Given that the sticky is barely ever updated nowadays, it's obvious that the system needs improvement. As someone said on the shoutbox yesterday, you don't really know whether anyone is working on reviewing a game or not.

My suggestion is to create a new forum under Abandonia.com cathegory, specially meant as a sort of notice board for reviewers. If a person starts working on a review, they would simply post a new topic with the game name as the title, therefore making it immediately clear that this review has already been claimed.
When they finish writing a review, they would just post a reply to their original thread informing of that. Informing of standing down from reviewing the game would be handled the same way.

That solution would not require a single individual to keep track of all claimed reviews, and any change in review status would be immediately known.

Such a forum should be _viewable_ for all registered users, but - for obvious reasons, spammers included - in order to post there a regular user would require a special permission (just creating a "reviewer" user group with posting permissions there would do the job). Moderators/VIP/etc would automatically have posting capability there.

So, do you think such a change would be a good thing?

in the light of the increasing user partipation with the site, such a place might be useful.
Not sure if it would need a extra usergroup. A very strict moderator would probably do as well and that would invite more people to post there.

But you'd still need a central list so people could see what games are available for reviewing, right?:unsure:

The way I see it, Requests forum more or less serves that purpose (at least when I manage to get all the [APPROVED] [ON SITE] etc tags right it will).

The current list can be carried over as a sticky in the new forum without any problem.

good idea!

Is there a list somewhere of games people are willing to submit that are abandonware? Would your new list include all games that the site already has but are not being reviewed?

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Geezer @ Feb 20 2007, 05:07 PM) [snapback]280226[/snapback]</div>There are several such lists (ones I recall were posted by myself, Titan and Mighty Migdet).

The current "Games that need reviews" list has that, at least as far as I know. It would be carried over as a sticky for future reference, but would change in its purpose - it would only store a list of games that are uploaded but not reviewed, rather than also track reviews currently in progress.

Additionally, this way of expanding the system would reduce incidents where the updaters lack the information on who reviewed the game: if they don't know, they can just look up the appropriate thread title.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(the_fifth_horseman @ Feb 20 2007, 02:34 PM) [snapback]280163[/snapback]</div>Would that work like in a domain with Active Directory and all? Like:
User A may view Data 1,2 and 3. B may view 1 and 2 and change them but doesn't see 3? (very abstract, sorry, but I'd like to know for further reasons) :unsure:
Haven't you asked this particular question before, 5th horseman? Or is that - once more - just me...? :huh:

EDIT: I voted 'yes' a few days ago.

Not really. More like "all users can see the forum, but only certain ones can post messages". Of course, like Data said, merely allowing all registered users to post but maintaining a strict moderation may work just as well.

I don't recall posting such a thing before.