Magnus you have truly gone above and beyond this time! Thank you!

Suggestion! when you write the review, you should get to rate it out of 5 stars. That way, it would be possible to have the "average rating" for the game, and post that on the archives. That would be sooo cool...(yes. I did mean to spell "so" with 3 o's. Don't bother correcting me, Mr. Nazi)

Older reviews had a system of rating programs for 10 out of ten on things such as graphics, controls, etc. I wonder if that system will be impemented this time?

Even if it isn't, you can at least give say something like "Out of ten stars, I'd give this program seven" or something similar. (I know, you can't get an average rating-but almost as good)

No, it won't. At least not in the way it used to be. About other ways.. Well....

you know, this system could fix all of the problems that were presented on the "Irked and Chafed" news article discussion about having to wade through all of the terrible programs. If you were to score things on some sort of scale with stars or whatever, then you could start sorting the directories by rating and stuff. It would probably take some time before there are enough reviews to do this, but over time it could prove a good investment as the archives keep growing, and some method of sorting will be needed.

That is an intriguing idea. Kind of like how you can sort a directory by it's date. If it has a rating you can have an option under your account settings to not show files with a rating of less than some number from 1-10.

Wait...you can? I never noticed that :-D

you can sort by name or date. They sort by name by default, but to sort by date click on "date" at the top.

its hard though, because a lot of games may be fun, and go unrated, whereas others will rated a lot, and most bad games will be unrated. There should be an attempt, similar to the screenshotting effort, that calls for ratings on a lot of games, especially those that are good, and then you should be able to sort programs by rating with those that are unrated appearing at the bottom. People should be informed of this and its purpose of making the archives more accessible, and i think a lot of people would be willing to help out with this effort.
You could make it even easier by making the rating system and the reviewing system independent of each other, so that users who dont wish to write a full review but who do wish to convey their approval or disapproval of a program can do so by simply clicking a rating to give it. That will also help keep the reviews less repetitive, and only a small number of full reviews will be needed, as a textual supplement to the general rating scale.

That is a very good idea. The screen shotting was a big success, so I do not doubt that this initiative will accepted warmly.

However, I believe that the rating and the reviewing should be link.

-W-

The main point is to make it easy to sort the archives by rating, so the more ratings we could get, the better we could do that. However, if everyone wrote a review with their rating we would have two consequences:

A: We would get less reviews, because it takes time and effort to write a review, more than just giving a rating.

B: The reviews would get repetitive and thus hard to read through if they are all similar.

Yes, if it is that easy to give something a rating, then there will be people who will give bad ratings for no reason. But i think that this will not matter much in the end, as there will be more good reviews to counter that. And each person can only give one rating or review to each file, and you must be registered to do it.

I can see a reason for having them not linked-someone might not want to put the effort into writing a full review for a program, but want to express their liking (or dislike) for the program.

Yet another way is to organize the subdirectories into sub-sub-directories (like in the basic math progs, for example, put "algebra", "geometry", "trig", "misc", or some other system of organization), because usually, I don't know about other people, but I'm looking for one type of program. Also, that way, all the solvers, for example, would be together, so they could be easily compared to each other.

I have an e-mail in filearchive@ticalc.org from 1997 that suggests tat idea. I keep it on there to constantly remond me that one day we might have to do this. I am fearing that day, will probably need massive help to sort through them all. But...we are nto doing that for a while

This is great...I've always wanted to see if other people like my programs, and to put in a good word for the ones I really like.

Excellent. Do you think we should give the programs ratings, like an X-out-of-10 scale? I noticed some (if not all) of the old reviews had this.

also...

A suggested format for a review *in* now up.

I thank you once again. If it's in an article it definately needs to be fixed. However I couldn't care less in a post :-)

what hapens when someone updates a program?
would all the reviews be deleted?
because it should be rated as an entirely new program

-jordan

Good call, I agree with this! (Or at least give the author an option to keep/discard reviews when updating).

the old reviews should be kept, but should be labeled with "NOTE: The following review(s) pertain to older versions of this program." Besides, if a game gets a bunch of good reviews, and then is updated, it should be at least as good as the old reviews, because generally programs are _improved_ after an update.

True!

Wow, impressive. The actual text written is:

Note! This review was written for a previous version of this file!

That was pretty darn close :-)

are you serious!?!
when i was writing my comment, my original text said "NOTE: The following review(s) were written for a previous version of this file." Which is almost exactly the same. But then i changed it to "pertain", as that is less passive then "was written for". I also thought that to indicate that the review may be a few versions old, i would modify it to accomodate that as well. Also, for the sake of effiecincy, my version lets you write the note and then put ALL of the old reviews underneath, whereas yours neccesitates that the note is applied to each review.

sorry, my original text used the word "program", not "file"

Close enough :-)