I’ve made a Google Spreadsheet in which links to public reviews of the games can be entered. The names of the games are in there – some in abbreviated form, but all should be clear – so feel free to start adding reviews! Please use one column per reviewer.
14 Likes
Mathbrush has written nine reviews already?
4 Likes
He needs neither sleep nor victuals.
5 Likes
I think he’s actually just a sophisticated AI program.
2 Likes
Decided to add a column with my own reviews, just labelling them “author’s forum”, since there is no publicly accessible URL. Not useful for most of you, but I thought it could be helpful to (1) authors who don’t follow the authors’ forum closely; and (2) reviewers who want to review the least reviewed games. (I’ll move this column to the right so it’s not taking up precious space when more reviewers get added.)
1 Like
Can I add links of my streamed (on Twitch) playthroughs of the games and then later replace it with a link to an actual review?
Sure!
Do you need to replace them, or could you keep a separate column for each?
1 Like
I don’t want to take 2 columns for myself and also ruin the review counter with it, but I could just put 2 links into one field.
3 Likes
OK, I hope I didn’t do anything too out of bounds here with Google Apps scripts.
I tested them on my own copy. Now we can see the latest review an author wrote and the latest review for a game. The spreadsheet updates every time someone adds something, listing the latest author/review for the public and private forums.
I suspect my code can be improved, but I hope it’s good/useful/fun enough for now. You need to convert a number to the column equivalent, and that’s tricky, but doable.
Victor, if you need to roll this back, I won’t be crushed. But I hope it will be useful in some form.
1 Like
Looks like some advanced work there, Andrew. 
I certainly have nothing against it!
1 Like
Thanks, Victor. It was neat to finally have motivation to use serious JavaScript beyond the “hello world” stuff you find in online tutorials.
Also: I updated things so now we have a link to the latest reviews. Again, I tested the code before adding it. . While it’s possible (arithmetic grinding) to maybe have a link pointing separately to the author and the work along with the latest review, I think the best first step is just to link to the most recent review.
Linking to, say, the 10 most recent reviews (public or private) would be another next step. We’d need (probably) some sort of for-next loop where, say, cell E100 takes E99s value, E99 takes E98, and so on down to E91, which gets a new value. This doesn’t seem impossible, but if someone put in a bogus review link and forgot to undo things, it could break the list a bit.
ETA: most recent 10 lists are now in place. Again, they sort of break things if we find one author who’s posted 10 reviews, but I still think/hope it will be useful to see immediately who’s posted what, when.
3 Likes
This is amazing. So easy to check it and see the latest stuff. Thanks for doing this!
2 Likes
No problem! Your thanks poked me to check something that might speed things up…and it did!
I didn’t realize 1) you could copy ranges and 2) you could copy ranges that overlapped. So I replaced a for-loop with (range).copyTo and tested it, and now there will be far less of a delay after a game is added. There is still a race condition (e.g. if you add game A then game B quickly, e.g. with a serial copy/paste, the lists may not update ALL the new reviews added,) but it should be a lot less.
I think for our purposes, people will only be adding one author at a time, so the race condition might just make it harder for a discovered author who’s had 10 reviews to knock everyone off the list. I think/hope that’s ok, because if someone new appears, people will probably be looking at everything they right anyway.
1 Like
I suppose there is no easy way to fix mistakes? For instance, I accidentally copied the Breakfast Review link for Extreme Omnivore into the ProP column, then fixed that mistake… but now there’s a spurious entry for ProP reviewing Extreme Omnivore in the latest reviews column. Not a big deal at all, just checking.
Good point, Victor. We should have some guidelines on fixing mistakes.
I suppose undoing (ctrl-z) is the best way to do things if we remember, because it would (in this case) undo ProP’s latest review.
But we don’t catch mistakes right away, and that’s okay too–I don’t think there’s any problem with deleting ProP’s review in the “latest reviews” column, shifting the reviews below it up, and adding Breakfast Review’s. That should cover enough up. It may make the 10 most recent instead the 9 most recent until a new review comes in, but that’s not the end of the world.
I can’t think of a good way for the script to catch these mistakes. It assumes they don’t happen–and it will leave us with some odd stuff like ProP’s apparent most recent review not being there. It’s not trivial to track dates for all reviews, though it could be done without too much stress on a separate sheet. But I hope this is a good enough work-around for the top list.
Ah, you can just delete a non-existing review from that list of 10 without breaking anything? That’s good to know.
Yes. I was looking for a good place to put this information, but I couldn’t find one. Anyone who can think of a good way to lay this out, please go ahead and do so. I wouldn’t want anyone to avoid adding stuff because they are worried they might break something.
Oh good, I just added mine (without reading the rest of this thread first), mis-pasted one, and came back here to be like “I broke it a little, I’m sorry,” so it’s nice to know I’m not the first person to do this and that there’s an easy solution.