Community Content Rating and Filter System Improvement

[Ephelemi]

A lot of you might be aware that most ships and other stuff submitted to the community content section quickly fade into obscurity. This is because mostly only gigantic ships or stuff from well known contributors attract enough attention to gather enough ratings and downloads to stay relevant. There must be a huge number of well built ships that may not even have 50 downloads and probably no ratings at all. To make ratings less rare overall I propose to change the system so that writing a review is not necessary anymore and anything can be rated instantly upon opening the page of that particular ressource. Of course I am aware that you cant actually have a fully legitimate opinion on anything you havent actually taken a closer look at, but I think it would still be better than no ratings at all in an overwhelminly large part of all community ressources.
Another thing that would have to be changed (or added) is the way the sorting filter works. The reason for this is that when you sort by rating, it actually appears to be sorted largely by number of ratings, thereby again promoting the already heavy hitters. What we need is the ability to sort it by purely average rating, maybe with a small, adjustable threshhold for stuff that hasnt garnered more than a couple of ratings.

This is where the probably relatively easy to implement part ends, my next suggestion is an additional filter that lets you sort ships by size. This would probably require a change to the .sment datatype itself, for the server to read out the ships length and mass.

 

[NeonSturm]

I completely agree about the obscurity-issue,
however I would still like to keep the possibility of distinctive ratings (maybe aside the preview-rating).


I think every content which took a few hours from the creator should have at least 3 reviewers, better 5 to initialize the rating.
Additionally, we need to be more demanding on description-quality like using of tags "warhammer, star-trek, original" which are grouped and provided as option-survey.
If the author doesn't care about this feature, but the content gets top-rated, the community could provide it along with the preview-rating.


For featuring, I suggest following:

1. Newest
2. Least rated at all
3. Least reviewed (with quality rating)
   
4. Top rated
5. Subscribed by player

For sorting, I suggest that you can both include and exclude tags and that you are provided with adjacent-tags near your included/excluded or near the tags of your search results.

Info for the devs / implementation:

With near, I mean that the tags have connections (4546.movie=6135.startrek, 6843.starwars)(8615.group=4546.movie, 3612.game)
The numbers are hidden and meant for the data-base interface as entry-position aka index.
To reduce database load, arbitrary entries may be served as chunks, depending on how often they are requested together.
An efficient implementation computes heavy-loaded entries with first and recent timestamp plus a request counter for total, recent and previously-recent accesses. These heavy-loaded entries are then becoming partners of entry-chunks for benchmarking purposes (grabbing new-lonely entries and ditching least-used ones from chunks).
​

It would also be nice to have grouping.

Someone could make a Warhammer-group and you can sort your blueprint into Tau, Eldar, Necron, Imperium, Chaos, Orks, …
And another group could handle units by their name in the original game.

Another one makes a StarTrek-group and has Klingons, Humans, Vulcans … and sort ships by appearance (Enterprise12346, Voyager, …)

 

[Brokengauge]

I definitely think a size filter would be helpful.

The main reason I download other ppl's stuff is to compare against my own. Obviously it's a bummer when I download a "frigate" and its 5x's the size of my own lol.