Miscellaneous questions

[eduo]

Hello there!

I got an answer to my last post that was so satisfactory I had to dump a whole lot of questions here as well. Some of them might be considered as ideas in the future, others might not be done and others may be impossible.

The rating system is broken, at the moment. I mentioned this elsewhere. It could be a really important part of the site and provide a "social" aspect to it (as subtitle uploads currently is). I've thought some things to help fix it.

-Consider purging lowest-rated subtitles from the database periodically. No point in having 10 different subtitle files for one "Lost" episode in each language. Alternatively, flag them as "additional" and don't show them by default. I'd limit the number of subtitles for each file and language to 2 or 3 if no new subtitles are uploaded. I'd purge subtitles older than six months with the lowest rating of the group.

-Track and Report the number of voters for a rating. "10.0" from one voter is less useful than "8.0" from 100

-Add tracking to the XMLRPC API and/or the simplexml pages

-Converting subtitles - Consider converting all subtitles to a single encoding (Unicode?) and all subtitle formats to SRT (when possible). Standardizing the output of the subtitles might be a good way to ensure subtitles will work.

- Subtitle Language - Consider detecting the subtitle language server-side instead of client-side before upload.

There might be more but it's late and I don't think these'll be accepted anyway, so no point in clogging up the forum

[oss]

no, those ideas are really welcome, and I have mind similar things. I can make them in some way (I can show only "best" subtitles), while others will be hidden via Javascript. But there will be problemks again, because somebody will upload some movie, lets say he dont get any vote, than somebody will upload same improved (a little bit) version, and original author will complain about this system...(because we will show newer subtitles when they have same rating...)

[eduo]

I understand. That's why I thought it would be a good idea to show EVERY subtitle for a while and only after it's failed to raise above a certain level of quality it gets hidden from results (API and Web). New subs would be shown and it would be clear they are new.

About people complaining about subtitles not being shown I don't know, to me it's irrelevant. It depends on whether OS is a place to show ALL SUBTITLES EVERYONE HAS EVER MADE or to show the best subtitle for each occassion.

Extra subtitles would always be present. In the subtitles results would be a link that says something like "(8 more subtitles for this movie)" and then clicking on it it shows the extended search (which would be a checkbox in the search form and clicking on the link would just enable the setting).

In the API there could be a setting for getting a "simplified" set of results, with only the "best" results ("default" behaviour should not change, so it would show all results).

Again, I can't help thinking this would improve the overall quality of the site. There is a LOT of crap at the moment, because more and more people upload similar (but not identical) subs. It could also make the "social" aspect of OS a little better, as you'd only "raise" socially if your subs were of good quality.

And if someone uploads your subtitle with improvements then everyone benefits. The point is to have quality subtitles, not to inflate people's egos. Especially if people want their mediocre offerings (if there is an improved version then yours becomes mediocre) to have priority over those that improve them.