The Org Redesign - What's wrong with the org?

[Pwolf]

Since the org staff wants to wait to gather ideas in an organized manner, I've decided to take it upon myself to create what I think are the necessary threads to get the job done. I don't want to wait until the coding is done before we know what the website will look like and function. Lets start now.

This thread is for gathering what people think is wrong with the org in general. This can be design related, function, or even member attitudes. Please share your concerns and provide constructive idea on how to improve or fix these issue. If it's a design problem, post examples. Keep in mind the org pays for it's hardware and bandwidth by donations so changing the current way perks are being given to donators might cause issues in revenue. If you want a donator perk to be changed to non-donator, please provide an alternate solution perk.


Go.

[Kosmit]

I first came to the org around two years ago. Here are some things that discouraged me at the very beginning.

1. The necessity to log in to download videos. This really is a problem if you want to download one video from a friend of yours and don't really care for all the others. Try sending an org link to one of videos to your friends and the result will always be the same - people will ask for another link since this one requires registration and stuff. For this very reason I started uploading my AMVs to YT. I feel the need to log in to watch/download videos should be removed altogether. That would inevitably increase the hosting costs of the org, so that brings me to my next point.

2. Donations. While I'm perfectly aware they are crucial to the existence of the org (that's why I'm a regular donator), all the info and walls of text about them doesn't exactly encourage people to donate. In fact, I felt a bit intimidated by all the graphs and info about pledges. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one - my friend even asked me what to do next because the pledge screen appeared after she clicked on the download link for an AMV. Imagine how much more confused poeple can get if they are not fluent in English... Why not just have one big button saying 'Donate!' on the main page somewhere with a direct link to PayPal? Better still, we have a lot of talented banner makers (Nya, I'm looking at you ), why not have them make banners encouraging donations? That way the banners could have an actual positive effect on the org besides, you know, looking cool.

3. Star ratings. While I understand the need to have at least some feedback, forcing people to do it (and with a limit of 10 to boot) is not the way to go. Some will just give whatever just so that they can download/watch more. Maybe we should modify it a bit? Comments directly beneath the video and an additional requirement to give a score once you comment. That way those who don't care about giving feedback won't have to, and the editor will have a general idea of who the ratings came from.

[Kionon]

QCs, Star Ratings, Routine Abuse of LOCAL...

I actually like the current design of the org, and would like the navigation menus to stay roughly the same.

Absolutely do not concur with Kosmit on his first point. Registration should be encouraged. Passive viewership is already killing the hobby.

[CodeZTM]

If the org is going to require star ratings, then I think offering a donation status in order to remove the requirements, but keeping them all in a hide/unhide box if we wanted to leave QC's and star ratings.

I think we need a new forum section for newcomers to introduce themselves. A "beginners" forum, one might say. I've offered my assistance in getting this set up, and I hope we can get something like this up and working. This way, they can introduce themselves, ask basic questions about the site, and get the endless threads of "WHAR CAN I UPLOAD" and then 4/5 people trolling and Karuido/mirko/mod pointing them in the right direction. The site is intimidating enough without it, and I think it might get some new traffic.

"The Grand Newbie Guide". Kind of like a different version of Kionon and godix's threads, but based around the site's basic functionality and forum attitude. This could be in the aformentioned beginner's forum, and I have no issue with writing it.

It's not something we can really control, but I think we need to have people leave a lot more feedback in the AMV Annoucements forum, or more active participation in Opinion Exchange. I'm guilty of this too. We all get busy, and downloading/reviewing videos isn't high priority, but I usually spend my days off downloading the videos I missed and leaving small critiques.

[Zarxrax]

Here is something that I already posted in a private section of the forum before:

First of all, the opinions system. Opinions were originally supposed to be a way for people to leave critical feedback on AMVs, so the creator could learn from it and improve on future AMVs. However, opinions rarely serve this purpose. In fact, even in the original days of the site, opinions rarely served this purpose. One of the biggest problems, is the coupling of the top 10% with the opinion system. Any time someone is able to rate something, and have that rating affect a ranking of some sort, many people have a strong urge to try to affect the ranking with their vote. As a result, people end up giving videos straight 10s, not because the video deserves straight 10s, but simply because they want to see that video move up in the ranking. As a result, this creates useless feedback for the creator.
Furthermore, many of the categories on the top 10% are utterly pointless for actually trying to find AMVs. For instance, trying to filter by audio quality? What does this even mean? Is the top video really going to have better audio quality than a video 100 spots below it? About the only meaningful score on the top 10% is the overall score. The rest just adds useless complexity.
My proposal here is simple. Stop making opinion scores affect any sort of scoring. Opinions should simply be for giving the creator feedback, and nothing more. The ability to make opinions public should also be removed. The creator should have the option to disable opinions, if they dont want to receive feedback.

