Optional filtering of reviews with less than 150 characters

Instead of threadjacking other ongoing discussions, I thought I might offer a suggestion for discussion here.

Most of the reviews, I don't like seeing on the work page are either misplaced tags or short personal notes ("like it", "a must read", "no") that add little value to the general public.

Thus I propose a review filter setting which excludes all but one's own reviews with less than 150 characters of text (two sentences). Links probably have to be handled separately. It should be easy to implement and removes clutter.

Additionally, I propose a filter for reviews written by your connections (friends, interesting libraries, top 50 similar libraries). I am more interested in reading the opinions of people I either self-selected or people with similar interests.

Additionally, I propose a filter for reviews written by your connections (friends, interesting libraries, top 50 similar libraries).

You can get that in Connection News.

>2 christiguc:. I want a connections filter option on the work page, so that I don't have to wade through 50+/100+ reviews. The connections page is timeline-oriented not work-centric.

That would be a good idea. Or, perhaps a "(review)" link after each of our connections in the list on the work page if they had a review?

4> That review link used to exist. I would love to see it come back.

I like both ideas in the original post.

I'm not sold on the less-than-150 char filter (mostly because I think a lot of these could be flagged 'not a review' and removed from everyone's sight, not just one's own), but I really like the second idea.

Couple that with a better mechanism for finding/adding/keeping track of friends and interesting libraries (something which has come up quite a bit in FAQ and RSI), and I might actually start using connections! :)

>7 monarchi: If flagging worked as advertised. It doesn't (all those misplaced tags as reviews never disappear.). Furthermore, flagging means often futile work (how often will I revisit a review page?), most of which becomes unnecessary under my proposal.

If we get to choose to have a review filter, I would rather have one that got rid of the very long ones - say over 200 words. I'm not going to read them anyway, and they are much more trouble to scroll through.

I have a regular review blog and I post LINKS to the appropriate blog entry (ala BTRIPP's review of Kurt Mendelssohn's "The Riddle of the Pyramids" (1139 words)) as my reviews ... most of my reviews are 500-1000 words but the link copy is frequently under 150 characters. It would deeply aggravate me if this sort of a filter was put in place, as I would be forced to "pad" my descriptions with extra text simply to get over the limit.

Hatred is not too strong a word for the emotion this brings up.

 

10: Would it be so much of an inconvenience for you to simply cut and paste your blog reviews to LT?

In any event, the feature I would want would be to have the option to prioritize reviews (and ratings) visible to those written by members of my social network: top 50 similar libraries, friends, interesting libraries and so on.

I quite like both ideas suggested by the original poster. And I'd be just as happy not seeing reviews that are nothing but outside links. I come to LT to read reviews here not to be sent off to people's blogs and websites. Especially if there is no information presented in their LT review that would make me think their opinion is worth tracking down.

Getting rid of reviews that are just links would be a big advantage to filtering out the shortest reviews. It seems to me that it would be only polite to put in a paragraph to indicate content of the review before assuming that everyone is going to click on just a link.

I would never follow a link to an extern review, so they are as useless to me, or more so, than a oneliner. If link reviews were filtered out along with the very short reviews I would see the filter as fulfilling its purpose.

I don't know if I think it is a very necessary feature to filter out very short reviews, but as long as it is optional, I'm fine with it.

The filter for connections review seems more relevant, and would make the 'Friend' and 'Interesting libraries' more useful - or at least I would be more inclined to use them:-)

Agreed with amberwitch/14's paragraph 1 and 3.

I read many reviews here every day, and always scroll right past the linked reviews, even if its the only review for the book.

Would love the connections filter. Would love even more if there was a module for Interesting Reviews. Because oftentimes, Interesting Libraries are quite different creatures from Interesting Reviews.

>10 BTRIPP:.

What would be a nice feature for blogging reviewers would be to put a link somewhere in your profile to your review blog (or, if it's your standard blog, tag it with "review."). Then, LT could establish some sort of protocol to make it so that when you post a new review to your blog, LT puts the full text, or up to a <!-- more --$gt; like control.

Maybe the protocol could involve the books ISBN.

...

