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TCS Reviews

Postby Jack Road » Tue Aug 18, 2015 10:49 am

I know people like Ambi have had this idea before, so this is more me throwing in my support.

I know there is no real limit to articles one can submit, but we are all very used to listicles, which is what most of the articles here involve. I was thinking of a separate tag called TCS Reviews, which are just oners of review-able things, like movies and porn, and books and porn.

This isn't a dramatically well-formed thought, I don't have any idea of how to implement this, just curious about it. As I am led to understand, Marcuse generally reviews each submitted article and posts them after some editing process. As reviews generally need to be timely, this would be a sped up version, I guess?
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Re: TCS Reviews

Postby Marcuse » Tue Aug 18, 2015 1:22 pm

So, to a greater or lesser extent, we're already doing this. You might have noticed that there's articles coming up on Mondays now, with the subtitle Blockbluster. We've just trailed a new review series called Filmsy reviews as well. These are part of an expansion of the article process in order to have a specific publishing day and we're working on getting editing up and running for it. The content is currently being curated by Ambi, so if you're looking at writing any reviews of movies, hit him up for ideas so we don't end up with several reviews of the same thing.

As I am led to understand, Marcuse generally reviews each submitted article and posts them after some editing process.


Everyone seems to be confused as to what happens with editing now, since it's not "marc edits and posts everything" so I'd like to take the opportunity to clarify. Most of the editing and image work is now done by a small team of incredibly committed and awesome people who edit to a specific schedule I set. I then review it and post up the finished work on the date it's meant to be run on. The only real delaying factor for this is if the author doesn't contact us to approve the edits and greenlight the work. This is why occasionally you'll see no article up. Authorial control over their own work is more important to me, so if I don't get the okay I won't post unless it's been ages and I absolutely have to.

Editors are currently named in the top banner of the article on the media site, so go give them user ratings if you liked an article too! Then give Ambi one for processing the images!

As reviews generally need to be timely, this would be a sped up version, I guess?


To be totally honest, I don't see this as being either possible or fair within the system we currently have. Speeding up reviews only based on them being timely is effectively saying that whenever a review is posted someone has to jump to and edit that shit asap and then post it regardless of every structure I've set into place to ensure consistent content delivery. Basically it's a fine idea, but I don't think it's workable right now. Having a day for reviews is about the best compromise I can find to get more reviews out without putting other people's work further and further back in the schedule which would be massively unfair.

I want to accommodate the reviews in a way that preserves the structure we have in place and allows for reasonably timely reviews. Hopefully this works out and we can continue it, so if you like the reviews thumb them and comment on them so we know it's a good idea.
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Re: TCS Reviews

Postby Jack Road » Tue Aug 18, 2015 1:27 pm

Thank you Marcuse. My main goal of this thread was to get some clarification. As someone who has not submitted an article, but is interested, but is lazy, but has all this ice cream to eat, but keeps working 80 hour weeks, but is making excuses, I really did want to gain a better understanding of how the article format/main page is being handled.

I have a lot of respect for everyone involved in making it happen and really enjoy reading the articles. I think you guys are doing, pardon my LaChaise, a balls out awesome job at all of this. Knowing who to thank is a lot of why I decided to post this.

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Re: TCS Reviews

Postby Learned Nand » Tue Aug 18, 2015 1:47 pm

The "Review" tag is (or should be) applied to all Reviews, so you can use the tag searching to isolate them, but there isn't really a place dedicated to reviews. It would be easy to create, for example, a Reviews setion next to the Articles and Podcasts one that shows just articles with that tag.
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Re: TCS Reviews

Postby Marcuse » Tue Aug 18, 2015 1:52 pm

aviel wrote:The "Review" tag is (or should be) applied to all Reviews, so you can use the tag searching to isolate them, but there isn't really a place dedicated to reviews. It would be easy to create, for example, a Reviews setion next to the Articles and Podcasts one that shows just articles with that tag.


Everything that is a review is tagged as review, but the problem is to provide a concurrent place to post reasonably timely articles without displacing other articles whose authors have been waiting to see their work posted. Adding an extra day and editing staff seems to be the best solution for this, with additional curation to keep the backlog small so reviews are posted fairly quickly.
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Re: TCS Reviews

Postby Jack Road » Tue Aug 18, 2015 1:53 pm

So my idea mirrors Cracked's "Quick Fix" but of course, Cracked churns out 3-5 articles a day, so they have the volume to fairly run a rapid response section. Marcuse is right, we just don't have the volume to fairly run an area with precedence.

I do of course think some reviews should emerge in line with the actionable events they are reviewing, but this seems to be happening already, at least in line with Ambi's articles, Pixels isn't even close to being out of theaters yet.
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Re: TCS Reviews

Postby Dr. Ambiguous » Tue Aug 18, 2015 6:17 pm

Sooo a couple things, some of which has been covered here already.

All review articles are tagged as "Review," and you can browse them all by clicking on the tag. Just click it.

We're working on basically that Jack, weekly movie reviews, trying to be timely with them. It's currently still a work in progress, and it's in it's trial run since we want to know that it's something that the community here wants.

There's probably a better way to feature the reviews without bumping off the regular articles, but I'd rather wait and see that it's a success before worrying too much about that.
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