Title says it all. I am looking for some sort of easy to use method for the community to suggest maps to be highlited as a Community Spotlight, or included in the weekly Community Roundup. Right now we have a semi automated process, using some MySQL magic to look at trending maps. But having some sort of human feedback system would be preferable to using magic queries to guess at what maps are good.

An email address? Suggestion box? "Suggest as Spotlight" button on the download page? Sticky thread to post in? Let us know your ideas, I would love to setup a new system for this.

Thanks.

I like the idea of a suggest as Spotlight button. If the map is really good hopefully a number of people will go back to the page to click it.

I am going to look into the viability of that when I start upgrading/modifying the DLDB overall. Unfortunately, as it requires modifying phpBB itself, it seems the most difficult to add.

I agree with chickenmobile, a spotlight button should be placed somewhere. Maybe near the "Rate this map" when at the download map part. But I think there ought to be a certain number of people to press it before it appears on the spotlight. Maybe 20, 30, 40? I don't know just thinking out load here.

It won't automatically appear on the spotlight, it will just gather data for us to look at later.

A rating system would def help. Or maybe a button that says "Would you recommend this map?"

I think that there is already a rating system, do you mean one for the spotlight button?

MasterLagger wrote:
I agree with chickenmobile, a spotlight button should be placed somewhere. Maybe near the "Rate this map" when at the download map part. But I think there ought to be a certain number of people to press it before it appears on the spotlight. Maybe 20, 30, 40? I don't know just thinking out load here.

If you noticed that not many people actually rate maps after they play them and even less comment on the page to leave feedback. So the fact that over 20 people would click the 'suggest to spotlight' button is a little ridiculous.
msleeper did set up a sort of automated rating system that shows the most clicked/downloaded map, however she was saying that we needed human input as the automated download recorder doesn't really tell what map is good or is deserving on a spotlight.

Admin, you might want to talk to the people who play every custom map out there (djinndrache, coopcrowd, xdiesp etc.) and ask their opinion on who deserves to have the spotlight. Or even have their votes preferred over normal voters if you are going to have a 'spotlight suggestion' button.

Is it possible gather the top 10 maps that were released in the week according to downloads and create a poll topic, and we vote on that poll and the winner gets spotlight?

There needs to be encouragement to rate a map.
Is it possible for map makers to apply a type of calculation that apears at the end of the map and asks the user to submit their performance.
This performance scenario could encoarage map makers to aim for a specific type of calculation relating to dificulty etc, and in vice versa, registering this by the user could keep a taly of their performance over a period of time, so you have rated authors, rated maps, and rated users.

Something like : 38 - 4 - 72

First number is number Time it took to complete the map, 2nd - number of time killed to complete, 3rd - number of portals used.

Maybe other scenrios could be considered along with a rating out of 5 submitted by the user as an overall rating.

I remember that Valve actually had a voting GUI implemented in the game (which I'm guessing they are going to add this properly in the DLC. Or maybe it was just something they used for testers).

Would be great if they implemented this in for custom maps which is linked to the map page. Don't know what they wanted to host the maps on though.

iWork925 wrote:
Is it possible gather the top 10 maps that were released in the week according to downloads and create a poll topic, and we vote on that poll and the winner gets spotlight?

This is a possibility.

gavsta wrote:
Time it took to complete the map [. . .] number of time killed to complete [. . .] number of portals used.

I don't know how much of that would really be useful. If you want to help playtest maps, your best option is to record demos and send them to the author, and/or post Youtubes of your playthroughs.

Speaking of youtube, at the end of the map you could game_text it up and put something like: 'Please make sure to rate and comment."

I hate when youtube users shoehorn that into their videos and I think I'd be pretty irritated if Portal 2 maps started doing that too

I wonder If we could intergrate a link to the forum into the end of a map. Possibly rate the map in-game. A little nutts maby.

kwp21 pitts wrote:
I wonder If we could intergrate a link to the forum into the end of a map. Possibly rate the map in-game. A little nutts maby.

It's a good idea, if it wasn't just a link but a message to rate the map at the TWP website I would think it would alright. There is a web browser for Steam to get on the internet while in-game.

Wow, way to totally steam my idea.

Steam your idea? Was that a pun?

It is now. Steal*

I give your pun a rating of 3 out of 5.

EDIT: About the ratings, tf2maps.net has a topic every month for suggestions. I guess that could work. Except that a lot of people would vote for themselves... Or bribe people to vote for them... BTW Bribing is rude and evil, so don't do it.