As of Friday night, the team at Unvarnished pushed some new functionality live on the site that we wanted to share with you all. So check it out below, and watch the video tour, at bottom.
Better voting
A core part of how Unvarnished works is the idea that not only does the community review professionals, but also that the reviewers themselves are reviewed, via community voting on their reviews.
In this fashion, the reviews that the community feels contribute the most are properly recognized, with the reviewer who left them gaining authority in turn. And the reverse is true for reviews that the community feels do not contribute.
This works best when the community engages and votes early and often. And while this was happening previously on Unvarnished, we thought we could do a better job getting voting rates up by making voting more obvious, fun, and engaging.
Enter Friday’s change. Gone are the small voting hyperlinks, which have been replaced by big, juicy voting icons, with engaging rollover states, and satisfying animations when voted on.
I personally don’t feel that my home page review feed isn’t complete before I’ve voted up or down every review on there, and everything’s marked green or red!
So everyone: go exercise your franchise, as an Unvarnished community member, and vote!
Standalone Review Pages
Another great new feature that our users have been asking for is standalone review pages—a single page, with a single hyperlink, devoted to a single review.
Just like tweet pages, these standalone review pages make it easy to pass around a specific review that you want to share with people (whether via email, to tweet, post to Facebook, blog, etc.), while at the same time providing a link back to the associated profile, with the rest of its reviews, such that the reading user decides they want to dive deeper, they can.
So if you wanted to send someone a great review about, say, an entrepreneur who’s can be too pushy about his favorite topic at parties, you can do that. Or if you wanted to pass along a review extolling the virtues of an amazing Director of Customer Service, you can do that too.
What would you like to see on Unvarnished? Drop us feedback here.
Check out a little video tour here:
[...] Faster Reviewing & Daily Review Updates The Unvarnished team has been hard at work since our last big release. Today we’re happy to announce two big features that pursue the joint goals of making it easier [...]