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An Observation about OCR


Final Kingdom
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If there was, for example, a pre-judge judging system, one which premium members of a sort were allowed to help with or vote on, which allowed us to weed out the really awful stuff and save the judges time, I, for one, would happily pay for the opportunity. Hell I would happily pay just for a permanent acknowledgement of raised status.

We do have one, and it does exactly what you say it does, for free.

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The only pre-judge things that's actually mandatory is the screening of mixes in the inbox, where some are rejected right away, some skip the panel to be direct posts, and some are posted to the panel. I don't know how it's set up, but I think it's pretty much a manual thing. In that case, it could be more automated, maybe via some script that auto-posts emails forwarded to a specific address to the panel or a dp inbox. This script could also add a notice back to sender that the track was posted to the panel or that it'll get a direct post. Likewise, there could be a script that spreads out submissions to different inbox evaluators.

Regarding mod reviews: higher-up staff, could workshop mods get a mod-review shortcuts forum, with only mod-review-marked threads? It's not that hard to command-f for "mod r" in the remix forum, but this would give a better overview, as well as make it easier to unmark old mr-marked threads.

Related suggestion - a shortcut subforum to all Album/Other threads, so ppl can more easily find ppl's own albums and other releases.

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1. The writeup is not the only effort involved in posting a remix. There's getting it tagged, uploading it to multiple servers, and getting the associated YouTube video uploaded, not to mention Facebook/Twitter promotion of the mix.
I feel like the uploading part should be fairly easy to automate using a script or two.

I also don't see how the above tasks, albeit horrifyingly boring, could take any more than a few minutes in total. Anyway, is djp solely responsible for doing all that as part of mixposting? Is there any reason why any of the above but the actual write-up couldn't be taken care of by anyone else on staff? I would have thought this was already the case (Larrybot), but from what zircon wrote, it doesn't seem to be. Reducing the workload on the bottleneck (djp) as much as possible should be in everyone's interest.

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I'm not sure of how it could be done, but maybe giving some benefits to people that succesfully use the WIP forums could lower the workload for the judges.

Just throwing out ideas, but maybe if a song receives a good review by the Workshop mods, the ammount of YES votes to be accepted could be lowered. Stuff like that could work I think.

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Love all of you and everything about the mission statement of the site, but it's late and I have a life so I'll be the first to admit I tl;dr'd this one.

I'll assume that someone mentioned the voting system a la VGmix by now, and I'll agree that there's pitfalls to that system when any/all users can vote... I've also seen first-hand from having met Stevo and some of the gang at PAX East this year that I know you guys work RIDICULOUSLY hard considering you're all glorified volunteers. As someone who just finished putting everything he had into ConBravo, I can sympathize for how much the kickstarter thing must've hurt. To think many of you have time to make music on the side is insane.

I've been pretty inspired by another new media business model from entertainers/gamers/entrepreneurs VGA Live. They've got a membership fee and suggested yearly membership re-donation of $50 to go 'turbo' and access their minecraft server, tf2 server, and be able to chat live on the show as well as other benefits. Not unlike Something Awful's paid forum membership, it really helps to weed out the idiots.

My suggestion is that, perhaps, a 2nd tier of membership for OCR would work well. I can donate, and I would support the kickstarter v2, but what gets me REALLY excited as a potential contributor to the site is the opportunity to help in a tangible WORKLOAD way.

If there was, for example, a pre-judge judging system, one which premium members of a sort were allowed to help with or vote on, which allowed us to weed out the really awful stuff and save the judges time, I, for one, would happily pay for the opportunity. Hell I would happily pay just for a permanent acknowledgement of raised status.

Call it a pride thing but I've been with the site for nearly a decade and I want to do what I can to build this brand with you guys too. It sucks to think that great musicians might be withholding contributions when they see a backlog of a year and I want to do what I can to contribute to a solution.

We don't really need more methods of fundraising though, nor do we have a shortage of music contributions... our backlog is enormous and the rate of submission is only increasing. If we did implement a fancy submission form, the rate will go up even further.

