Tinkering, errors inbound

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## Tinkering, errors inbound

Because I just switched the site over to PHP 5.3 (from 5.2) there might be errors around. So far I noticed the engines/tools/wads listings did spit out many deprecation warnings, I hid those… If you encounter any errors, please report them.

Why, you ask? I am working on a database driven version of the reviews. Finally… There will be tagging, rudimentary user ratings and the possibility of a proper search function. Any other things I should consider? I want to refrain from adding user accounts. It would be great for some features but too much work.

edit: I want to reduce the rating scale from 1-5 to 3 values. Something along the lines of “Should you play it?” -> “Yes”, “Probably”, “Probably not”. Needs better words of course. Any objections?

edit2: Right, all the description pages are broken because of the stupid comment script. Change the .html in the url to .xml and all should be fine for the time being.

04.03.2010 in quaddicted.com | 6 Comments »

### 6 Responses to “Tinkering, errors inbound”

1. negke Says:
   04.03.2010 20:02

   Good. Average. Bad.

2. metlslime Says:
   04.03.2010 23:37

   i realize this is kind of a huge task, but in an ideal world there would be user accounts, mainly so that each user could rate each map (1-5 stars) and then you could display the average user rating for each map. That might result in better ratings than one person’s opinion at one moment in time.

   But yeah, “good, average, bad” is fine :)

3. negke Says:
   05.03.2010 09:32

   There don’t need to be accounts for that. The Doomworld map archive works fine as it is – people can rate and comment on maps with only a captcha. Of course there’s abuse from time to time, but it seems to keep the spam bots out successfully.
   The problem for Quaddicted is that user ratings only really work when there are enough votes for each map, and in the case of this site and game I doubt most maps would be voted on. And hardly anyone used the comment function so far (it would be good if the map listing indicated if and how many user comments each map has). If the map rating were based solely on user votes, most of the descriptions would have to be reworked to contain more information about the map (that’s why I suggested adding a link to the text file a couple of weeks ago – again, see DW/idgames).

4. Spirit Says:
   05.03.2010 15:57

   I am convinced that user accounts would be a great thing and it does not look all that complicated to me (at least right now). They would open up a whole new world of great features and ideas.

   I have to write my own commenting function anyways and that too would benefit from having an account.

   The comments integration really sucks at the moment. Having the latest comments displayed prominently and show the comment count on the listing would probably increase partitipation a lot.

   I do not to ditch our current ratings. Also a integer 1,2,3 rating would be idiotic (thanks to megaman for hammering that into my brain). I guess keeping the current ratings and add an additional “user rating” would be my plan. User ratings would be made from integer 1,2,3 and then an average (or something better) floating point number would be calculated from that. So 1.0-3.0 or something. This could help polishing the existing editor ratings and maybe one could merge them some day (or apply some black magic).

   Adding textfiles would be hard work. DW/idgames have the huge advantage that they always were the one and only repository. They had rules and those rules were enforced. Quake files are not packaged by standards. There are so many readme.txt etc. I do like the idea and could imagine it being helpful otherwise. Very low priority for me but please keep bugging and thinking about it in the future, maybe there is a good way.

5. metlslime Says:
   09.03.2010 01:15

   With a community this small, non-authenticated user ratings are easily abused by one user who wants to bump up his crappy map.

   While creating multiple user accounts is also a possible method of abuse, it’s at least harder (you could make it a lot harder by using email authentication etc, but may not want to do that because of ease-of-participation concerns). Plus, it’s easier to flag an entire account as “vote spammer” than to identify individual IP addresses in a log file…

   Accounts can be rated by veracity, including how many total votes (more is better), how many votes are outliers (lower percent of total is better.)

   Finally map’s rating display and “top 100″ displays could be weighted similar to how metacritic or imdb do it, where a minimum number of votes is required before the rating is considered decent, and votes are weighted based on the reliability of the account that generated them.

6. metlslime Says:
   09.03.2010 01:18

   regarding text files, you already have a listing of the archive contents, maybe each .txt file could actually be turned into a link? That way you don’t need to worry about filename schemes, as long as the readme is a .txt it will be among the hyperlinked files.

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