As you're probably aware, a few people have taken on the task of editing the reviews on the site to correct any mistakes in the spelling, punctuation and grammar. We'd like it if you all gave us permission to do so, rather than just wading in, so please give us the go-ahead in here. If you have any strong objections or would like to see the changes we're planning on making before the corrected review is uploaded let us know - we can always PM or email you the final version with highlighted changes. If you flat refuse that's fair enough - saves us a bit of work!

We're not quite sure as yet what we're going to do if we don't get a response from any of the reviewers - I imagine there's a few who are no longer active. We'll probably just leave them until last and make a decision then.



The following reviewers have given us permission to edit their reviews:

BeefontheBone
Einherjar
Fawfulhasfury
Iron_Scarecrow
Kosta
Lizard
Mad-E-Fact
Maikel
Reup
TheVoid
Titan
Tom Henrik
Wendymaree
Wormpaul
The Picard
Punch999
Kon-Tikki

The following people would like to see the edit before it was uploaded:

Omuletzu
Puffin/Kiddiarni
Sebastianos
Strobe
Tuttle
Unknown Hero
Einherjar

The following do not want us to edit their work:

Astral





The old thread got closed because the discussion has gone off-topic. Please refrain from doing this here.

If you want to give permissions or not please send a PM to BeefontheBone or post in this thread

i give permission for my review (theres one been uploaded and i did a few others taht got lost when my HD died :'() to be edited as needs be.

Permission granted.

Just to say: i don't think you guys can't be trusted. I doub that someone of you will totaly change the point of the review. And i don't see why should we keep reviews with syntax errors or errors in language.

My second review (Shadow of the Comet) was changed by Kosta on several places and he even put his own walkthrough instead of mine. No problem, minor changes in review were made because i made some mistakes and his walkthrough was much better. I can't understand people that would have problem with this kind of actions.

I also think that teams for translating abandonia to different languages shoud have this checking of reviews, just in case.

I'd like to see the edit of my review before I give a permission for putting it up instead of the original.

No problem guys, I'll note those now. The post at the top is no longer mine unfortunately, so I can't edit it, but the one we use in the Grammar section I can!

Well, i think that anyone will want to know when the changes in their reviews are made, although they gave you entire permission. Just inform someone that you made couple (or several, or many) changes in his review due to that-and-that.
I think that this should be a rule in the future.

In my case, it won't harm to informe me, but i guess that it's not a big deal, unless entire sentense is changed.

Just occured me, if it is big error and therefore a big change, you may send original sentence and new sentence to the reviewer, in order to improve his english, but this is too much even in my opinion (then why did i mentioned it :blink: )

Basically we've been seeing a blank "go ahead" as permission to correct any mistakes we find in the SPG. We're not doing anything major, barring the occasional restructuring of a sentence, and asking the reviewer if there's anything bigger. Anyone who says they want to see the edit is getting just that - a copy of the text with changes highlighted and the opportunity to dscuss any of them with us if they're not happy. If anyone looks at a review we've changed and doesn't agree with what we've done we're very open to discussion - there's no enforced editing here!

If anyone isn't happy AFTER an updated review is placed online, you can still send a PM to Kosta or an Admin, so we can have another go at it..

you may edit my reviews too. please send a note with the changes to me.

[EDIT] no further notification necessassary. I'm not online too often at the moment, so feel free to edit my reviews without asking. After all, I've begun to trust you grammar guys :D

I see your point, but that would mean reviewers would constantly have to read through all of their reviews to see if a change has been made. I've reviewed well over 30 games and don't really feel like reading every single one of those reviews every day, just to see if anything has changed. I don't mind my reviews being edited, but as long as there's my name under it I'd like to know just what has been changed.

It's enough to trust those from the Grammar Squad. They're with enough to make sure nobody'll edit the contents, and'll just take out grammatical mistakes and spelling errors. Give them at least that bit of credit.

God knows we don't deserve much more!

I think i only have 3 reviews that are on the site but feel free to correct them.

You are free to correct my reviews. :ok:

Feel free to correct mine!

Don't post much, or review much,'xept those Ultimas which I think aren't up becuase of the reviews I did, but feel free to modify anything I do, or even replace them totally.

can I join the grammar team? I wanna do something for the site too! :-p

hey, off-topic ness! (ish) we're ok for grammar bods at the minute thanks - try asking kosta about starting on the FAQs (once decisions have been made about their content, of course)

everyone else, i'm noting these in the grammar section, so this first post here prolly won't get updated (since it's not mine)

I did 2 reviews but i don't see the point correcting them, for grammar i use Word and there can't be mistakes and as for the other, it is the personal style, you can't just start correcting something that have a little of the soul of the reviewer and you wan't to change it... I Don't want my reviews being corrected in any way...

If you need my permission...you got it. :)

Putting a lot of trust in MicroSoft there, bud - I wouldn't recommend it. :D If you don't want them changed we'll try not to, but if we spot something we'll ask you about it.

I think i have 2/3 reviews floating around, feel free to edit them.

Would have given permission before... I thought I had.

According to my list, you already have :ok:

I thought we lost all our rights to our reviews once we submitted them? If that's so, then why are you asking for our permission for you to edit our reviews? Like I've said to others before, there's no point in reviewers granting permission for review editing because the editors will do what they want anyway.

Well, you tell me. Did you think that? If so, you are correct.

Courtesy.

