the request screeners script on Geoff's server. I'm not having these problems on my server, but I'm noticing several quirks I shouldn't be seeing. I probably have some tiny error that's causing the problem, but I haven't been able to track it down. I asked Geoff to set me up with phpMyAdmin access, and once that's done, I can more easily see what's going on...

BTW, I just sent Geoff a new version of the 'read' page, incorporating all of Noel's suggestions.

You guys kick butt.

I'm happy to say that after several hours of non-stop tinkering, I've finally fixed the problem with the screeners.

I apologize for any inconvenience, and I hope the dark days of the new software are now over. :D

I'll definitely have to get the counter stuff up ASAP. I had no idea so many people read DVD Talk reviews. Since this went up around 1 AM EST Monday morning, "Enemy At The Gates" has gotten 708 page views...even an older title like "Armageddon" is up to 409.

-Adam, who barely scraped into the top 75 with just one review. Woo-hoo!

There's no accounting for taste.

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 ;)

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.

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

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

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.

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

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!

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.

Gotcha.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.