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People are already elitist about being posted. I don't think having a tier for posted mixers to be put in some kind of different inbox (or even just be auto-flagged based on being a "contact" in the inbox's contact list) would have much of an effect on the existing elitism. And it would be one more thing for new remixers to strive towards, like being posted. I don't think it has to be some huge deal either. I think it is something they could implement without telling anyone, honestly why would they need to (tell people)?

If it helps them separate the submissions easier then that might be helpful. But they still need to approach every mix in the same manner, whether it is "flagged" as a posted mixer or not. Nobody would get special treatment from that. Stuff that isn't flagged wouldn't be rejected just because the mixer is new to submitting or hasn't passed yet. If it helped speed up direct rejections / direct posts then that might be helpful, but even posted mixers can get direct rejected. And newcomers can be direct posted. It happens. :3

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People are already elitist about being posted. I don't think having a tier for posted mixers to be put in some kind of different inbox (or even just be auto-flagged based on being a "contact" in the inbox's contact list) would have much of an effect on the existing elitism. And it would be one more thing for new remixers to strive towards, like being posted. I don't think it has to be some huge deal either. I think it is something they could implement without telling anyone, honestly why would they need to (tell people)?

If it helps them separate the submissions easier then that might be helpful. But they still need to approach every mix in the same manner, whether it is "flagged" as a posted mixer or not. Nobody would get special treatment from that. Stuff that isn't flagged wouldn't be rejected just because the mixer is new to submitting or hasn't passed yet. If it helped speed up direct rejections / direct posts then that might be helpful, but even posted mixers can get direct rejected. And newcomers can be direct posted. It happens. :3

Yeah, so in a way there already is a second tier of membership in form of being posted. But the fact remains, if people pay money to the site to get some badge saying OCR SUPPORTER that comes with some benefits, then that's also gonna be bad. I love this community, and I love how welcoming it is to new members. I'd hate to see anything like paid membership destroy that in any way.

Being posted is one thing, but if you paid to get benefits? That expands the pool of possible elitist jerks by quite a bit were it to be implemented. And if you've been posted AND you paid for that OCR SUPPORTER membership, then that's double the dose of jerkhood.

Just my two cents on that, though.

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Nah no way paid membership yuck. I don't think OCR would ever consider such a thing, kinda goes against what I think they stand for as a site. I could be wrong but that seems clear to me. :|

What I do think would be awesome though is achievements. Could be like the Steam Badges they just implemented on Steam. They could be a variety of things and open to anyone who registers. :-D

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It wouldn't save any time, since all subbed mixes have to be evaluated. Plenty of posted mixers, even those with 5-10+ mixers or more, can sub stuff that is 3 NO material.

Yeah, we're definitely not having paid memberships where members could help eval tracks. Let's not run too far with evaluating how that idea would work; we're not doing that. :lol:

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Nah no way paid membership yuck. I don't think OCR would ever consider such a thing, kinda goes against what I think they stand for as a site. I could be wrong but that seems clear to me. :|

What I do think would be awesome though is achievements. Could be like the Steam Badges they just implemented on Steam. They could be a variety of things and open to anyone who registers. :-D

I could get behind that idea. It would also encourage people to lurk less and be involved more, which wouldn't be a bad thing at all.

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Wow. Wasn't aware of this system. I should really come around here more often. :<

The only reason I don't think a second tier of OCR membership would work is because it would probably serve as a deterrent for new members. People would abuse it, show elitism because of it, and generally be jerks about it. Inevitable.

While I don't think it would completely scare newbies off consistently (many of them might just want in the club) you may have a point about the abuse thing. We have enough dicks around these parts.

We don't really need more methods of fundraising though, nor do we have a shortage of music contributions... our backlog is enormous and the rate of submission is only increasing. If we did implement a fancy submission form, the rate will go up even further.

It isn't really the submission format I'm talking about here, that would only need to change if change would help it in some way. I'm just looking, as an outsider, at how demand exceeding supply is working out and how it seems to be increasingly disproportionate; worse still unsustainable. The reason I mention VGA and their 'company' is that, while it's still just a meager couple of guys out of a house they've always treated it like a business and have been able to consistently improve their product because of it.

