We were talking about the reviews pages a while back so I'd like to make a suggestion. I really like the way they are laid out, by subject, and also how they show the relative popularity of various reviews. One thing though that I miss, compared to say Track Links is it's a little hard to search for an item by manufacturer. Maybe I'm missing something but the only way I can find to locate all Italeri kits, for example, is to find one Italeri kit reviewed then look at all the other Italeri kits from that one. Shouldn't there be a way of listing all Italeri, DML, Tamiya, etc, reviews without first having to find one by that maker?

Rodger, there WOULD BE a large database of reviews iif people started sending in reviews/overviews or news. The way I see it, your idea is totally valid, the problem being that unless someone sits down, and every time they build a kit, they do a review of it...that way we would end up having a truly useful review databank. The problem is that not many actually spend the time (or have the inclination) to actually put together a review or even a news item.

On a general note, apart from Military Modelling and Euro-Modelismo (and sometimes FSM), I don't have the same access the vast majority of modellers here have to news items either in LHS, model shows or the regular access to specialist magazines. Therefore what I have to do, is to trawl the 'net, looking for items which could be of interest to the users of this site. I tend to steer clear of aviation unless its something which really gets my interest... Phantoms for example.... I also tend to stay clear of Axis armor, my knowledge base tends to be a little out of date. Also, I get mightily annoyed, when 'rumors' are published as gospel, something that this site does (fortunately) stay clear of. Other sites seem to have no compulsion in publishing rumors as if they came from the manufacturer themself...

The solutions, which need a great deal of consideration will eventually come. This will require the members to actually start doing some of the work themselves...Jim

This might be easier done than you think. The reviews are supposed to be categorized by vendor/manufacturer when the review is written. If the vendor/manufacturer isn't listed in the drop-down list when writing a review, staff members have the ability to make it so they are-but I'm not sure of all those that can. I know I can.

Anyway, if the vendor/manufacturer is selected from the drop-down list then I tink it might be rather easy to add a sort function on the review home page that lets you select the vendor/manufacturer from a list and then display those reviews. Sort of like a database look-up function.

I say this sounds easy but when Jim weighs in we may find out otherwise.

Hi there

I've called out for an indexing system for reviews on several occasions. The "sort by hits" system is an amusing novelty, but no help in finding what you need. The search engine is much improved since the adoption of Google, but an alphabetical index would be so much easier...

Now the time to act on this sort of thing; at the moment we haven't got too many reviews to make adopting a new system a major problem.

All the best

Rowan

Hi...
and.. as the number of reviews is, currently, manageable the time to do a proper index thing is now. Then all following reviews can fall into place.

And as also there have been a few new reviewers, is this a trend were we will get a lot more in the near future? Plus I have a number of reviews in the pipeline and Rowan probably has a loose handful in prep also. So the number of incoming reviews is definitely growing.
Prevention is better than cure.

Just my farthings worth.

Cheers
Peter
:-)

Christmas in March? Look under the tree...Santa may have left something for you.

Jim

Now THAT'S what I call service. There it is, a way to look at all reviews by manufacturer. Thanks Jim.

Thanks, Jim. This is a really cool function, and very helpful. I never realized just how many reviews we had available at Armorama.

Mike

That is too cool! Great idea Rodger and good job Jim. I'd only add the ability to chose between genres like armor/aircraft/etc. within a manufacturer's listing once we have a whole lot of reviews. Right now there probably aren't enough reviews per manufacturer to make this worthwhile.

Also someday the ability to cross reference a review through various boxings. For example, a review on the Italeri M60A1 would be crossed referenced to the original Esci M60A1 and would also pertain to the Revell M60A3 and the original Esci M60A3TTS.