I've reconsidered my star rating system. It's been a four-star system for a good six years or so, but I used half-star increments. So, technically it was a ten-star system? Hmm.
It's worked well for DMD for a long time, but a natural downside of only reviewing things you love, like, or find interesting, is that it's rare for something to ever get less than two-stars. And I'm a tough enough critic that achieving the maximum four-stars is a rarity. So, technically, it's always been a six-star system? Hmm.
This is why I have changed things. The star-system is now simplified to just five bolder options:
☆☆☆☆ = Atrocious
★☆☆☆ = Poor
★★☆☆ = Okay
★★★☆ = Good
★★★★ = Excellent
There probably won't be very many zero-star reviews, it's true, because I have the luxury of filtering what I write about on a personal blog, but I'm hoping more four-star reviews will be achievable now. The Walking Dead season 5 premiere already managed that honour. I probably would have given it a ★★★½ ranking a week ago.
Another big reason for the change is the nature of these stars. They're text-based, not image-based. It was a pain to keep uploading .GIFs, or recycling existing uploads.
Having text-based stars make my life a lot easier now, and has the added bonus of stars being visible in the sidebars of DMD. So now you can tell how many stars I gave something 'at a glance' in more places than ever before, including my Twitter feed. Incidentally, RSS feeds sometimes wouldn't show the old .GIF stars (no idea why!), but there's no such problem with text-stars.
I'll leave you to ponder the mind-blowing magnitude of this change, while I submit this post for consideration in the Most Boring Blog Post of 2014 category in as many online awards sites I can find. Goodbye!
Update: if you have a spare 2.4 seconds, please vote in my poll below, so I can determine if these stars are a major problem, or if a minority just need to upgrade their OS/browsers.
(Oh, feel free to use this post as a place for random questions, thoughts, queries, and opinions on anything relating to DMD. I know some people have stuff to say, but don't want to rudely go 'off-topic' in a published post.)