Next, I want to focus on the star scoring system. I think people should be able to leave a star rating for any video, regardless of whether it has a local (or other) download link available, and regardless of whether the system thinks they have watched it. Likewise, I don't think people should be forced to leave a star rating.

The star scale scores need to replace the top 10%, as far as being able to find top videos. There need to be many many more options. Top videos in the past 24 hours, past week, past month, etc. Top videos as rated by creators only. Top videos by genre.

Next, the comment system. Replace the quick comment system with a youtube-like system. Comments should be public. Give the creator the option to disable comments, or make them private only. Should not be anonymous.

Donations. The "pledge" system is extremely confusing, and I believe it actually turns off many potential donators. Get rid of "pledging" altogether, and just let people donate straight up. Make it clear that recurring donations are extremely important. There are so many people who default on their pledge and are then PUNISHED, because they simply did not understand what they were doing. It's not helped by the big wall of text and the fact that many people may not speak english as their native language. Plus, potential payment methods are not even mentioned until after one makes a pledge.
The text that appears begging people to pledge when you download a video is tl/dr; Vastly simplify this, and instead of having 3 buttons to choose from, make a temporary waiting period of about 30 seconds, like you see on many file download sites.

[Arigatomina]

The ability to make opinions public should also be removed.

I strongly disagree with that. Part of the motivation to leave a thought-out opinion is knowing it might be made public, giving you a chance to influence what sort of opinions other people leave and whether they watch the video in the first place. I always look at public opinions before leaving my own so I know how the person may react (if they responded to the public ops), what to leave out (so I don't repeat what they've already heard), and what sort of opinions they've gotten that they consider worth showing off (if they're crap ops, it's more reason to leave a detailed one). In my opinion, disabling public ops can only have a negative effect on the quality of that feedback. If all ops were public, we'd certainly never have the copy-and-paste spam ops made by people trying to increase their word count. There would be fewer useless flames as well. From what I've seen most editors start out showing the best and worst ops they've received - hoping to inspire someone to write one better than the best, and to warn off people who might write one worse than the worst. Having all ops public - thereby making the writers responsible for what they write since *everyone* can see it - could have a positive effect. Having them all private can only make the quality go down.

Those who don't want their ops public already have the option to not make any of them public. I see no reason to take that option away from the people who want and choose to use it. As both a reviewer and a receiver, I consider those two public ops very useful. I'd like to make more ops public, not have those two taken away from me.

[outlawed]

The ability to make opinions public should also be removed.

I strongly disagree with that. Part of the motivation to leave a thought-out opinion is knowing it might be made public, giving you a chance to influence what sort of opinions other people leave and whether they watch the video in the first place.

He was saying they should be made public by default and provide an option is provided to hide them. In other words you opt-out instead of opt-in.

[Zarxrax]

He was saying they should be made public by default and provide an option is provided to hide them. In other words you opt-out instead of opt-in.

Not really, but I don't really feel that strongly about it one way or another. My main point was just that opinions are for the creator, so we shouldn't do anything to undermine that.

[leptogenesis]

The process of recruiting and initiating new developers could be improved: http://www.animemusicvideos.org/forum/v ... 16&t=99853

If you think this isn't a problem, read my post (#33, third page). It seems like a good recruitment system shouldn't require much more than what we already have, except that the current system doesn't work for some reason.

[JaddziaDax]

Commenting on making ops public: I tend to leave mine not public because it may instigate some people to leave me an op just so they can see what the other ops said. I know in the past, I've left ops just so I can read the other ops.

Do people still do the copy/paste ops to increase word count? It was kinda a running joke for a while, but I haven't gotten one or given one in a very long time.