Topic: A suggested change for the directory
Two things attracted me t BiM a few months ago:
- the neat appearance of the forum (compared to some other ghastly well known brickfilm forums)
- the film directory with ratings
The first is self-explanatory but I'll explain the second point.
Most fan forums have a place to dump film but BiM has a community rating system which offers real value. Granted, the "score" is often random and under used but it has value. I use only two metrics in measuring the "worth" of my flims - youtube stats and BiM scores. They are used by different audiences and that's important.
Getting to my point, the directory is quickly becoming irrelevant to me and that's a shame. There are a lot of 10 seconds "This is my minifig waving test" which really don't belong in the directory. I suggest anything less than 20 seconds is removed by a moderator until code can be put in place to enforce it.
It would be great to show how many "votes" a film has received. I look for the good films and quite often I'll find a 5 brick film that has only one vote and it turns out to be crap. The law of averages hasn't been applied and I wish I could see that while browsing. It might also encourage more votes.
Thirdly, a means to sort the directory by bricks and by date would be neat. Again - so I can avoid the "walk cycle test" etc.
I appreciate there are limitations in resources, time, money, programmers and forum technical constraints but I thought I'd put that out there. A lot of people use the directory to show off their creations and that's fine - they can still do that, but that doesn't change the fact the directory is unique in the community and its worth is being diminished.
Cheers n beers.