In the past I have read and participated in discussions on the forums about how to lessen spamming in the game comments. Suddenly, something occurred to me when I read a very well-structured review from one of our fellow-users (I have not remembered his name, unfortunately). As I could not find a thread about this on the suggestions forum, I am making a new one for it now. (Please feel free to delete it if another thread exists with the same idea...)
What if the comments box would be turned into a comments FORM that forces each user to fill out several boxes before being able to submit? My suggestion would be:
GRAPHICS ...
SOUND AND MUSIC ...
GAMEPLAY/BUGS ...
OTHER ...
A user would be forced to fill out a bit of their opinion about each of these aspects, with room for traditional comments like "I will burn down your house for posting this game" and "OK" in the box titled "OTHER".
The worst that could happen would be for a spammer to write: "OK" everywhere, but how many people will do this if the game obviously looks or sounds lousy? They are more likely to think at least a little about what they write down.
An additional benefit would be for the game's submitter to see what aspects of the game are liked and disliked. If he/she consistently sees low ratings but positive comments on graphics, they know that these are not at fault. If the sound scores badly and the gameplay average, there may be a quick solution to prevent future disappointments by adding more or better quality audio.
I personally feel a split comment form would increase the threshold for spammers a bit, improve the usefulness of comments in general a bit and offer a nice guide for those who want to write a structured review but do not know where to start.
Perhaps someone else can think of some cons of this system or a better way to implement it?
The thing is, people could still spam with that system. For example, they could put 'a' in every box. I think if they put a minimum amount of characters, that would stop them a LITTLE bit.
Requiring one to follow a review system isn't fair to all those people who don't do that, including moderators. A minimum character limit would be the best way to deter lazy people. There used to be an argument about comments and spam and stuff. I'm still with making reviews and regular comments separate in some form.
I see where you're going. You also want to implement statistics tracking through the website's API. Well, with AG 3.0 coming up we'll have to see what happens.
It doesn't matter. Some games aren't going for graphics. Some games are going for their music. Some games aren't even for the gameplay, but more of a message. It's not about parts of the game, it's about the game as a whole. You don't need a form to show you how to comment.
This would ruin the whole merit system, because it would simplify the whole writing system and make it too much easier for people with no writing skills at all to get merits.
It wouldn't really decrease the amount of spam, either. It would just give the illusion that it would because comments would appear to be longer, when really they just take up more space with the default text.
A character limit would also not be as useful, because people would just type random things on the keyboard, like dlkfhgdfdjfghdlfk and still get points for posting the comment just as long as it followed the character limit.
Not really. It would deter people who just write "good game". You can always bypass such anti-spam measures. The only thing that will definitely kill spam is more moderation.
Maybe if we could rate comments, like on YouTube. And, we could mark them as spam, and that hides the comments. I think that would be cool. And yeah, a character limit would be good as well.
This wouldn't add anything to fighting off the spammers at all... like others stated, this would only require putting in a single letter or number in each box in order to spam the form!
And when you add a character minimum to the form, this can be easily cheated upon by 'writing' rubbish in every box... you could simply do this by quickly hitting several characters on your keyboard, for example: "uiwagrcvnkwu" I did this rubbish-writing action in only one second... and with using the Tab to cycle through the boxes, it would mean several extra seconds a spammer would need to spam the form completely...
Additional problem arising with this form would be cutting off every means given to the review-writers to write his/her own personal and original review of the game... like it is stated in the merit guide, it's not set on how your review should be written, but it should be original and thourough and that's just one basic rule that would evaporate immediatley when this form was to be implemented by AG...
So my opinion in this is: nice suggestion, but not needed and/or doable, sorry...
Maybe if we could rate comments, like on YouTube. And, we could mark them as spam, and that hides the comments. I think that would be cool. And yeah, a character limit would be good as well.
We used to be able to vote up comments so they could be more recognizable as good ones, and we can still flag them. Yet, mods have to actually see the comment to see if something had been voted up, or if something has been flagged.
Additional problem arising with this form would be cutting off every means given to the review-writers to write his/her own personal and original review of the game... like it is stated in the merit guide, it's not set on how your review should be written, but it should be original and thourough and that's just one basic rule that would evaporate immediatley when this form was to be implemented by AG...
My point earlier. Not everyone uses a structured system or review with categories for every aspect of gameplay.
Not everyone uses a structured system or review with categories for every aspect of gameplay.
Exactly, there are some games I made a review on without using the summary of the points stated by Co1980 like graphics, sound and music, gameplay/bugs, other, etc...
They actually deviated from this point-summary completely!
And this would be killed instantly when such a form would be made to review the games...
No, it would never even see the light of day. A few mods don't use structured systems, so that must be a sure indicator that being forced to use them would never happen.
I think you're right on the fact that this will never be implemented because mods use different structures to decide what's merit worthy and what's not... it also presents a good situation, because now there are several different views by several different people (read: mods) on the game reviews the users make! This way it is not restricted for them to use a simple 'moderator-merit-guide' to review the reviews, but they can actually decide on their own about it, well... at least I think they can...
