The recent update states:
- [MBS-11146] – Add “Reviews” tab for CritiqueBrainz
The submitter of this ticket that this should try and help encourage more reviews, but if anything it’s just been made more difficult.
Now all the review content, including the button to click to encourage people to leave a review in the first place, has been shoved under another tab!
I’m not trying to be a negative nancy here, but I thought we were trying to get more people to know about CB and that should be piped from one of the more popular projects being MusicBrainz, sticking reviews under a tab and taking away a quick and easy “click this button/link/element to leave a review” has made it more complicated.
I’ve spoken to @aerozol recently (in a direct message) about this, and he asked my process and I said that point it was quite simple:
RG entity on MBZ > click Write Review > Give Star Rating > Type in my lovely review > hit submit
And advised it couldn’t be sped up, but now theres a new element called “click on Reviews tab” between the first and second steps.
EDIT:
Just while I think about this, and everyone’s got an opinion and doesn’t mean I’m necessarily right, but as a techie I know we love tabs. We love them in loads of things, but for me sometimes from a UX point of view I flipping hate them. They obscure and hide data, and if that data is important then it should appear “flat” and “inline” with the rest of the other content. I get using tabs to seperate data that might not be overly pleasing or important to look at immediately (such as DiscID’s or aliases) but a page certainly looks more “full” when things are left to run flat.
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Ah, my questions to you were only related to CritiqueBrainz changes (CB-442), didn’t know about this one! Funny timing.
I think a separate tab is great tbh, much better than squidged down the bottom, lots of space for expansion. But your workflow shouldn’t be impeded - would a ‘review this’ link, maybe in the Editing section in the sidebar, solve the issue?
Apart from that I have my own feedback on this ticket:
- Without knowing whether there is a review or not, and with 99.9% (at a guess…) groups not having reviews, this really does bury the few existing reviews. The tab needs to indicate if there aren’t any reviews (e.g. MBS-11645). Or, indicate if there are some (e.g. a number in parenthesis on the tab)
- Imo the reviews tab needs to be on releases as well as the release group (though it would be the same content)
- Review relationships should be shown on that tab as well. Our split of review relationships/CB/ratings is already a bit confusing as-is. (Example group with review relationships + review, now on seperate pages)
Tagging in the people involved in that ticket: @reosarevok & @rdswift
3 Likes
The implementation is a first go at it (with at least partly the intention of enabling the reviewing of more than just RGs from MB proper), so I’m happy to see discussion on it 
This should help improve it further.
This is something we’ve talked about in the team and it might work (it does require checking for reviews before loading any tab rather than just the reviews tab, but it’s probably not a bad idea anyway). One doubt is what this should do: should it count only reviews with text? Also CB rating-only “reviews”? Also MB ratings? My gut feeling is the first but it seems a bit weird to show (0) if there’s ratings to be seen too.
This is something I did consider and it probably makes sense. Right now the release sidebar has “Release group rating” and “Release group reviews” - would a “Release group reviews” tab make sense?
This seems like a good idea, not sure how easy it is to implement with our current system but I hope it’s not a huge complication.
In general, tickets with further improvements for this feature (including the suggestions here) would be helpful! They can be linked to the original ticket for ease of finding too if you can be bothered 
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We can already see, with the blue and yellow 5 stars, when there are Ratings to the entity.
So IMO, it should only count real Reviews (with text / from CritiqueBrainz)
Or are there MB Ratings (blue and yellow 5 stars) on one side and CB Ratings on another?
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Currently, yes. There’s CB ratings as well (reviews without text). I think the idea was to eventually combine the two, but…
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Added, and boldly assigned to you 
(I just saw the ‘link’ tickets button… oops… hope sub-tasks is okay, otherwise let me know)
@reosarevok, any progress or insight onto when this can happen?
I’m not sure how this change skipped feedback and went straight into prod (or did I miss something?) @sound.and.vision is by far our main CB contributor and if something’s making their life substantially harder it’s not a good sign!
The original change was in beta for a week or so like all other changes Anyone who wants to stay on top of changes and give feedback should probably always try to use the beta server.
Re: other tickets related to this, I was on break, I can look into this more now I’m back
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Apologies, I will try to make sure I do this - probably something in me that has always associated beta with “unstable”.
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That is fair, and sometimes it can be, but in most cases it’s just fine If it’s unstable, then do let us know so we can fix it before release, and then stop using beta for a bit if needed!
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Thanks for the reminder, I think you are right about using beta, but I always forget to do so!
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Personally I think the tab makes this more visible. I never really noticed the link before as it was just another text item in the sidebar, but the “Review” tab makes this more visible. Just my 2 cents 
If it helps I guess the link in the sidebar could be added again. I just personally don’t pay much attention to the side bar, I visually focus more on the main content.
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How many times do you now click on the ‘review’ tab, knowing that 99.99% of the time it will be empty?
Edit: if anyone missed it, existing reviews used to be displayed under the table on a page (e.g. in a release group page) with no clicking required
Anyway, I think the review tab is a great idea FWIW, just need to make sure we don’t break anyone’s workflow.
My bad 
I’ll change my shortcuts now, I keep meaning to…
edit: @Jesus2099, is your ‘preferred server’ script still working? The copy I found wasn’t (seems like the best way to do this rather than keep checking links…)
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