Today I decided to undertake a very difficult task: try to see how many abusive reviews are made in a 24 hour period. Boy I wish being a review mod gave me a tool to do that quicker...but that's not for you to know or for me to divulge so we'll just leave it at: it was a pretty hard thing to do. In fact, I kept my search to just flash and audio reviews.

Time fram: ~4:00pm 11/5/10 to ~4:00pm 11/6/10
number of reviews made in that time: ~2900
Number of reviews I deleted as being abusive: 123
percentage of reviews which were abusive: 4.24%

Now, since I went through them after-the-fact starting today I can't account for reviews deleted by other moderators during that time. I was mostly interested in a snapshot of how the review system is holding up.

I think that 4% is an awesome number considering the size of the website, the number of submissions we have and the size of the community. I have heard people complain about how the reviews aren't used appropriately on this website or say that there are many abusive reviews that need to be removed...I don't think that is the case.

Of all the reviews I looked at today, a vast majority were positive and offering encouragement! That's awesome and fosters an enthusiastic group of animators who I can only imagine will continue to bring quality work to the site for years to come. Now, not all of them would be all that useful to providing the best advice to improve, but that is to be expected since not everyone can know the inner workings of Flash.

The vast majority of lower scoring reviews are actually very informative. People really know how to offer constructive criticism. In fact, I am more impressed by this number than anything else I saw today. Some people seem to think that if a review is giving a low score, then it has got to be abusive, but my discerning eye found few with enough fault to be deleted. That is awesome! You guys are really getting the hang of reviewing!

Contrary to what I have heard, the reviews are not split as either being all 10s or all 0s. People are rating flash as they see fit. Lots of 5s and 6s and 7s and 9s! I like that people might withhold a complete 10/10 or 0/10 because nothing is perfect and nothing that gets through judgment is totally worthless (even the spam flash takes some effort!)

I'm impressed with the quality of reviews on the website. It only goes to prove that we have one of the most encouraging communities for independent artists on the web!