Or even simpler, if you post a link to a website for your review as the only text, LT will auto-pull the first ~100 words or something.

Or even SIMPLER, make an "external review" field in which you put a link to your review.

Of course, this wouldn't be as "simple" for whoever has shuffle through the different formats to get something readable.

Just a thought.

>11 StormRaven:.

I can understand why BTRIPP doesn't do this. I personally HATE crossposting data, which is why I pipe all my LT reviews to my burned feed, which also gets content from my blog. I promote that as my "blog," as I don't want to force somebody who's my fan to have to subscribe to every single one of my feeds. I do that for them.

I only wish LT didn't escape the HTML when publishing the RSS, as sometimes I use the STRONG and EM tags, and would like to see those come through. Also, it strips the implicit BRs/Ps, which makes the reviews look like a Wall Of Text.

Add me to the list of people who never click on blog links to read reviews when nothing else is posted.

I don't mind short reviews that much - they're easy to scroll past, and if you sort by thumbs they'll usually go to the bottom anyway. I do like the idea of making it easier to find new reviews from your connections.

I also hate links to external reviews. It ruins the entire point of trying to get an overview of opinions about the book on a single page. I seldom click on an outside link to a review, unless it's the only one available for the work.

So yes, if there were a filter for short reviews and it also hid link-only "reviews" I would view that as a bonus feature of the filter.

Although, I think filtering under 150 characters as extreme. I think there can be a worthwhile review in 80-100 characters, so I would vote for a filter for fewer than 75-80 characters.

18>

Well? Don't keep us in suspense!

(Your &lt sign got interpreted as HTML and munched the rest of your post, because you entered it directly. Try & lt (without the space) instead, or just write out "fewer than".)

20: So your response to a feature that some users want is to be a dick to make sure everyone has to see your reviews? I would simply flag those reviews. And I suspect many others would too. So much for your attempt to circumvent the filter.

20: Don't be so combative. You're allowed to put in a link and we're allowed to ignore you. Adding nasty padding won't change that.

Would it be possible to create a filter that allows the user to weed out certain users' reviews? That's starting to sound like it would be a good feature to have.

aethercowboy/16 - great ideas! I would love to be able to read those linked reviews .ON. LT somehow, if LT would grab and display them.

BTRIPP/20 - Personally, I don't consider them 'nasty external links'. But I have moved to a place thats stuck in the dark ages and the most I can get is turtle-slow dial-up. I can't tell by the look of the link if its going to go to one of those sites that take forever to load, so I'll just pass on the links version, thank you. LT is a known quantity; I'll stick here for my reviews. Doing LT in the way it works for me shouldn't earn me the label of unreasonable.

Why not just be able to sort reviews by length?

Seems like that would solve this "problem" without things getting personal.

I would favor options to filter out reviews - very short, and those with any external links. I don't go to external sites, and I think its not cool to try to tease people and use them to drive up hits at a blog site.

Perhaps something so people can select the option that works for them, (too short, too long, links ...) and then tie it to sorting, so the reviews you want pop to the top.

BTRIPP- #20 I don't have a problem with links to reviews. I simply don't like when that is all there is. If you included the first paragraph or even the first few sentences I'd be more inclined to click the link and see what you think in full. Assuming the the sample provided sounded worth reading. But I'm not going to follow links without some indication that it's worth my time. And if all you can be bothered to do is post links without any more information, I'm not going to bother myself to see what you think.
And I'm certainly not going to click through if your reviews are just a link and petulant filler designed to get over the required word count while refusing to offer anything of substance.

25: I think length seems to be the best way to make the 3 camps happy.

>25 saltmanz:, 28 But I think people would still want to sort by thumbs, just with some reviews excluded.

BTRIPP and others that post links as reviews. (I believe I have posted about this before and the response was "Who cares about you Luddites?" - but I will try again)

(I'm one of the ones who would not ever link to an outside source for reviews - If I don't know what I will find when I get there, why would I click on your link?)

I'm curious as to why you think that we (users of LT) should bother to click on your dubious links if you can't be bothered to take the time to copy/paste your reviews to LT. If your link is not worth copy/paste-ing why should we consider it worth reading?

