Hi Steve,

I just received a message from a person who tried to “randomly review” a piece of mine. Apparently they weren’t allowed to because of this message, “The creator of this item has too many locked reviews and cannot receive more reviews until they are unlocked. Message them and remind them to unlock!”

I’m pretty sure there aren’t any locked reviews that I have. If I do, an indicator-something to alert me of where they are would be spiffy. Not sure if this is a bug, but some explanation of these recent changes would be appreciated.

Best,

Curt

The new organization of reviews I think is great! However, people are still receiving the same message upon trying to critique a work of mine.

After clicking the “You may find your locked reviews here.” link, I’m taken to the Reviews Received page where the message reads, “You have not received any reviews yet.” A couple of hours ago there were 3 reviews listed here, but none of them showed up when I accessed the piece. (Yes, I checked hidden as well.)

As stated, these reviews have since disappeared on the “locked reviews” page. One distinguishing trait amongst all three however was that when I clicked on their profiles, it said this person is no longer an Urbis member. Again, I initially tried this about 3 hours ago.

I understand you guys are busy, so I’ll stay chilled and be patient.

This is totally wrong. Why can’t I gather a few thousand points and leave my piece for reviewing over night, wake up and then unlock 10 or more reviews?! ?!
This way I can get only 2 reviews a day unless I’m online logged in Urbis 24/7 AND checking for reviews every few minutes.
Come on Steve, this is so bad I can’t find words for it.

disclaimer: I haven’t slept for 48 hours so if I got this wrong just ignore me :)

Curt,

There was a bug in there. It will be fixed in about 20 mins.

jebzoid,

Sort of a double edged sword here. We receive complaints about reviewers receiving “dead items” in their queue – those that have not been looked at for a long time and have dozens of locked reviews that will seemingly never be opened. Reviewers want their reviews to be read and this assures that only chronic unlockers will receive their feedback.

There are a few things we can do to address your issue:
1. increase the limit across the board.
2. increase the limit for PRO members.
3. Use a percentage instead of a raw count. i.e. if more than %10 percent of your total reviews are locked, you’re out of the queue. This way, if you have received 100 reviews, up to ten of them could be locked. We would still want a cap on raw count, however – greater of 10 reviews or 10 percent, for example.

The math for option 3 may be a bit heavy on the system. Need to look into that.

Thoughts?

Much appreciated! Now it’s time to mull over these solutions . . .

Is it tied to the number of active works?

By which I mean if I have 3 pieces with reviews active, is it 2 reviews on each piece, 6 in total or just 2 in total? The last seems a little, well, stingy.

I would vote for a limit of 4 or 5 unopened reviews in total sounding like a more reasonable number, with more for the PRO types.

In fact I would find it sorta helpful—being snowed under with reviews is almost as bad as only being allowed 1 or 2 unopened ones. But then I’m more of a long-piece writer where individual reviews can cost a fortune.

How about: your pieces stay in the queue for 24 hours, receiving unlimited amount of reviews (depending on your credits, whatever) Then, after 24 hours, if you have more than 2 unopened reviews per piece – that piece gets kicked off the queue. After you unlock all the reviews for that piece – it gets back in the queue for another 24 hours.
I’m guessing this wouldn’t be too hard on the system (simple math= 2 unlocked reviews per piece + 24 hours hold time) and seems fair.
Any better ideas?

Good idea but it wouldn’t solve the main cause of credit inflation (which I discussed a few weeks ago in another thread). The primary cause is new users creating one of their free PRO items and not returning to unlock their reviews. Those PRO items jump in the focused review queue and receive upwards of ten reviews, usually within the first 24 hours of submitting it.

I think a percentage is still the way to go.

Blimey this is a difficult one. I agree with Jebozid that the 2 locked reviews rule is irritating for those submitting shorter pieces, because unlocking 10+ reviews a day is a lot easier on your credit balance and so perfectly feasible to do in a day.

I, like Tris, submit longer pieces and so don’t have a problem with being limited to 2 locked reviews and so am not keen for the limit to be raised too high, although 4 or 5 isn’t too scary.

Allowing ProLific users to have a higher limit might be the way to go. If people are using Urbis seriously and regularly, they shouldn’t begrudge Urbis the money for going Prolific, and then the locked limit would be higher, because as keen paid up members of Urbis they will undoubtedly get around the unlocking a larger number of locked reviews.

It would still be important to have a limit though. Unlimited locked reviews scares me for this reason: I’m about to submit my first item in about 4 months and I have over 20,000 credits built up, meaning I’m probably going to shoot straight to the top of the review queue. If there was no limit on the number of locked reviews that I, as a prolific user could accrue, I could come back in a couple of days and have a hundred reviews waiting for me, all of which will take 400 credits or more to unlock (because I’m submitting a long piece). Goodbye hard earned credits.

So in summary – leave the 2 unlocked reviews rule in place, but raise it to 10 for Prolific users. Don’t be afraid to blackmail people into paying for the better Urbis features Steve!

We discussed this in many threads, so I made this one sticky to centralize the conversation.

On Monday, we will change the rules for how the number of unlocked reviews affect your ability to receive new reviews.

