JCD wrote:Un-related, but on-topic, one thing that desperately needs to go is mandatory star ratings. Giving out star ratings after 10 downloads just keeps me from downloading an Avatar Music Video here but instead watching it on YT sooo often. To people who bitch about not getting any feedback otherwise: Just make your videos suck less. If the new design will make the QC and star options more prominent, they will get used more often automatically.
Wow, way to be elitist there. All videos deserve feedback, not just the good ones, and it's arrogant to think otherwise.
I'm bothered by the couple of occasions that I've seen in these threads where editors have suggested promoting our "bestsellers" (like getting rid of New Vid on the Block in favor of advertising the highest rated recent videos, for example) instead of focusing on the site content as a whole. This isn't a masterpiece gallery. Get out of that mindset before we turn even more people away from our hobby.
Anyway, since many of my concerns have been addressed already, my suggestions are very small ones, and probably not relevant to the overall design.
- I'm not sure why I'm still being directed to another page when I click Local on a video download page. It seemed logical when I was a non-donator, but didn't I pay money for increased functionality? Okay, so it's a one second wait instead of a ten second wait, but that adds up over time.* Moreover, it navigates me away from the video information page, which I could really use when saving the video, since "Movie_0001.wmv" is terribly unhelpful when trying to remember what the hell it was supposed to be when I go to watch it. (And just looking at my stars-yet-to-give on the main page doesn't help if it's something that I'm re-downloading, like right now, when I'm trying to reclaim my entire collection after an HDD crash.)
I think that this complaint is a part of a much larger concept that we've all been talking about in these threads: simplification. Why does uploading require so many steps? Why is there an extra page load to endure when downloading, even for donators? Why are there so many menu options on the members' main page when half of them could be (and should be) put on your profile? Things like that. What most people seem to be calling for is a sleeker, easier-to-use .org. Technically speaking, we could keep all of the current functions and still manage to trim away a lot of the fat cluttering up the site.
To be honest, I'm kind of indifferent to a redesign. As long as the .org keeps hosting new videos, I'll stick around - but I support anything that draws in more people to our hobby, so if this is the way to do it, then I guess I'm all for it.
I don't know if any of that was really helpful. It's late and I'm sort of just going stream-of-thought here.
- Jen
*
I've downloaded 8245 Local videos. Most of those were as a non-donator, but even assuming that they were all from a donator's status - thus the one-second wait - I have wasted over two hours of my life minimum just clicking away to another page that shouldn't have been there to begin with.