Changes to Review Day?

Paracosm wrote:Oooooh! I like the idea of a monthly YWS'estival. Good thinking.

Not when you think the effort and dedication it will take to organise it each month.

Here's my opinion.

I agree with everyone else that the teams don't seem to be split completely randomly. I don't think it's necessary to have a team splitting system based on stars or review stats etc., but a bit more randomization would definitely be nice. I don't know how that system works right now but I think there is some obvious room for improvement in that area.

For reducing the number of teams to two, it'll be likely that one team will be far ahead and the other lagging behind, same as the situation with four, but minus the two in the middle.

Agreed. Not totally convinced that 2 would work entirely (still worth experimenting with though), but 3 might offer a nice balance.

More notice would also be great. As long as there is a good balance between too early and too late.

Themes might also be cool although I'm not sure what exactly themes entitles. Still... It could be cool.

But please don't get rid of teams! Teams are what makes review day so fun and the main reason people get so involved. Getting rid of them wouldn't help make review day any better, at all.

Thanks to everyone for contributing your ideas! Please keep 'em coming; I'll just be responding to some of the ideas brought up so far.


Separate record for Review Day reviews

Interesting idea, but I don't see how it'd increase reviews on Review Day.


Getting rid of teams

Everyone seems opposed to this, so we won't be trying that!


Going from 4 teams to 3 or 2

People brought up a lot of good points regarding this. With four teams, you are almost guaranteed that there'll be at least some competition. But the chances of that happening are diminished each team you reduce the number of teams. Indeed, there have been times even with 4 teams where one team was far ahead of the rest.

I'd still like to try going down to 2 first, though, and see how it works. If it doesn't, we'll bump it up to 3 for June.


Weekend of activities / Festival

It's a worthy idea, but we already have trouble getting Review Day in order. Having more activities on top of that would be too difficult; keep in mind that this site is volunteer-run and the moderators & myself already have our hands full with just moderating!

But, turning Review Day into Review Weekend may be worth trying, and I think I would like to try it.


Distribution of members in Review Teams

All teams have the same number of members, and for all intents and purposes, the distribution is currently done randomly.

Distributing members based on their length of time on YWS, reviews already done, or any other method would unfortunately not work as none of these are an indicator of how one will do on Review Day.

What's going on is that you have a small-set of power reviewers, and then everyone else. For example, the top 3 reviewers (out of 75 reviewers total) on Review Day did 21% of all reviews that day. This means that one out of every five reviews on Review Day were done by just 1 of 3 people. In fact, the top reviewer (Aley) did 10% of all reviews just on her own. Obviously, with four teams, you're going to have one team far out in front when the top reviewer did 10% of all reviews.

So how do you combat this? Two ways. The first way is to reduce the number of Review Teams in hopes that the power reviewers will be more evenly spread out. The second way is to encourage everyone else to review more, which more notice should help with.


Prizes

We actually used to do this when Review Day first started. The reason why prizes are no longer offered, though, is because the top reviewer was often someone who would just write a few sentences. Getting rid of them also didn't have an impact on the number of reviews.

However, keeping track of which team won is a good idea.


To sum up...

Here's the list of changes thus far that most likely will happen:
- Reduce teams from 4 to 2
- Review Weekend (meaning May 25 and May 26 for this month)
- Track Review Team history
- More notice


Other possible ideas from me
I've been tossing around a few other ideas in my head, but please keep in mind that these require a lot of coding so they may not happen even if other people like them.

Club Newsletters: Bring back the function for club leaders (and hence Review Team leaders) to send out mass PMs to their club / team.

Statistics: On the Review Team overall page, it might be cool to show a line graph of reviews over time. This way, a team can easily tell if they're making progress or stalling out.

As a top reviewer (Totally did not know I did 10% of all the reviews) I would suggest that we do something more celebratory for reviewers. It could be simple things like: Most words written, top 3, or 2, get prizes, or perhaps the 'title' until the next review day. This could encourage the competitive people to come back. If you based it on things like 'most points earned,' and checked for repetition before handing out prizes (especially since posters that are repeating the same word to get points should be punished) then they wouldn't just go to low point reviewers who reviewed the most, and they would reward good reviews, in theory. Aside from gifts, some prizes could be things like interviews posted on Writing Gooder about the experience, reviews for something of their choice, or as I said earlier, the titles that were around for The YWS Festival.

Be realistic though, this is YWS, let's take the gloves off.
I think you should bring up different themes for YWS's colors for review day. Change it up by making it bright orange or some other obnoxious color, and as we get closer to the goal, the color gradually goes back to normal. You could do orange/blue, red/green, yellow/purple stripes. o.o These could go up everywhere but the greenroom, including chat, and the team rooms, so it would scare people into the sanctuary of the green room, and what else would they do but review? It's a bit under-handed, but it might work. It also might make people stay off YWS for the day, but at least they wouldn't be attempting to submit?
To expand on this, if we have 100% of reviews to do, make it two obnoxiously contrasting colors. If we get down to 50% of reviews left to do, make it something 50% less obnoxious, etc.

Speaking of underhanded methods, you could attempt to make the only thing on the homepage a giant link to the greenroom, or all of the links and things at the top go to the greenroom.

