[daigoro]

A while ago someone in the discussion forums where asking for a book voting feature, and well here it is http://www.sffworld.com/ubb/smile.gif

So head over to the new Book Voting section (http://www.sffworld.net/members/sff/vote.nsf/frmWebVInd!readform) and have a look for yourself.

Dag


[This message has been edited by Dag Rambraut (edited December 12, 2001).]

[Eventine]

Interesting, but probably useless. We already know who the popular authors are, and I fear this will be plagued with people giving 5's to their favourite author and 0's to their least favourite.

I'd be more interested in a poll page, with users able to suggest questions for the next poll.

Just a suggestion though...

[Rob B]

Eventine, a number of people mentioned this as something they wanted to see here @ sffworld.

Though what you say may have a bit of truth giving a 5 to favorites and 0 to un-favorites, Dag is taking a lot of time to listen to people and implement suggestions to make this the best SFF Web site on the 'net.

[jbcohen]

I'm with eventine on this issue. What is probably needed is a more detailed way of sorting through the universe of novels. Such as dividing the universe into the different sub-generes then asking people to rate the novels based on different characteristics or to detail why the book should be one of the best available. I have not really though this issue through and will post again if and when I come up with a more thought out and detailed approach to this problem.

[Rob B]

When you get into genre classification, this can really by a cloudy or arbitrary issue. I'm not going to get into that right now.

jb-what you're outlining seems to be pretty much handled with the book reviews section.

[SusF]

Nice feature! Thanks, Dag.

Susan

[daigoro]

I somewhat agree with you Eventine, although I think that with enough votes you'll eventually get a rating that might be of some interest. I guess we'll have to wait and see how it develops http://www.sffworld.com/ubb/smile.gif.

Another thing I was hoping to achieve with the new section is that this also might become a reference to authors and their series.

A Poll page also sounds like a great idea, all I can say is that you never know what will be next http://www.sffworld.com/ubb/wink.gif.

[This message has been edited by Dag Rambraut (edited December 10, 2001).]

[Eventine]

Hopefully it does provide another frame of reference for investigating a new author or novel.
Personally I find this forum currently the best tool for that however. In general I find the reviews to be full of short, undescriptive and generally useless reviews:
I luv this book. It is awesome, especially when *insert extremely large spoiler here*. This author is the best author on the planet!!!

On the forum however, the discussion of the books is generally a little more thoughtful, with some nice analysis of why a book is actually good. Plus you can get a feel for other people with similar tastes, and try something they recommend.

The featured reviews is a good place to start though, as if it got featured it is obviously well written.

So how could it be better?
A system similar to Amazon, allowing you to rate if a review was helpful or not. Then on the reviews list, it would be as easy as hitting the "Most helpful reviews" link.


[This message has been edited by Eventine (edited December 10, 2001).]

[Sammie]

Well I like it.

I think it'll be a little while b4 there're enough votes for results to be v representative of general opinion, but these things have to start somewhere!

[BehemothCat]

I haven’t posted here in a while (too lazy for my own good!), but I saw the new feature and decided to jump start the database with more than 1300 new entries posted from my collection. Since my tastes run to the literary, the original and the exotic, you’ll find lots of little known treasures like Steve Aylett, Ernest Braham, Mikhail Bulgakov, Paul di Filippo, Kelly Link, Jeff Noon, George Saunders, Michael Marshall Smith. Lots of great classics too – I’ve read all but one of the Hugo winners and all but one of the old Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. Not much phat phantasy though – it’s not really my cup of tea.

I tried to be as fair as possible with my voting – less than 10% of my ratings were a five.

Dag: Thanks for the new feature – I really enjoyed it.

A few improvement/fixup requests:

Can you add another sort criteria so that an author’s books will alpha sort if they aren’t in a series? (Philip K. Dick is a good example – there are so many books that it’s hard to find a specific book).

Some similarly named authors don’t link to the appropriate detail. For example, both “Anderson, Poul” and “Anderson, Poul & Karen” link to the detail for “Anderson, Poul”. Another example is that “Niven & Barnes,” and “Niven & Pournelle,” both link to “Niven & Barnes,”

Also, the “Add new author” button is currently broken.

Thanks again,

BehemothCat