I'm not suggesting that OCR charge for server access, but yeah, if a badge system, or WHATEVER system, meant that OCR wasn't just meeting their hosting fees but actually cutting a profit, as law would allow, then maybe, perhaps, some more dedicated volunteers could afford a salary and leave their day job to focus on OCR full time. Ugh, I'm probably talking out my ass. I don't mean to belittle the massive amount of work already being put in, I just want things to be moving towards greater functionality and not the opposite. It's also seems unfair to have only djp manning the posting write-ups and such.

Another idea, just spit-balling here, my brother's webcomic operates on a buffer. He works on about 4 comics a week for a 3 comic week, MWF, and he didn't even launch the comic until he had over 100 strips (ie: nearly 8 months) ready to go. His buffer keeps increasing so that he can take time off as he needs, kind of like how tv series have everything done WAY before it gets to the tv station and it's just a matter of how/when they release it.

If we had it so that we averaged about 40 songs/month and even if we had 2 or 3 songs ready that day, released at a rate of 1/day... or 5 a week on weekdays and the page/post was time-delayed to being launched, would that not start shifting things back in our favour? I know submission quality/frequency ebbs and flows, but even still, I would think working towards something like that might help.

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It isn't really the submission format I'm talking about here, that would only need to change if change would help it in some way. I'm just looking, as an outsider, at how demand exceeding supply is working out and how it seems to be increasingly disproportionate; worse still unsustainable. The reason I mention VGA and their 'company' is that, while it's still just a meager couple of guys out of a house they've always treated it like a business and have been able to consistently improve their product because of it.

I'm not suggesting that OCR charge for server access, but yeah, if a badge system, or WHATEVER system, meant that OCR wasn't just meeting their hosting fees but actually cutting a profit, as law would allow, then maybe, perhaps, some more dedicated volunteers could afford a salary and leave their day job to focus on OCR full time. Ugh, I'm probably talking out my ass. I don't mean to belittle the massive amount of work already being put in, I just want things to be moving towards greater functionality and not the opposite. It's also seems unfair to have only djp manning the posting write-ups and such.

Another idea, just spit-balling here, my brother's webcomic operates on a buffer. He works on about 4 comics a week for a 3 comic week, MWF, and he didn't even launch the comic until he had over 100 strips (ie: nearly 8 months) ready to go. His buffer keeps increasing so that he can take time off as he needs, kind of like how tv series have everything done WAY before it gets to the tv station and it's just a matter of how/when they release it.

If we had it so that we averaged about 40 songs/month and even if we had 2 or 3 songs ready that day, released at a rate of 1/day... or 5 a week on weekdays and the page/post was time-delayed to being launched, would that not start shifting things back in our favour? I know submission quality/frequency ebbs and flows, but even still, I would think working towards something like that might help.

you have some good ideas, but the issue is twofold:

First OCR is not run like a business. It is basically Dave's personal site with a lot of people helping him out.

Having an 8 month backlog of scheduled stuff to post would be *amazing*, but the reality is that to get to that point, we'd need to take 8 months to get there, and that would fall solely on Dave's shoulders, since the bottleneck is his ability to post. With him dealing with the OCR redesign and a lengthy discussion with a certain game company, as well as a full time job and other responsibilities, the time just doesn't exist. The other staff ranges from 'second-job-busting-their-ass' levels of time commitment to '15-minutes-of-work-every-4-months'.

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actually cutting a profit
That would either mean paying large sums of royalties to game publishers or closing the shop. :wink:
It is basically Dave's personal site. [...] that would fall solely on Dave's shoulders.
Having hundreds, maybe thousands of people using your personal site as their base of operation, and such a huge supply of user-provided content that cannot possibly reach its target destination/audience in a timely fashion, it becomes apparent that:

-Mr Lloyd is NOT a Terminator. Yeah, I'm disappointed by the truth as well. :cry:

-he needs help handling the vast amount of content delivered everyday by a grumpy mailman who broke his back carrying bags of remixes.

-he should proly start delegating more responsibilities to his loyal and trusty vassals, as any sane feudal lord would have done in his time.

Though this has already been discussed at length in this thread, so I'll close the parenthesis here. ;)

As for the paid membership...

many of them might just want in the club

Last thing this site needs, is a way to further ostracize itself as an elitist club. It's hard enough reaching the gates of the OCR citadel as it is. :lol:

Yeah, we're definitely not having paid memberships [...] we're not doing that.
Amen. :)
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