Also where did that annoying monkey in the ugly popping red box go? I reviewed to get rid of that thing, I'm sure other people did too.

P.S. I'm not sure if you noticed, but red and the YWS blue, do not go together smoothly. I clicked the review team button this time so I wouldn't see it any more DX. This is how I know you're willing to use underhanded methods to trick/force people into clicking things. ¬.¬

Loose wrote:

Paracosm wrote:Oooooh! I like the idea of a monthly YWS'estival. Good thinking.

Not when you think the effort and dedication it will take to organise it each month.

There are people (Me) who would be willing to do this.

Nate wrote:It's a worthy idea, but we already have trouble getting Review Day in order. Having more activities on top of that would be too difficult; keep in mind that this site is volunteer-run and the moderators & myself already have our hands full with just moderating!

Well, here's an idea: Since Reviewing is something that YWS is big on, why not make Review Day a portion of the moderators' Teams? For one, it would help out a lot on doing the Review Day, and if you have anything else to do then, in hand and it would help Review Day, or Weekend, be better organized.

Also, if you, or other moderators, don't have time to do it, there are, I'm sure, other people who would be able to help and would want to help (*Cough* ME *Cough*)

Overall, I love Review Day, but last Review Day snuck up on me and found myself not having time to do any reviews! (A funeral didn't help me at all, but still)

It is good that you are asking for input from the people who actively participate in Review Day, I love it!

I'd just like to point out that having power reviewers (or people who have reputations as such) on a team is no guarantee of victory. The Review Day where I was a team leader, I had two reputed power reviewers on my team. They did less than five reviews between them. Additionally, almost my entire team weren't reviewing. Out of 30+, only about 10 went out and reviewed, less than half that did more than five reviews, and only two did more than ten, and I was one of those two. The running joke in chat was that I was my entire team, and considering I did almost as many reviews as my entire team combined, that Review Day was seriously demoralizing. This was despite my encouragements, praising those who did review, and setting smaller goals as motivation. The people on my team just weren't reviewing and it SUCKED.

I've noticed since that the two lagging teams tend to be the two last in the sequence of sorting, and that for reasons inexplicable, they attract a disproportionate amount of dead weight, i.e. members who join a review team but don't review. These dead weight members also tend to be very new, which seems to point to "What is this button?" *click and wander off* behavior.

It's not the fault of those members since they're new and probably have no idea what is even going on, but I do think it would be nice to have a system that sorts new members fairly evenly across all teams. In addition to (hopefully) reducing the load of dead weight, such a distribution would help acquaint new members with more experienced ones who can then help introduce these new members to reviewing, assuming that active, experienced members are distributed evenly across teams as well.

With that said, having several days before a Review Day to plan and choose leaders and all that really, really helps build a sense of camaraderie that helps motivate the team as a whole to review. The day before or the day of really isn't enough time to build such a team spirit or enthusiasm, which exacerbates the whole dead weight issue. The Review Days I remember most fondly all involve at least two days time beforehand to meet teammates, come up with a reviewing strategy, and build up a sense of "we're in this together"-ness.

Honestly, I'd like to see review teams stick with 4, if only so there can be four solid team leaders to help people out.

Review teams weren't originally intended just to spur numbers. That, for me, was a nice side benefit to their use. An unexpected side benefit. The original purpose for review teams was mentorship. The goal was to teach people how to review through teamwork, effective leadership, and examples.

I want to see the mentorship aspect brought back. The numbers were a side benefit, and it makes me sad to see review teams focused exclusively on the numbers of reviews they generate, because that wasn't the review teams I remember building years ago. I remember building a place for people to learn how to review, get to know a bunch of people on the site at once, and getting a friendly competition going to spur both quantity and quality. And that teamwork build up review momentum that lasted for at least a week after review teams were done, which, to me, is much better than a single hit a month.

By having more time in review teams, members can learn about points, the benefit of writing longer reviews vs lots of little reviews, learn how to write longer reviews, all those lovely little benefits that only come from actually being part of a team for a longer period of time. And this education will actually impact the overall quality and quantity of reviews on the site, instead of relying on a single day to drag us out of a slump.

To me, a 2 or 3 day investment in review teams will build a much stronger site and stronger reviewers. It's basically 4 workshops on how to review a month. We already know the strength of workshops for increasing reviewing skill. Review teams are better than workshops in a sense because it's practical. You have incentive to use the skills you just learned immediately. Plus, all the notifications from excited members who do know what's going on will help drag out the dead weight from those who just wandered away. They'll keep getting reminded of it.

My two cents. I've only been watching review teams again recently, but the difference of a numbers focused mentality vs a mentorship focused mentality seems to be pretty stark: one surpasses numbers and has momentum going for a long while after review day, while one fails to live up to expectations and falls flat on its face on a regular basis.

I've been reading all the suggestions and everyone's keeping so much thought to this!

And even if I don't have much to contribute, I'd still like to suggest one thing.
In RD, we review written works, stories, poems, those stuff. But to make the experience a BIT more varied, why don't we try reviewing Art too?

Just for one day, you get points for reviewing art, for those who may get bored or annoyed (although that's impossible >u>) with Literature?

Just an idea.