Seed Company Review Grid... let's do this thing!

I like the idea of making it as easy as possible to write reviews.

Too many requirements, and maybe people would think it's too complicated and not bother participating.  When we did the book review grid, we kept things fairly simple, asking only that if they want the review to show in the grid, they use the magic phrase.

If you want to add the link to your own review, feel free.  
I'm also working on a way to automatically include the link to the grid in each thread, but this will take a week.


To make it work, please use "seed source" or " nursery" in the first line of your review.  
One of these two lines.  
I give this seed source X out of 10 acorns.
I give this nursery X out of 10 acorns.

By the way, the grid is looking lovely.  Thanks everyone for your patience and help to get this project off the ground.

Ah! So the terms "seed source" and "nursery" are necessary for other aspects of getting the review grid optimized. The review grid will show results with other terms, but search optimization and linking to the review grid will require us to use the terms "seed source" and "nursery." That makes sense! Thanks, R!

I like Mike's text

And yes Nicole I was thinking of it being in the Wiki portion of the review to help people know what they should do to respond/add a review to the thread.

Here's Mike's text in an easy-to-copy-and-paste version:

If you'd like to add your own review, please have the first sentence be "I give this _______ X out of 10 acorns."
Here's a [url=https://permies.com/wiki/76308/Review-Review-Grid-seed-source]Tutorial[/url].  Your review will then end up on the [url=https://permies.com/wiki/76171/official-permies-Seed-Plant-Source]Official Seed and Plant Source Review Grid[/url]

Nicole Alderman wrote:Ah! So the terms "seed source" and "nursery" are necessary for other aspects of getting the review grid optimized. The review grid will show results with other terms, but search optimization and linking to the review grid will require us to use the terms "seed source" and "nursery." That makes sense! Thanks, R!

Thank you, yes.  I'm having trouble with words right now.  You said exactly what my brain wanted to say but came out in chaos.  Thanks.

Bernard Welm wrote:I like Mike's text

And yes Nicole I was thinking of it being in the Wiki portion of the review to help people know what they should do to respond/add a review to the thread.

If what I want to do works, then there may be a problem with having it in too many places.  The automatic linky thingy that I want to use sees that there is already a link in the post and then says to itself "google isn't so happy with too many links, I won't put my extra link in this thread".    But it's all complicated and still jumbled in my brain.  

Short version: keep it simple for now and just keep those reviews coming.  That's the first stage, populate the grid.  This is a huge help and I'm grateful and impressed by all the reviews so far.  Thank you everyone!  

I'm working on a way to do this link thing automatically.  I want to figure out what tools we already have that can do it (probably already existing in the thread boost system).  This is going to take me some time as things are a bit overwhelmed right now.  

At the bottom of any thread, next to the picture of a house, there's a little text advert (If you have used your PIE superpowers to turn off adverts, you might not see this).
I asked the system to put an add there for the seed review grid.  Has anyone seen this yet?

I recently turned off some of the graphics to help with my slow internet issues, so that pages load faster . I did, however, see this at the top of the seed saving / exchange / plant breeding forum page:

It works!

I went to My Profile and turned banner ads back on. I've been to several threads (like a dozen) in several different forums. I don't see anything by the house at the bottom of the page about the Seed Source review grid. There's lots of PDC/ATC stuff, Erica/Ernie's RMH stuff, dehydrator stuff... The only thing I've seen is what I posted with the picture.

r ranson wrote:At the bottom of any thread, next to the picture of a house, there's a little text advert (If you have used your PIE superpowers to turn off adverts, you might not see this).
I asked the system to put an add there for the seed review grid.  Has anyone seen this yet?

I turned my banner ads back on and I see the house...no 'text advert' though.

EDIT: I reloaded the page and now I see this next to the house... "Did you see how Paul cut 87% off of his electric heat bill with 82 watts of micro heaters? "

so, it will be one of several that will show randomly?  I'll try to remember to watch for it.

I found that I could just reload a page and there would be a new ad each time...after a couple dozen times, I noticed that there was one that was blank so do you suppose it's something as simple as needing to click on 'show' back there?  I don't know if that's relevant for this set up, just thought if that blank was it maybe the text was still on 'hide'.

I saw it!!!

"it's a teeny, tiny, wafer thin ad:
The official permies.com Seed and Plant Source Review Grid
https://permies.com/wiki/76171/official-permies-Seed-Plant-Source"

Karen Donnachaidh wrote:Judith found it! I guess I stopped searching too soon. Good job!

Karen, I think that it might not have been there then.  It turns out there are maybe thirty or so ads? I might have lost count and I didn't try to notice if there were repeats...so it took around thirty reloads for it to show and as I mentioned above, I thought there was a blank earlier.  

This was just the sort of rainy day, stare at the screen, mindless type of thing I was up for for
(thanks for the apples!)

Awesome you found it.

I only put the tiniest amount of threadboost I could on it so I wasn't sure if it would show up or not.  I'm excited to see what other thread boost features I can play with.

Have you looked at the grid page in mobile view? It makes a really long list. This is just a cellphone screenshot of the first couple of entries:

Great news everyone.

We have loads of lovely people writing reviews.  You rock!

Someone noticed that some of the reviews aren't showing up on the review grid - even though the poster did everything right.  Thanks for using the 'report' button to draw our attention to this.

What seems to be happening is that there are 24 spots for reviewers (at the moment) and if person 25 writes a review then they don't show up... except if they write two reviews, then they knock someone off the grid.  Not sure if this makes sense when I say it out loud.

That makes sense as the people who who write more reviews move further to the left (can't remember where that was written but i think it was Nicole's tutorial.

So those people who write more reviews are highlighted and those with fewer reviews fall off the chart.

I think the idea is that companies can easily see who writes lots and good reviews, then send them free samples.  This happens with the book review grid from time to time.

I just noticed that many of the reviews aren't showing up on the grid because it only shows the 24 people who've reviewed the most companies.  That's kind of sad for the people who only have one or two companies to review.  It might discourage them from posting reviews.

I suspect that's also why there are companies at the bottom of the list that don't have a score shown.  Their score is somewhere off to the right of the page under a person who only has one review.

Is there a way to keep the 24 column limit on the matrix but add a summary column at the left that includes everyone's score for a particular company?  That way even if people know their score won't show on the matrix, they can see how they impacted the overall score.  It would be even better if it could say "8.7 acorns out of 5 reviews".  I know that's too much text but you get the idea

My selfish reason for mentioning this is that I have a review out there for a company that isn't a high score.  As far as I can tell, it's the only low score on the entire board.  But by looking at the thread for that company, you can see that two other folks also ranked them very low.  So it's not just one outlier causing the low score, there are three of us.

I was thinking that an "average" collumn right at the far left, next to the names of the company, would be really useful for all sorts of reasons, like you mentioned. I hadn't thought about having the number of reviewers listed, too--that's a good idea. It would take up a bit of space, though. Maybe having the number of reviewers pop up when the mouse is hovered over the average? Or maybe a collum that says number of reviews, then average, and then the highest reviewers?

Something like this, but, you know, programmed correctly and with correct information, etc, etc

Seed/Plant Company		Number of Reviews		Average Reviews		Mike Jay		James Freyr		R Ranson
Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds		5		9.5				10		9
Seed Savers Exchange		4		8.75		10		8

Yes, exactly that.  Maybe if we need the room we only put 20 people columns on the chart.  And hovering over the average to get the number of reviewers would be sweet if it isn't too hard to make happen.