AIO Rating System Released

Whit's wiping down the counter, Connie's mopping the floor, and the kids are sipping on their milkshakes. If you want to talk about Adventures in Odyssey the radio drama, this is the spot to do just that!
Post Reply
User avatar
Bob
Catspaw Rocks!
Posts: 705
Joined: September 2006
Location: The Metroplex
Gender:
Contact:

AIO Rating System Released

Post by Bob »

Some years ago I made a proposal for a better way to make an AIO rating system, based on matching up individual episodes against each other. After some work, I'm pleased to announce the first version of this page is ready for use.

This preliminary version lacks some desirable features, including a complete list of episode summaries and a more convenient refresh button, and the appearance of the page is not complete, but it is functionally ready for action, and given the scope of this project, I thought it would be best to get it up as soon as possible so that users can get started rating episodes.

Thanks for your time and interest. I'd love to hear comments or suggestions.
User avatar
bookworm
ToO Historian
ToO Historian
Posts: 16248
Joined: July 2006
Contact:

Post by bookworm »

Very cool Bob! :)
Image
User avatar
Mariogeek
Tallying up
Posts: 148
Joined: September 2016
Location: Supposedly on Earth

Post by Mariogeek »

Yo
User avatar
Catspaw
Care Bear Admin
Care Bear Admin
Posts: 30425
Joined: April 2005
Location: Canada
Gender:

Post by Catspaw »

Fun stuff! I can see this becoming addictive. I want to keep clicking! :mad: I'm sure a lot of work went into this, Bob. Thanks for sharing!

I wonder if multiple-part episodes should be listed together? I had one where I was comparing part 1 of an episode to part 2 of a different episode, and it felt kind of odd. I don't even always remember what the dividing line is, and I'm really thinking of the episode as a whole when I vote.
Image
User avatar
Bob
Catspaw Rocks!
Posts: 705
Joined: September 2006
Location: The Metroplex
Gender:
Contact:

Post by Bob »

Thanks for the support!

On multi-part episodes: Sometimes it's hard to tell. I erred on the side of caution here for the cases where the multiple parts have a substantially different style or differences that are relevant (I admit I was also a little worried about multiple-parters being ranked more highly than regular episodes, but perhaps that's not reasonable).

What exacerbates the problem right now is the total lack of episode summaries, especially when AIO (in my opinion) made the mistake of making entire albums that consist only of parted episodes and no distinct episode names. I can generally remember at least a little bit about most individual episodes in DBD, but nobody knows what happened in "The Ties that Bind Part 9". When the differences between the episodes are described in more detail, it will be easier to tell if there is a real difference in value.
User avatar
Mariogeek
Tallying up
Posts: 148
Joined: September 2016
Location: Supposedly on Earth

Post by Mariogeek »

I think you were correct in making multi-part episodes as... well, multi-part episodes. My opinion about Legacy part 1 is drastically different than my opinion about Legacy part 2. I'm sure there are other multi-part episodes that I feel the same about.
Yo
User avatar
Bob
Catspaw Rocks!
Posts: 705
Joined: September 2006
Location: The Metroplex
Gender:
Contact:

Post by Bob »

Introduced a few desirable new features and cosmetic/formatting changes, bringing the version number up to 1.1, and then 1.1.1.

The highlights:
* There's now a results box that pops up after a finished rating showing the gain and damage.
* New "Skip" button for users who haven't heard an episode, or can't possibly bring themselves to choose in a tough matchup.
* New link in the name that pulls up a new tab going to the AIOWiki page -- among other things, this should help mitigate the problem with the lack of episode summaries until they're up.
User avatar
Mariogeek
Tallying up
Posts: 148
Joined: September 2016
Location: Supposedly on Earth

Post by Mariogeek »

Hi again, Bob, I like this system so much that I added a button for it on my site homepage: https://odysseynerds.wordpress.com/2018 ... -homepage/
Yo
User avatar
Bob
Catspaw Rocks!
Posts: 705
Joined: September 2006
Location: The Metroplex
Gender:
Contact:

Post by Bob »

Thanks so much! It's lovely to get this kind of response to it so early. I hoped it might be a big thing when the idea crossed my mind a few years back and it seems like we're taking the first baby steps towards getting there.

A few remarks on the changes in 1.2.0 and the phantom 1.1.2 which I never seemed to comment on (in the future I think I mean to keep a better record of all the version changes and what they entail). This is going from my memory, with help from logs -- so it might not be strictly accurate, but it's my best guess at the time present.

1.1.2 entailed a fairly minor but helpful bug fix. From what I can best seem to figure out, I believe it involved fixing a problem with generating AIOWiki links with special characters in them. Before, it choked on apostrophes (like in "Bethany's Imaginary Friend"); the revised 1.1.2 should have had fully working links for every episode.

1.2.0 was mostly a backend change. I was concerned about the possibility of the RNG not being sufficiently random, and installed a new one which *should* be improved from there. I believe I also added the display on the Statistics page showing how many episodes are in and how many matches there've been at this time.

Some things I hope to get in in the future (besides new episodes):
We're still lacking a full set of summaries. This is the most important thing that can be added right now in terms of benefitting the user and should get top priority. I am not sure at this point whether I mean to pursue getting permission to use the official summaries available from FotF, see if I can borrow the AIOWiki's or some other Odyssey site's, or have an entire new set written (which would be sure to meet the standards I hope for, but would take a very long time, and may require that I have some help -- I suspect I'd break my hands or develop carpal tunnel trying to summarize 866 episodes in a short time span).
I hope to come up with more theme styles (I was thinking a unique theme for many individual albums) and a situational system for choosing which one to display.
The statistics page needs a numerical ranking showing how far down or up the list you are. This 'should' be simple to implement and a tweak that will greatly improve functionality there. It's quite possible you'll see this in a microupdate, maybe 1.2.1.
I decided on the Elo rating system for its simplicity and the ability to get instant feedback on the results of your decisions, among other things. That said, since the system stores every match, I'm not sure there's anything preventing me from also implementing a version of the more complicated Glicko system down the road. Perhaps this will come at a later date, though this is considered an advanced feature and not something I mean to work on soon (its chief advantage for us is its ability to get a fair ranking of an episode with fewer matches under its belt).
At some point I would like to have some 'grouped' statistics tables, comparing albums or such.
Finally, when I first proposed this idea, I thought that episodes might be matched up against each other on different criteria. There is room for this to be added in down the road -- it just involves picking those criteria, implementing everything I have now again several times over, and giving you a way to choose between which criteria you're using.

-- 12 Jan 2018 05:39 pm --

Microupdate underway and a notice about a mistake I made.

1.2.1 includes the ranking table change I mentioned before. In addition, I'm working on including the first batch of episode summaries, primarily covering the majority of the first 200 episodes.

Unfortunately, while doing this work, I had some trouble importing and ended up restoring the table with episode Elos from a backup. This shouldn't have been a problem, but I left the site up while I was doing this (figuring it'd be 'easy' and since nobody was on it'd be no trouble). Well... somebody may have been on. It's possible that some Elo rating changes were thus 'eaten' by the restoration of the backup. I'm very sorry about this. Thanks to the matches being stored the way they are, I can in theory restore them at a later time. I'll be looking into ways to help mitigate this kind of thing in the future.

-- 12 Jan 2018 11:05 pm --

The Elo ratings should now be fixed. It's worth noting that the backup was recent, so very few of these should have been affected in the first place, no more than 30 or so.
Last edited by Bob on Wed Jan 10, 2018 2:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Post Reply