Featured Ratings & Reviews

[Tamschi]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I make game assets which have very positive ratings and reviews from game creators. I'd like to make them visible on my project pages (with the respective author's prior and self-revocable consent, of course) in order to better convince visitors of the purchase.

Describe the solution you'd like

I'd like a "Featured Ratings" section that shows on my asset pages.

I bodged a quick example using styles from the development log section and HTML from a https://itch.io/game/ratings/… dashboard page¹:

(I'm clearly not a copy editor, but I think notice about the cherry-picked nature of the section is important.)

When authoring a rating, there should be a checkbox to allow this:

On the project's https://itch.io/game/ratings/… dashboard page, I'd like a "Feature on project page" toggle at the bottom of each rating that can be featured to let me do so.

(For ratings created before this feature is added, it would be lovely to have a "Request to feature on project page" toggle instead, but I suspect that may be more work than anything else in this request. It would be important to not make it spammable, i.e. to limit the simultaneous total and retract notifications when undone.)

Further details I'd like to see:

• The date links to the rating's https://itch.io/e/…/… feed-event page, just for further clarification that it's real.
• If the rating user has a creator page, their display name links to there instead of to their community profile.
• If the star-rating or text are changed, the rating is automatically un-featured or un-to-feature-requested, whichever is applicable.
• If the rating author has NSFW content uploaded, don't feature their rating unless the page visitor has "Show content marked as adult in search & browse" enabled or the featuring project page is adult content itself.
• In light of automatic un-featuring and hiding items to certain visitors, please let me overprovision a bit.
  For example, if up to 3 ratings with review and up to five ratings in total can be featured, let me (request-to-)feature up to 10 ratings privately and display only the chronologically most-recent ones that are eligible among them.
• Toggling only the permission to feature the rating, with no other changes, should neither broadcast a new feed item to followers nor un-feature or un-to-feature-request the rating.

Possibly nice to have:

• Allow requests to feature any rating where that's not yet allowed by its author, not just old ones.
  This may need a notification debounce and rate limits so that the rating's author can't be bothered with repeat notifications.
• Notify the project owner when a rating becomes un-featured or un-to-feature-requested, alongside rating notifications
  (see also Feature request: notifications for reviews received #1154).
• Maybe let project page owners choose to feature ratings by adult content creators unconditionally?
  Though I suspect there'd be issues if adult content becomes directly discoverable through itch.io that way.

Overall this should ensure existing (viewer's) content preferences are honoured and that nobody's rating or review is suddenly made more public than they intended when submitting it.

Describe alternatives you've considered

This intentionally doesn't involve making the project's aggregate rating more visible, as that would be easy to manipulate.
That generally isn't as much the case with reviews that are explicitly cherry-picked, where credibility is given by the reviewers' reputation instead.

That said, it would be prudent to be able to report featured ratings and reviews for impersonation directly, without reporting the surrounding page.
(Another option might be to show the user's ….itch.io domain alongside their display name.)

It's possible that featured ratings where their author received a (now) paid project item for free (legally) have to be marked to disclose that potential conflict of interest.

Additional context

This is inspired by a social media post I saw some time ago that expressed the core idea of "reviews shown on project page".
It was made by a game- rather than purely asset-developer, so I think it would be beneficial for game projects too.

Footnotes

1. Essentially, I just copied the .rating element HTML and three or four style rules over from that page. ↩