Castle Paradox

[Baconlabs]

I submitted a review for Okédoké! pretty soon after it was released on CP.
That's about two weeks.
It still hasn't been looked over.

Then I look at the game entry over at Slime Salad and immediately saw a review by Pepsi Ranger.

Is this sort of waiting time normal for CP? If so, it's no wonder reviewing seems to be such a hassle.

[Moogle1]

Unfortunately, yes. Your best bet is to alert one of the mods to the review, but I frankly can't remember who approves them anymore.
_________________

Slime Salad :: Independent Game Design

[Spoon Weaver]

I don't even understand the need for the approval process. I think they should just be posted and mods should be able to remove them if they are deemed unworthy.

On this same note, whats up with people review their own game? That's really dumb. Why were those given the OK.

[Inferior Minion]

Sorry for the delay. We haven't had new reviews in months and I've gotten into the habit of not checking the submitted reviews section every day.

The review approval process was put in place to ensure a certain level of quality in the reviews displayed on the site. I also never implemented review editing functionality for users once a review was accepted. Reviews were originally managed by Chaos Nyte, then Squall and Uncommon were also given Review Management permissions. Many of the rejections are for incomplete reviews, one-line (sometimes one word) sections, missing screenshots, and incoherent reviews. Although it does add extra overhead, I do like the idea of a moderated review system. At the very least, it ensures at least one moderator has read every review available on the site.

I also want to state that we do not reject or restrict the reviews based on the opinions or ratings given by the author. We will reject when we think there is a discrepancy, though: "You said the graphics made your eyes bleed then gave graphics a 10 out of 10?"

With regard to reviewing your own game, I feel hearing the author's opinion of their own work is extremely valuable. The author's perspective is welcome, but does not have any impact on the average score when searching for highest rated games or looking at the average grade within the gamelist.

I do agree that the current system is very clunky, though, and even something as small as e-mailed notification of submissions, rejection, or acceptance would go a long way. With the start of HamsterSpeak, review submissions significantly dropped, and with Slime Salad's much more free-form reviewing mechanism (it's just a forum thread with the ability to attach as many screenshots as you'd like) review submissions have basically stopped. I've been checking the submissions page once a month, whenever I remember, and am always greeted with an empty list.

Reviews is one section of the site that really needs to be completely rethought and redesigned. It's one section of the new site I haven't even begun to plan out yet. I have quite a few ideas I'd like to try out, but far less time to actually sit down and implement them. Given the other wonderful sources of reviews, I'm pretty sure we'll be releasing the CP rewrite without reviewing functionality initially. I'd really like to get the new site released, rather than delaying yet another year for feature completeness. It was so much easier to find time to work on CP when I was still in college and didn't have a full time job.

It's coming and there are plenty of improvements, I swear.

~IM
_________________