For all I know your link link leads to some spam Viagra advertisement - why waste my bandwidth on your income? (At my new house the best price I can get is 5G per month- at close to $15/G - you can bet that I am practicing clicking on nothing that might be spam-a-lot)

The only reason I wouldn't subscribe to a character-limit filter is that I might miss Tim's "No." review (which is of way more interest to me that someone's "visit-my-blog-because-I-must-be-special -because-I have-a-blog" review)

30

Yep, makes no sense at all. If you write something that theoretically you want people to read, and just post a link to it, any reasonable person is going to assume that what you really want is for the person to look at the external source.

It is also pretty reasonable to assume that if you can't be bothered with a few second copy and paste then you won't be of any interest, anyway.

You then want people to waste time (and possibly money) loading other pages when they already have the page her to look at.

20

Truculent petulance is likely to confirm the above chain of thought, too. You go on about them a lot and don't want to share? Very odd.

#20 {Edit: Here's your freakin' 150 characters, chuckles … you happy now? Really? You want MORE characters? I'll give ya more characters! Satisfied NOW?}

Oh, that made me chuckle ... I don't click on links because I like reading reviews on LT but I would still chuckle if I saw that.

I like the idea of a variety of filter options. I think that you should be able to filter over/under a specific character length (to oblige those that want to avoid either long or short reviews), I think you should be able to filter by reviews not containing links (for those of us who don't click on external links, no matter how long the LT review is ... ones that post the first paragraph and then link to their blog bug me more than just links ... you can scroll over a link but it's harder to avoid the more they put in) and definitely a connections filter/sort. I find 'Interesting Libraries' doesn't really do much for me as it is and I rarely add one because it seems no more than a hat-tip to people with interesting collections, same with 'Friends'.

What's wrong with providing a variety of different options which you can choose to just not use if you're happy with the status quo?

>31 bluetyson:.

But some people (like me) HATE to duplicate content. That's why I don't post reviews to my blog, and stopped copying my LT reviews to Amazon.com (my solution for making these reviews known, as I've said before, involves augmenting the RSS from my LT reviews into my regular blog RSS feed).

Though, at the same time, I never click on external links unless absolutely, positively mandatory.

But why? The reason that I come up with is that if you need to edit it later you need to edit it in all the places that you've copied it to. But how often do you edit a review after you've posted it and is it really all that much trouble if its only two places?

33

You hate to duplicate content - but manipulate RSS feeds? That's some head-twisty logic going on, right there.

Pretty trivial to automate any of this if you want to, from a lazy programmer point of view, is it not?

I have no problem with people linking to their blogs in their LT reviews. I can sympathize with their desire to drive traffic to their blogs since I remember how eager I was to do the same when I had a Geocities website back in the day. I imagine most of these bloggers aren't raking in the money as a result of these links and I think they do offer some benefits to LT -- for example, by allowing comments on reviews.

That being said, I very rarely click through on link-only reviews. If the book I'm looking at has some substantial full length reviews available on LT, I'm just not motivated to click on link for another review. I imagine that, as the number of reviews on LT grows, I'm going to be clicking on fewer and fewer links. I think the suggestion for blog linkers to include at least a paragraph from their review before the link is a good one -- I know I would be more motivated to click through if I had a better idea of what content awaited me.

I would much prefer it, however, if bloggers would post their entire review on LT followed by a link inviting them to visit or comment on the blog. If you redesign your blog, move it to a new provider, or shut it down you've now left LT with a bunch of dead link reviews. I've seen some already, and I can only imagine the problem will get worse with time. Posting the full review on LT ensures the permanency of the data. You might even find that more people are willing to click through to your blog!

>35 bluetyson:.

For me, it's more trivial to muck with RSS, 'cause I merge the different feeds into one consolidated feed (that is, I build a superfeed based on the individual feeds). If I change the source, the element in the consolidated feed is changed, as it's still part of the original feed. I'm not doing anything illogical, nor am I doing more work than Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V (in fact, I'm doing less, since I only have to write it once). I just don't like to bombard the intarwebz with crosspostings galore, and links to other feeds, and such. This way, I can plug in any new feeds I generate, and have a clean integration of any new output I'm creating, instead of a bunch of different, disparate feeds all saying the same thing. I can explain in excruciating detail how simple (and free!) it is if you don't believe me. If you want to see the generated feed, it's linked to from my web page (if you're so inclined to actually visit my profile and click external links).

