Why does this site exist? What does it propose to do?
This is a community controlled review site. Most review sites post reviews from a small group of people. Even those that allow for submissions from their readers require that the reviews go through an editor before they are posted. Not only that, an awful lot of them aren't very well organized and only have one way of looking at their list of reviews. I wanted something more flexible and I wanted something anyone could go and add a review to. (Kind of like dmoz.org or ↗Wikipedia, only for anime reviews.)You might ask, but what about quality? Well, the second phase of the project will allow users of the site to select which reviewers they like. Then those reviewers reviews will be weighted more heavily when displaying the reviews.
What do the ratings mean?
One of my pet peeves of many review sites is that they use arbitrary numbering systems. The better ones explain the numbering system at some other location (like this one), but even then you have to try to keep it in mind while you are looking at the reviews. So I decided that the best approach would to separate the ratings out into the four different actions I'm willing to take with an anime (Buy,Rent,Watch,Avoi| Buy | I'd be willing to buy this anime in commercial release. |
| Rent | I wouldn't be willing to buy it, however if it were available for rent I would pay to see it. |
| Watch | I'm not willing to pay money to see it, but if it's being shown I'll take the time to watch it. |
| Avoid | If someone puts it on, I'll leave the room. |
Additional: Okay, so I do use numeric ratings for the details of the views. These numbers are not totaled as their meaning tends to vary between reviewers. Each reviewer looks for different aspects of each category. To find out what they mean precisely visit the "Reviewers Section" and look at their description of how they make their decisions.
How do I become a reviewer?
It's really easy! Click on the link on the sidebar labeled "Become a Reviewer". Enter your email address and click "Create". You'll be emailed a password. Then login using your email address and the password you just got. You're now a reviewer! If you want to change your password, or set your name (and other stuff) (you do!) click on "Edit your profile" (in the sidebar).If you run into any problems, click on the help link (?) nearest your problem. If you still have questions please feel free to ask in the forum or email me. If you prefer to use an IM you can contact me on AIM, my screen name is seikihyougen.
Who runs this thing?
It is run by Andy Turner, the vice president of (and programmer for) Arcus Digital, a small ISP and consulting company in central Maine. I'm also a managing partner at AcadiaNet. I live in Waterville, Maine a town of 26k. I collect anime. I code bits of Perl and hack at bits of C in my spare time. I idle on a MUSH. I play Avatar on cyber1.org. I'm on the IT staff of Onna!.Technical details?
The machine is located in Arcus Digital's server corridor. It has unmetered access to our T3s — except that it's plugged into a crappy 10 meg switch. I use the text editor 'joe' (version 3.1) for all of my editing. It is kind of a merger between the Borland IDE keylayout and Emacs. (And Borland's IDE keys are based on Wordstar.)This site is the new mod-perl version. The old site was entirely CGI based where as this one has been built using HTML::Mason. It took me years to get around to porting the damn thing... I've been planning on porting it almost since the site was first launched back in mid 1999.