The rules will be as follows:
Users’ items will be removed from the queue if they have the higher of:
1) 3 reviews are locked
or
2) 10% of reviews are locked – up to a maximum of 10.

So the limit is 3, unless you have more than 40 unlocked reviews, which raises your limit to 4. For every ten over that, you have one more. 50 unlocked =5 locked allowed, 60 unlocked = 6 unlocked allowed, etc, up to 100 = 10 locked allowed.

Wise. I’ll let Avedis do the maths on that one and boil it down for us all. Avedis? Ready, old chum?

Awww, crap… ::slaps forehead:: I shouldn’t have deleted many of my items and reviews on them.
I like the idea though. Go Steve!
Claire, let’s say you have 100 or more opened reviews. Your items would be in queue as long as you would have less than 10 unlocked reviews. Which seems fine. Very fine. And you don’t need to be bothered by the 10% thingie.

I think this is fine; of course, I doubt it will effect me very much. I tend to turn reviews on one item and turn them off of another to keep my reviews limits controlled; this will actually be benificial to me to have a limit. I will feel less pressure to turn off reviews on different items for fear of not getting to unlock them as quickly as I would like. Also, I write mostly longer pieces, and they don’t get many reviews, and my 1000 worders get a lot more attention, this should help keep everything a bit more balanced (for me, anyway ;P).

However, if this does become an issue, or has too many complaints or is just generally disliked, I do have something else to consider. What about a credit limit? Like, once your unlocked reviews reach 3,000 credits (just a random number, I dunno what a good limit would be), it will not appear in the queue again until you have spent some credits opening reviews, thus putting you back into eligibility for the queue. It could be a certain amount of credits per user, or per item (per item seems more reasonable). Another good thing about this, is that you short writers will be able to get your normal flux of reviews without being slammed and us longer story writers won’t have to go into major debt to unlock ours. Of course, this is just a secondary suggestion; in case the new method doesn’t work; I have faith that it will, though.

Thanks, Steve. I’d like to cast a write-in vote: Friends can review an item any time no matter how many locked reviews. No biggie if this doesn’t fly, but if it does, it would be nice.

I’ve been hiking. What’s going on here? What’s all this math and numbers and percentages and stuff? Would someone please explain this to me without ANY numbers?

Actually, we could make that exception for both friend and random reviews, since the credit transaction does not take place until the review is unlocked (thus not affecting the economy). I kept the rule site-wide because I wanted a strong incentive. Also, I asked in the forums about going site-wide with this rule and everyone was for it.

I’d like to hear other thoughts on this before we make that change. Anyone?

Bingo!

And I’m still for it . . . I think it’s a good change.

All I can say is that it worked for me.
After weeks languishing with zero new reviews, following the change my short story suddenly recieved three!
That’s encouraged me to become active on Urbis again.

Yeah, i am getting reviews again as well…yay!

Still for it. I do like the idea of random and friend reviews being always available.

I have to agree anecdotally that this seems to be working. I had just under 1000 points with nothing happening, and within two days of the implementation of the new rule I received four or five reviews without doing more myself. It’s starting to feel like the ‘old’ days, give a review or two, get one back.

I am fine with any tweak you guys think will work Steve. Excepting friend and random reviews makes good sense. Certainly the new math makes sense for the regulars. I very much appreciate the attempt to return balance.

Quick question:

If we keep random reviews always open for review, is there a way to control (or hide) the items that have been inactive for a certain amount of time?

I suppose if this was possible, we probably wouldn’t need the new rule, but I still thought it was worth a shot. ‘There are no stupid questions, only stupid people’ and all…

I think we’re asking basically the same question Karma. And we did so at roughly the same time. Weird. This point has also been brought up:

here
http://forum.urbis.com/forums/4/topics/590

Setting an item to private I do believe still allows Friends to see it by going to the [VIEW ALL / EDIT] and then clicking under “Reviews”.

To me, the word “private” means unexposed. Next time I’m in a private dressing room I’ll be sure to keep a look out for people’s peepers.

I don’t like this.

I like the idea of keeping random/friend reviews open. If you are reviewing a friends piece, or randomly reviewing a piece that you already have viewed, then you basically already know if that piece is active or not.

Sometimes I just browse through the site. Through the rankings, through profiles, through specific genres. I read some of what I see. I would like to review some of them, but I can never be sure if it is old or new. It takes a whole lot more time and effort to review an item than it does to read it for leisure and I like to know if I’m putting in that effort that it is still an ‘open for random review’ item.

I definitely want to keep them both open and available at all times.

What I am trying to figure out has to do specifically with randoms not by friends. I’d like to know for certain before I begin a random review (that could be selected by any number of means by me, I browse through a lot) that I am going to be able to submit the review. Couldn’t a simple note be implemented before we give a review to warn us that the reviews are not available for that item.

“Couldn’t a simple note be implemented before we give a review to warn us that the reviews are not available for that item”

The note does appear before you review the item. If you start a review, you will be able to finish it.

That said, the rule change will be live in the morning. All random and friend reviews will be back – not affected by number of locked reviews.