A lazy programmer (which I consider myself to be, as according to Larry Wall, laziness is a virtue) would probably think write a script to take the content of a review and post it to other places. But a TRULY lazy programmer wouldn't bother doing this, because a truly lazy programmer never writes the same line twice, and that includes book reviews. :)

If I ruled the world, I'd just have to use the tag "review" and some ISBN-like identifier tag on my blog, and have every book-review site that I use watch the feed for the "review" tag, and then figure out what I'm reviewing, and automagically attach it to the work in question. But that's just me wanting to decentralize the internet.

But that's just me wanting to decentralize the internet.

The Internet is centralized?

>38 suitable1:.

Not exactly...

<rant>

But, do you use Facebook (or any other social network) for social networking? If so, why? Because all your friends use it? Why should you, though, have to sign up with Facebook just to say you're friends with Facebook users? Why can't you have, say, an Orkut, and be friends with Facebookers and MySpacers without having to join an new social network?

When users are forced to sign up for a new site just to interact with its users, it's basically forcing some social aspects of the internet to be centralized, when it really doesn't have to be that way.

Your personal homepage, on whichever service you use, should provide the social networking capabilities you would normally get by joining a social networking site and connecting to all your friends that way. From there, you should be able to add any social modules: blogs, photostreams, walls, etc., and be able to advertise your friends in a decentralized manner, regardless of what websites they're using.

That's what I mean by decentralizing. Like I (paradoxically) always say: The Internet is My Social Network.™

39> I totally agree with this. I've tried doing something similar with my homepage, parsing together my Facebook, Blogger, LiveJournal, Delicious, LT feeds, etc. Now if only the LT feeds could be improved...

Speaking as someone who frequently uses links to reviews except for my early reviewer books of course. If people wanted to setup a filter saying that they didn't see those reviews I'd be fine with it. If you're not going to click then you're not going to click and there's no reason to clutter your screen with it. I do find it interesting that I actually get about 5% of my traffic from people clicking through the review links, often they'll stick around and go to other pages. So I don't think it's a waste.

BTW one argument against duplicating the same content over different websites is that it messes up your search engine rankings.

Tangentially related, I'd also like the ability to control / limit the number of reviews I see for a specific title, without eliminating them. HP is nice but there are a lot lot lot of reviews for them and I'd rather have the list of reviews that pops up in the "My Reviews" page to show the max different titles rather than be heavily weighted toward just the most popular titles.

Maybe just one random representative for each title, with a link to "more reviews of this title" at the end of it, for example.

I find it strangely amusing that most of the "anti-link" people assume that the links are there to drive up "hits" ... my reviews are on LiveJournal which (until very recently) did not have the facility of even using something like Google Ad Words, let alone "Ads" like you'd find on a WordPress blog (or, for that matter, even a way to count views) ... in fact, my links go off to a specific-just-for-book-reviews journal that has NOTHING BUT my book reviews, which I created four years ago specifically to work hand-in-hand with LibraryThing.

I'd love to lock those "turning their nose up" at the concept of an external link possibly being the source of some income in a room with some of the "black hat" SEO guys I've encountered on Twitter and Facebook and see what their opinion is if and when they come out.

A lot of us are either just wary of going to a link we know nothing about (there are spammers here) and/or have slow, expensive connections. What we are asking is not the the link be missing, but that we are given something to let us know that it is worth the time and expense of clicking through.

I would welcome the opportunity to filter out the just link reviews, and would certainly tag as 'not a review' if there was just fill text.

Not that this addresses the question at hand really, but if you're using Firefox MarthaJeanne, the CoolPreviews add-on let's you preview the page before clicking. I never thought of using before for LT reviews but I can actually read all of BTRIPP's reviews without leaving LT.

I'm not averse to people linking for whatever their reasons and links don't offend me, I just don't tend to click on them because if I'm reading reviews on LT, I'm on LT and I don't surf away. BTRIPP's reviews blog is really clear and easy to read but I often find that personal blog page design discourages me from reading a review if it's too fussy. That's why I tend to stay on LT ... that and the convenience of it being in one place. I just think the filter would be a nice option, without passing any judgement on those who use links.

