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Tabulated review threads sorted by average score

Patrick O'Brien said:
^Agreed, the thread is a great reference for choosing a new Trek book. I hope to see more threads for older books added in the future(hint, hint):D
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I've just started reading the DS9 relaunch and I'm thinking about posting review threads for each volume, but I'm not sure it'll attract much traffic.
 
Patrick O'Brien said:
^Agreed, the thread is a great reference for choosing a new Trek book. I hope to see more threads for older books added in the future(hint, hint):D
Click to expand...

Yes, I've been slacking! But I did get around to posting the thread for Reap the Whirlwind last week, finally :). More to come ...


bok2384 said:
Patrick O'Brien said:
^Agreed, the thread is a great reference for choosing a new Trek book. I hope to see more threads for older books added in the future(hint, hint):D
Click to expand...
I've just started reading the DS9 relaunch and I'm thinking about posting review threads for each volume, but I'm not sure it'll attract much traffic.
Click to expand...

Well, I for one certainly wouldn't mind discussing some of those with hindsight ... plus, I think the review threads are kind of a long-term thing, in the sense that it'll always be OK for future board visitors to unearth even a really old one and append their own review there (and the ranking table should help a little with finding them).
 
Excuse the double post, but just as a heads up, the five leftover threads I mentioned above are now in the ranking.

Also, Rosalind very very kindly agreed to do another round of renames for me. When I sent in the original list of renames to be done for consistency purposes back then, I was unaware of the rather harsh length limit on thread titles, and so only chose to acronymize/abbreviate the sub-series names I felt were excessively long otherwise. As a result some of the thread titles ended up lacking author names that could have fit otherwise, and some sub-series are ill-prepared for future novels with longer titles (in the sense that needing to acronymze/abbreviate to fit them is then going to cause inconsistency with the past titles). Given all of this, I've sent in another list of 21 renames that is going to make the titles consistently use acronyms/abbreviations for the sub-series names and add back a lot of author names (and the odd missing exclamation mark here and there).

Yes, I'm obsessed :p.
 
Sho said:
bok2384 said:
Patrick O'Brien said:
^Agreed, the thread is a great reference for choosing a new Trek book. I hope to see more threads for older books added in the future(hint, hint):D
Click to expand...
I've just started reading the DS9 relaunch and I'm thinking about posting review threads for each volume, but I'm not sure it'll attract much traffic.
Click to expand...

Well, I for one certainly wouldn't mind discussing some of those with hindsight ... plus, I think the review threads are kind of a long-term thing, in the sense that it'll always be OK for future board visitors to unearth even a really old one and append their own review there (and the ranking table should help a little with finding them).
Click to expand...

That's great thanks, Sho, I'll do that. I won't post a thread for The Lives of Dax because I'm not sure how rating anthologies work.

How do you think I should do the thread for Avatar though? Split it into the two parts, or all under one thread?
 
That round of renames I mentioned is done now (thanks again to Rosalind) and I kicked off a full reindexing accordingly. Wohoo, perfection!

bok2384 said:
How do you think I should do the thread for Avatar though? Split it into the two parts, or all under one thread?
Click to expand...

Sorry, missed the question somehow ... not that I really have a good answer :). Either seems fine, I think ... bundling might make it easier to get responses than dispersing over two threads, and I guess people can still differenciate between the two parts in a single review if they want to.
 
^ For the purpose of your rankings, I think when a book was released on its own it should get its own thread. Sometimes even the two parts of a duology vary in quality. For example, the two Avatar books would get two different ratings from me in the polls.
 
Right, ironically I was forgetting about the polls (haven't had enough caffeine yet) ;). True enough, that's a killer reason to give each book its own thread.
 
Sho, I have to say that a year (or so?) later I am still impressed by how useful this little page you made is. It has become my primary point of entry into TrekBBS, at least when I am looking for review threads.

I do have a small enhancement request though. Now that there are a LOT of reviews, it gets harder to find the threads I'm looking for. Maybe some sorting / filtering options would be useful. For example, a way to highlight the recent novels somehow. Or sort by release date.

Right now I just use "command-F" to find what I'm looking for in the page, and that works. As long as I remember the name of the novel I'm looking for. :)

Anyhow if you're bored and looking for ways to improve your page, those are some things that would help me.
 
Thanks! Both of those suggestions sound good to me ... maybe filtering by novel series via a row of checkboxes, and the release dates as an additional column? I'll have a look :).
 
FYI: My host has been having DNS and other issues the past two days. I'm talking to support about that. Page's not gone or so ...
 
I am curious how difficult it would be to add in the book ratings that readers have given to trek books from goodreads.com to this page?
 
Not sure, I'm not a goodreads user ... could you point me to a sample page and specifically what data on it you mean? Most likely the main challenge is reliably mapping a review thread to the goodreads entry in an automated fashion (I'd prefer to keep the manual labor at zero if I can), and to a lesser extent a future-proof way of extracting the data (unless goodreads has a nice and stable API I can use, instead of needing to scrape their HTML).
 
Goodreads does have an API. I wonder how it will skew things that some of us who review here also review there. Doubling up the same individual's vote.
 
One little question: I always assumed Sho's table as it is now (IIRC he has toyed with the idea to establish an indepent novel ranking site, though) was meant to give a view at how this BBS views the books, so I don't see why ratings from a different site should be included?
 
As I understood the request, the goodreads score would actually be in a separate column, doubling as a link to the goodreads entry. I.e. it'd just enhance the utility of the table as a launching off point a little.

I definitely wouldn't want to try to factor the goodreads score into an overall score, the main idea was indeed to reflect what this forum likes and that's how it should stay. It's meant to serve as a biased-but-fun mood barometer of sorts to enhance the discourse here.

So it'd just be "here's what the forum thinks, and here's what a wider world thinks".
 
^Thanks for the quick reply.

JeBuS last post seems to indicate that he was thinking about an overall score (with his skewed comment), that why I asked.
 
So I've had a look at Goodreads' API terms of use:

http://www.goodreads.com/api/terms

Seems pretty reasonable for our purposes. Staggering requests to once per second is a bit annoying, that'll bump the runtime of the report generation to (number of books) seconds unless I go async and just have some separate track add in that data now and then.

The actual API is pretty solid, too: https://www.goodreads.com/api

Though I wish the data structure returned for searches would contain a confidence rating per search result entry, then I could avoid badly-named review threads mapping to the wrong book on goodreads by filtering by a high confidence threshold.

On the whole though this seems reasonably doable. I'll do it once I find some time.
 
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