Originally a suggestion by TonythePony, the newest enhancement at Criticker is Featured Reviews. Apart from just the films which you’ve scored the highest, you can now choose which of your mini-reviews are to be highlighted on your profile page.
You can bring attention to overlooked films which you loved, or clever mini-reviews which you’re proud of. Or whatever else! Your list of Featured Films is stored as a collection, and you have control over it just like any other collection. Any film can belong to your Featured Films collection, but in order for it to show up on your Profile, you have to have ranked it and written a mini-review.
And you can feature any number of films. 10 will be chosen at random for display on your profile.
So what are you waiting for?! You’ll see the link “Feature on Your Profile” on the film information page of any movie you’ve written a mini-review for.
If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have noticed a lot of little changes we’ve been making to Criticker in 2010, designed to make the site more attractive and easier to use.
The latest page to get a revamp is the User Profile page (when you’re on other users’ pages, not your own). It’s changed a lot, for the better.
Here’s a quick rundown of the changes:
1) Expanded, cleaner information & bio area
2) No more ugly “dropdown” boxes
3) Dynamic film list, with multiple choices
4)
New Enhancement: Featured Reviews – basically implementing the suggestion
proposed here. We’ll be writing more about this later.
We hope you like these changes as much as we do, and agree that they greatly improve the functionality and appearance of the page. The personal User Profile page will be updated soon, too, in a similar fashion.
This morning, we introduced new changes to Criticker’s navigation scheme. So far, there haven’t been too many exasperated emails demanding that we change it back, so… I think that counts a success!
Here are some of the highlights:
| 1. Live Updating # Films – When you rank a new film, or delete a ranking, the number of rankings is automatically updated. |
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| 2. Forum/Blog Highlights – We’ve replaced the (ugly) link bubbles with the latest topics being discussed at the blog and forums. |
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| 3. Improved Submenu – Drop down menus is so 2008! Criticker is so 2010! The new menu layout is a huge step up… the options stay active even when not hovered upon, and don’t get in the way of other content. |
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| 4. Overall Style – Cleaner and sleeker. This is the first of many stylistic improvements we plan on making in the new year — others will be less noticeable, but we’re going to be constantly making changes to improve the way Criticker feels and works. |
This is something we’ve been promising a long time, and have finally made a reality — the ability to ignore users.
Ignoring a user will remove him from your TCI list, prevent him from contributing to any of your PSIs, hide him in a film’s list of reviews and remove him from the front page of recommendations. It will prevent that user from sending you personal messages (and vice-versa).
You can do this for users whom you find offensive or aggressive, users who you don’t want showing up in your recommendations, or those people who you just don’t like. The ignored user will not be aware that he’s been ignored.
If you find other areas where the ignored user appears, please let us know and we’ll extend the functionality.
They’re always properly credited, but many of our film summaries originate from other websites. Once in awhile, though, users take the time to craft their own summaries. We greatly prefer this — unique content is extremely valuable to any website.
However, until now, users weren’t really able to claim a credit on hand-written summaries. Now, they can! When you have written a summary, either from the Film Information page’s “update” utility, or while submitting a film for entry in the database, you can mark it as your own.
It’s about time we properly recognize the time our users put in on improving Criticker’s summaries, and it will hopefully encourage more people to write their own.
Please don’t hesitate to overwrite summaries that are not original! We’d love for some of the more popular films on Criticker to have unique synopses.
If you’d like to claim the credit on any summaries you’ve already written, please send an email to info-at-criticker.com. Just make sure to include the link to the Criticker film pages, to avoid confusion.
- Black Friday Deals
Thanks to user td888 for suggesting this enhancement, which we’ve just released onto the Kumpel page.
Now, you no longer need to refresh the whole page in order to get a new suite of recommendations based on your Kumpel’s ratings. Head over your Kumpels Page to check it out.
We’re back in the office after an extremely busy “vacation” spent shuttling around most of the American Midwest, visiting family and friends. Now let’s get back to work.
Falling under the category of “duh”, we’ve now made it possible to rank films that you’ve remembered, without first having to “forget” them. Previously, you’d have to remove the remembered film from that collection, before you were able to rank it. Not very intuitive, and no longer the case.
This also applies to Ignored Films. Just a small enhancement to enhance usability.
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