Review Template

I say people who decide to do reviews alot make their own templates and stick to their own formats. That will keep things fresh. However there should be a Zelaron standard for Title/System/Author/Publisher.

Maybe the template idea could be for those of us who lack the ability of creating a world class review. I for one don't exactly have the best reviews. The kind of person like me would benefit the most from a template opposed to someone who knows exactly what they are doing.

Should we require them to discuss certain points of the piece of media, or literature they are reviewing?

How far should we require a person to be into the form of media before they can give a valid review? Some people like me have a bad habbit of playing for 10 minutes then assuming the rest. Infinite Undiscovery actually turned out pretty cool, where as my first impression was don't buy it. Should you be require to have completed the item before reviewing? Or perhaps giving an amount of time you have spent with it?

Regarding the rating system, I suggest that we let all members decide the score of the product using the thread rating feature. "Rate Thread" is disabled in quite a few forums, but when available, it shows up next to "Search This Thread" below the PM notification box. Because no-one really uses it, I think we could rename the feature to "Rate This Game/Movie/Book (and possibly album?)" and only allow it to be used in the review forums. We can probably ensure that the rating feature will show up outside one of the menus, too.

As for templates, I think this is a good example of a review: http://zelaron.com/forum/showthread.php?t=35998

However, only the first 700 characters of a review will show up on the portal; reading the rest of it requires you to click a "Read More" link. Therefore, the bolded Title, Developer, Platform and Genre information in the beginning of the reviews should not be used. Besides, there's a prefix system in place that will let you choose the platform, and the title of the product will be the topic of the thread. The information about developer/genre can probably be baked into the review itself.