Quoting:
that's actually a good idea.  but wouldn't that be kinda hard.  I mean thats like a message board or something for every parody or something.  if one of mine parodies get rated low or high, I really don't care.  that just shows me that someone is reading it.  my certain ones, I think are funny, others are like ok and some are serious.  but all and all, I keep writing for me.  
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Quoting:
OK, I don't know very much about computers, so if this idea is way off-kilter, or would take way too much time, let me know.  Is it possible to either : Require voting on a certain number of other people's parodies per month to maintain "membership" or posting privileges... OR to receive a certain number of other people's parodies via e-mail, and be required to vote for them that way???  Also, I think it would be helpful if, when voting for another's parody, there was an area available to explain why you voted for their parody in a certain way.  If, when voting for a parody, you were required to explain your voting before submitting it, that might solve the problem of people voting poorly for a song just because it's not theirs.... Just tryin to throw out some ideas, let me know what you think!
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this is possible and not a bad idea in theory.. I'd have to write a lot of new code to handle it, and it would probably take a long time for me to get working.. but I don't think it would vastly increase the amount of votes people get though, and would probably decrease the amount of parodies submitted by unique people..

plus I'm sure people would game the system by just voting on anything to get credit.. back when I used to run a BBS in the early 90s, I used to try and encourage people to use the messageboard instead of just play the games.. people used to do just the bare minimum required, and then head straight for the games.. which I imagine is a similar analogy here.. whenever you try and slow people down from doing what they want, it frustrates them...

some of the other comments in this thread mention the ability for people to leave comments on a parody.. that's something I thought of ages ago, but wasn't sure how I should do it.

If the comments are to be viewed by just the parody author, I would have to make a userbased system for entering parodies (make everyone create an account, assign passwords, etc). It's a lot of overhead, and increases the amount of time people would have to spend on entering their parodies.  It also discourages new authors, which I certainly don't want to do (the more parody authors, the better IMHO)

If the comments are viewable by anyone, people will abuse it by posting garbage comments (ie. This parody sucks, or READ MINE INSTEAD, or VISIT MY WEBSITE FOR HOT CHICKS or worse).. so someone would need to police the comments for inappropriate comments, which means I need to appoint another moderator.. and whenever you moderate, you get criticism from people who just want to post inappropriate comments, or people who can't understand the basic concepts of posting meaningful criticism..

plus, if people don't take the time to vote (which requires only three checkboxes), what makes you think people will take the time to write comments?  

There is a possible combination of these ideas, which may work though.. I could setup a comments system, which gives  you the option to create an account to leave comments. Once you reach a certain amount of comments, you get a better rank next to your name when you leave comments.. that would encourage people who want to review parodies... kinda like the Amazon reviews.. you can still leave anonymous comments, but they need to be reviewed before being world viewable.. I could also create a seperate category for listing the most commented on songs, but that might favor someone like William Tong whose subject matter always causes a lot of heated debate..

I know people complain about William Tong, but if he wasn't posting his parodies here, someone else would probably have a lot of parodies and be a focal point for criticism instead.. so trying to seperate his parodies for whatever reason, just pushes the problem onto someone else.. it's not easy to figure out who the second most prolific writer on the site is currently, but I'm sure they've got several parodies in the top 50 too..

Quoting:
Chucky,

Just a thought about commenting on parodies directly - would it be possible to link a parody webpage to a thread on the messageboard (in a new area, say "Parody Comments"), such that the messageboard scripts would create the topic if it didn't exist - so you could have a "Click to to comment on this parody" which would take you to a thread on the messageboard "Comment on <parodyname>"; subsequent clicks would take you to the same spot.

You'd need to change the "this topic doesn't exist" code to be able to create a new one for jumps from amiright...

Another problem would be to get it to work retrospectively (i.e. provide the link for all existing parodies, not just new submissions)... Looking at the num= part of the URL when looking at a messageboard thread, ISTM that each thread has a numeric identifier - do you have a numeric ID for parodies, or could you use the document name as a reference (i.e. can the messageboard use alphanumeric for thread IDs?)
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I could do this, like I did in the past with the 80s news items, but I don't think I'd want to combine them.. I think I'd like the comments at the tail end of the page.. plus if there are no comments about a parody, and someone wants to read them, if it's in the messageboard, they would have to click through to the messageboard before they found that out.. seems like bad design... I'm not sure that I could put how comments have been made on the page easily with that format..

I'm sure I could figure out a way to retrofit all of the older parodies with comment pages no matter how I do it..