A lot of very short reviews appearing on Website

[ipmarks]

The website seems to be going back to it's neglected state, after a couple of months of it looking like it was on the up again.

Lots and lots of very short one paragraphs reviews seems to have been accepted. This now means that they will stay and anyone writing a better review of the same game will have it removed as a duplicate. It can't be that hard to not allow a game review up if it is ridiculously short, just don't put it on the web. It makes me believe that nobody actually reads the reviews, just presses the accept button.

If you are going to allow any old review on there then it debases the worth of the website itself.
Some of the recent reviews sound like they've just been copied off the blurb on the box!

[ipmarks]

A whole slew of reviews appeared tonight... one of them Super Sprint has definitely been reviewed before, because I reviewed it.
Also it uses exactly the same picture that I used.

Is anyone actually checking these reviews? Does anyone care?

[Team Alfie]

Pixeljunkie has managed to post 37 reviews in the space of a day, which is both an epic achievement and a tragic case of not reading the rules about duplicates. It's a good job that some of them are short!

[takesages]

You are not alone, ipmarks.

I did a few reviews when I joined but I haven't done any since. It takes quite a bit of time to write up something worth reading and it's annoying when you find a game you love, go to review it and someone has already uploaded a few sentences saying "THIS IS AN RPG!!"

Overall everything from the design of the site to the dodgy submissions and lack of care taken to moderate made me think: why bother? It's a shame it isn't being run properly becuase it could be a really great resource and there are some people on there that have done some really great reviews! If whoever runs the site can't keep up, why not hand it over to the community to moderate?

[ipmarks]

I agree completely, it could be such a good resource, but it's being run poorly.
If it was being moderated properly then nearly all of yesterday's submissions would of been rejected, both in terms of quality, duplication or both. Accepting 37 reviews in one day by one member, without checking or reading them is beyond ridiculous in my opinion.

Handing it over to the community would be a great idea, when this discussion came up before, there were lots of people willing to help in it's upkeep.

If you don't believe me look at the new reviews for Aqua Jack or Alien Syndrome, and ask yourself... is this a site being moderated properly?

[Darran@Retro Gamer]

The only people who work on the website are myself and stuart. The magazine is my biggest priority. I'll look into the duplicates hopefully over the weekend and will see if theres any way that a minimum number of characters can be entered. If not we'll amend the actual rules.

Also I don't read every single post on the forum, or even visit certain sections of the forum, so if you do have an issue about anything you'll always get a better response by actually emailing me at darran.jones@imagine-publishing.co.uk

[takesages]

We're apaprantly also accepting ripped wikipedia entries as well.

I don't get why there's a moderation system at all if there's nobody even casually scanning the reviews - finding duplicates sounds time consuming but when a review is added with wikipedia footnotes still included? Really?

[ipmarks]

It seems to be getting worse.....

Now we have as takesages says reviews that are not even written by the reviewer!
For goodness sake, Pac Man, Pong, Mario Kart... these are quite obvious duplicates.

I think it may be time to put the website on hold if there cannot be better checking than this as 20 odd short crap reviews a day spoils it for the good ones.
SeaDog74 and Gavin Eke both wrote excellent reviews on the site the other day, but these were lost in a sea of one paragraph garbage, often duplicate reviews.

[Megamixer]

These have been deleted now if I'm not mistaken.

I've added three recently but I'm running low on games to review, even resorting to playing some utter garbage (Dukes of Hazzard) just to have something to write-up .

[Steve Halfpenny Ver 2.0]

This saddens me.

I've just finally signed up and worked on writing reviews for a couple of obscurities I vaguely recalled, just because I thought that this would be more interesting than doing the obvious choices (Rescue for the Speccy and Microleague Wrestling for the C64 respectively). I did some research on the net, played the games again via emulation and got to reminisce over hazy days I had previously long forgotten. It was all a very enjoyable experience and was pleased that my work had been accepted. Then I started to discover stuff like below and felt a little sick.

http://www.retrogamer.net/show_image.php?imageID=3369

Darran and Stuart may well be the only people manning the site but can't we have a reader or two acting as moderators or something perhaps?

Regardless, this shall not hinder any further write ups I decide to do...

[ipmarks]

This saddens me.

I've just finally signed up and worked on writing reviews for a couple of obscurities I vaguely recalled, just because I thought that this would be more interesting than doing the obvious choices (Rescue for the Speccy and Microleague Wrestling for the C64 respectively). I did some research on the net, played the games again via emulation and got to reminisce over hazy days I had previously long forgotten. It was all a very enjoyable experience and was pleased that my work had been accepted. Then I started to discover stuff like below and felt a little sick.

http://www.retrogamer.net/show_image.php?imageID=3369

Darran and Stuart may well be the only people manning the site but can't we have a reader or two acting as moderators or something perhaps?

Regardless, this shall not hinder any further write ups I decide to do...

I cannot tell you how much I agree with this post.
Your Rescue review is fantastic, well researched and an excellent read. The sort of review that reminds me or educates me about old games.Also Stranger81 and Lexiomiguel have posted excellent reviews in the last week, all about how the website should be done.

MisterBiglee's reviews seem to consist of one sentence, and a poorly written/punctuated one at that.
You learn nothing about the game, I did leave a comment about the review on the Sunset Riders review but it got deleted.

To Darran's credit, I emailed him the other week and he removed the duplicates and the blatant Wikipedia rip-offs, but then these appeared. How can they have been approved for the site.... how? They are just sentences!

Oh well, I'm not adding any more reviews at the moment, as they just get lost in a sea of poor, non researched, box blurb copying crap.

[clarance]

Maybe we should all post a polite comment pointing out where they are going wrong - perhaps these 'short reviewers' don't realize they are doing anything wrong in particular. After all they aren't breaking any rules in general, just going against the 'spirit' of the whole exercise maybe?

[SirClive]

Darran and Stuart may well be the only people manning the site but can't we have a reader or two acting as moderators or something perhaps?

Yeah, they wen't that route with Mods on the forum so I am sure it would work with a couple of you guys supporting the web-reviews too.

[ipmarks]

I left a comment on Sunset Riders, saying it was only a sentence and needed padding out with opinion and detail.
I was polite and to the point.... but it got deleted, presumably by the reviewer, as they have a delete option.

I can see that some of them perhaps don't realize their reviews are a bit short.... but one sentence...

If they ever go down the reader mod option, I'd be interested....

[Darran@Retro Gamer]

Well I've just deleted around 25 profiles due to them being ridiculously short, or coming from Wikipedia.

Incidentally if people want to repost reviews they've written elsewhere then that's fine, but cutting and pasting from other sites just isn't on.

I can't contact the people in question until I'm back at work, but I'll look into it when I get back.
Right, I'm off to bed.