Well, no. The admins have the final say, of course. And we lowly editors are not out to get you or anyone else. If we run across a sentence like "The game is forcing player to run deeper and deeper into pathetic world of overpopulated earth," we'll change it to something like "This game forces the player to travel deeper and deeper into the disturbing world of an overpopulated earth." If we see that the review was written by someone we don't like, we may add, "but I feel an unnatural attraction to goats and other farm animals, so what do I know?" However, it is very rare for us to do this. If you genuinely have a problem with something we've edited, you are of course free to take it up with the admin of your choice. Given that the admins are human beings, previous forum behavior may help or harm your case. If you're generally well-respected and present your case in a calm and coherent manner, the admin in question is probably a lot more likely to be sympathetic than if you're widely recognized as a whiny jerk and fill up said admin's inbox with messages that read "GRAMMER NATZIES R TEH SUXOR!!!!1!!" That's just the way it is. (Note that this is speculation. I am not qualified to speak for the admins.)

Well there have been some mistakes in my reviews (some were ironed out by the grammer squad - great job you're doing guys and galls), but I like to be notified if this happens.

1) I can analizy my own mistakes and try to learn from them.

2) The grammer squad may have changed it into something I would never say (corrected it wrong). So I'd explain further what I was trying to say and the edited review would be re-edited and then the changes would be put on the site.

Yes - the reviews we submit do become the property of abandonia, but they are still our own reviews. So if a significant change is made I can still demand them to say who made the change. As long as my name is at the botom of a review I should have some say about it, otherwise people are actually putting words in my mouth (unless if the parts edited are marked and signed by the person who changed them).

That ^ is precisely how we've been working; anyone who asks to be notified receives a copy of our edit and is free to question edits or ask for explanation, and we'll listen to what they have to say, but if the majority of the grammar guys disagree with them we'll try to persuade them but eventually overrule them if they're intransigent. We're trying to correct mistakes and improve readability, not rewrite them all - if we wanted to do that why ask for them to be submitted in the first place?

I don't really like this editing system. I think that the editors should be reduced to an advisory role and recommend to the reviewer possible changes that they feel are needed (unless they want the editors to edit everything for them).

From my experience, the one editor who "consulted" with me was rather rude and arrogant, and refused to acknowledge most of the challenges I had posed to his corrections to one of my reviews. I had listed several outstanding circumstances in one review and explained what I thought was wrong with the changes they had made, and I was met with an holier-than-thou attitude. I don't think I should have to go through all the brass just because some editor with a chip on his shoulder the size of Alaska decided he wanted to play God with my reviews.

I wouldn't describe pointing out to you that all 3 of us disagreed with you on certain points while accepting and immediately changing approximately half of the things you mentioned, only to be met with aggressive flaming, a "holier-than-thou" attitude.

EDIT: And they weren't "my" corrections, there are several pages of discussion of that particular review with contribution from 3 members.

Many people around here have English for second or even third language, you know. So corrections are needed and helpful to keep the site in shape.

The grammar squad (or other people fixing some errors) won't do this with an evil attitude. They just try to impove the standard of the site. Maybe you have English as your first languge, but there might still be some minor errors while typing or writing a review. Sometimes it is just a single expression, which doesn't fit properly or for which the editor has some better expression at hand. Noone wants to dosgrace a reviewer's work here. You should just take them as a "good advice" IMO.

maybe they should only give 'good advice'. Im certain parts of my review weren't there when I sent it in.

The aforementioned review had a number of errors that were missed by the editors, and when I read the revised copy I added in a few changes, but they were reverted to what they were before.

When I tried to reason with the editor who contacted me, I challenged several revisions made by the editors. By not giving a reason for the revisions or why my challenges were overlooked, I inferred that those challenges were ignored. You see, I know my reviews aren't perfect, but that doesn't mean I'm a bad writer or I'm incapable of writing reviews at all. Would it be so wrong for the editors to choke down a little pride every now and then and admit they made a mistake instead of talking to the reviewers like they were dirt? I disagreed with those changes, and yet because I was a lowly reviewer what I had to say had little bearing on the final form the review would take.

Good advice is one thing, "here's my changes; if you don't like them, bugger off" is completely different.

As I said in my last post, we changed the bits where we had made mistakes (one serious one, for which I apologised) and I would probably have been more likely to enter into a discussion with you if your attitude had been more reasonable. I copied your comments into the editing thread and we all agreed, as I pointed out to you, that the edits you objected to were correct.

This isn't the place to discuss that, however - it's been dealt with, and this is already the second version of this thread, after someone caused it to be closed.

You have a flawed interpretation of what happened in that conversation we had. You were quite rude to me, well before I decided to give a little of your horse ~~~~ back.

Once again, that has already been dealt with, and if you have a problem with it still I suggest you take it up once again with The Picard, rather than cluttering up this once-useful thread.

My purpose for posting this incident was not to focus the thread on you (though I feel you got off a lot easier than you should have), but to demonstrate my reason for wanting the editing system to change. Please stop trying to make yourself the center of attention with your vain trolling attempts.

Which review would that be, Danny? I'm not aware that we have edited any of yours yet, although I could certainly be mistaken.

I don't know about which review Danny is talking about, but I know that sometimes reviews get changed by the updaters as well (usually it says Updater's comment). I know it happened to some of my early updates (like Detroit).

So maybe that's what's happend to Danny's review as well (it would help to know which game we're talking about though).