hwagan Posted April 3, 2012 Report Share Posted April 3, 2012 Howdy, I had a brief look through this forum to check if this had been mentioned before and came up empty. Would it be possible to add a sub-forum for people to embed or put links to video reviews they've done? I'd like to make it clear I have absolutely nothing against people who make video reviews of things, but personally I much prefer reviews in good old text, and I don't think I'm alone in that opinion. Every now and then I'll see a review entitled something like 'Full review of that gun you were thinking about buying', which then turns out to be a 2 minute long video that doesn't really quite live up to the title. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with video reviews, and I've seen some pretty good ones; it'd just be nice to have a clear section for them. That way I'm not going to end up a little bit sad that what I thought was going to be lengthy lunchtime reading on a product I'm interested in turns out to be a 45 second overview of the externals. If this is something that's been discussed before, please accept my apologies for not paying enough attention! Quote Link to post Share on other sites
hwagan Posted May 9, 2012 Author Report Share Posted May 9, 2012 Just noticed in the forum rules linking to a text review is a no, and the review itself must be posted. Surely a link to a video review is in a similar league? Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Marlowe Posted May 10, 2012 Report Share Posted May 10, 2012 Afraid so - otherwise no content is shared here, and the forum just becomes a graveyard of links to personal sites that invariably vanish at some point. Much better to centralise data and allow a link to the original copy also. If you find any which do nothing other than just a link to a review, report them and we'll pull. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
kojak Posted May 10, 2012 Report Share Posted May 10, 2012 I'd also prefer to see video reviews in a separate subforum (so I can avoid them). Quote Link to post Share on other sites
hwagan Posted May 10, 2012 Author Report Share Posted May 10, 2012 Afraid so - otherwise no content is shared here, and the forum just becomes a graveyard of links to personal sites that invariably vanish at some point. Much better to centralise data and allow a link to the original copy also. If you find any which do nothing other than just a link to a review, report them and we'll pull. Cheers Marlowe; Although I'm a little bit confused, do you mean embedded video reviews are fine but just the link to them isn't? I've noticed a lot of video review threads dissapear pretty quickly unless they're on a popular item or they act as the start of a thread. If I spot a link to a text review I usually report it, but what I mean is, could a subforum be created for video reviews or links to them to differentiate between video and text reviews? Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Marlowe Posted May 11, 2012 Report Share Posted May 11, 2012 Essentially if a 'review' thread here at Arnies is not actually a review but just a 'go visit my awesome site', we treat this as what it is - unsolicited commercial posting. It's essentially no different in our eyes to any other entity trying to take advantage of the forum to gain more traffic to its own site. However, if a person submits a full review here (text or video) and then chooses to include a link to the original article on a personal site, that's absolutely fine - we just take exception to individuals that feel we exist as an advertising board for their own site, as most people click on a review thread expecting to not have to be redirected somewhere else to get access. I'm unsure of the benefit of a separate video review section really - it would be a move back towards uncategorised reviews as there would be insufficient to warrant categories, and would therefore result in dual approaches to reviews on the site. Can video reviews not run alongside text-based variants, or am I missing something? We could ask posters to add a (Video) tag to review thread titles, but given how few people actually bother to check the rules as it is, I think we'd just dissuade a small minority from contributing and the rest would just post in ignorance of any stated rules. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
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