That doesn't do anything for the slow expensive connection bit.

#46, Well, as I said, it doesn't really address the question at hand but I thought it might be of interest.

I've been reading this discussion with interest. It would be nice to have some kind of filters on the reviews - there are some books in my library that I don't care about enough to read any further reviews eg. I'm fed up with seeing 10 reviews of Twilight and the other books in the series per day (yes I did read them all to see what all the fuss was about), especially as these are generally 'fantastic book' and would love to be able filter those out so I can focus in on the reviews of books that interest me.

Unlike klarusu the reviews that really annoy me are the ones that are just links, I prefer the ones with a sentence or two of the review so I can decide whether or not its worth the time clicking the link. I tend to ignore reviews that are just links unless from a friend, interesting library etc.

But as one of the things that I love about this site is that it seems much more friendly to the individual user than many other sites, which leaves us all free to review, read reviews, ignore reviews as we choose and U would resist any change that restricted that individual freedom.

BTRIPP

I am "anti-link" as you say (at least if there is no preview paragraph or something) because most of the time I don't care enough about those people or their reviews to bother. It's not a matter of accusing them of anything, I just don't care.

Also, actually, most of the people here gave other reasons for not clicking on links than ads or driving up hits.

Maybe I'm low-tech, but it seems to me that unless there are more than 100 reviews, it is just as easy to scroll past the "too long" or "too short ones" or "ones with links" etc. as it is to sort or filter. That is the most democratic solution.

k4k

k4k, I agree for the ones with fewer reviews ... it's what I do now. If there was a filter, I probably wouldn't even bother using it on most works but I would on the longer ones.

Regarding links on reviews. I think I am one of those people whom many here on LT probably skip over because a) my reviews tend to be long and b) I include links to full published copy on external sites whenever I can. But I do this because I was a reviewer long, long before I was a member of LT. And the primary reason I post any reviews and/or links is because I wanted a place in my catalog where I could see everything I happened to have written about a given book in my library. If posting the reviews also means LT people can read them, then great. But getting LT people to read these reviews isn't my primary reason for including them.

Also, I think that I owe the sites/publications who first took a risk and published my reviews a certain amount of deference, so I would prefer that anyone reading my reviews, if they like what they read, be motivated to visit the site that was willing to publish them. Also, I am extremely leery of simply pasting an entire review into LT because of potential copyright issues. I won't post full reviews to Facebook because I worry I'd lose control of the piece. And while I'm sure LT has an immense amount of integrity and would never use our material without asking permission, the fact is that the more places your work is reproduced, the more chance there is for it to be used by others without your permission or knowledge.

So while I can empathize with folks suspicious of "dubious" links, I would be willing to bet that on a site like this one there are also many many legitimate book reviewers and critics who have good reason to forgo posting their full work here, but choose instead to provide a link, just in case anyone is interested.

I usually don't click on review links, not because I care about whether I'm driving up traffic, but because when I do (if it's the only review for a book I'm interested in) the review is almost never worth bothering. If there's a useless review on LT, I can just skip over it, but clicking over to find a useless review is a bigger waste of time, and not worth it.

I think being able to filter reviews by # words would be great, both an upper and lower limit. I don't bother with linked only reviews in general, I have clicked a couple, and sometimes the 'site' is so busy and takes a long time to load it was a waste of time, other times, it was a dead link. Too much of a headache to care anymore about them. So being able to filter these out would be something I would like as an OPTION. I don't think it should forced or a default by any means, give every user the ability to choose, and like Tim is fond of saying %90+ of users use the default settings and never change them, so BTRIPP will only be filtered out by the people who wouldn't be reading his blog anyway. Not only that, if I want a minimum of 100 words today, tomorrow I might want a minimum of 250, especially if I am looking at a specific book.

I'd like to see the place on the Profile page that lists the user's number of reviews follow that figure with an average review length. So mine might say:

128 reviews, 333 words average

And/or that stat could go in Your Zeitgeist.