Guide Police Council

I think something like this can easily ported to Dotafire with suitable text adjustments regarding the freshness and type of guide.

Along with this, i have an idea which can really solve the problem but will demand a lot of effort from its members.What we can do is,We select a team of 10-15 editors/mods/members, and we rate each and every guide ( or top10) of each hero. like only one rating for overall score on a scale of 10. it will not take more than 15 minutes of a member's time to just skim through like 9-10 guides and rate it. If We can do 4 heroes a day, we can completely do the whole database in under a month. No extra comments, no suggestions, just a single or a (small) set of ratings.

With this we can easily classify and separate the husk from the grain so as to say.This will take a lot of effort, but the result will be just as satisfying.

Lots of good suggestions - although I think we're approaching this from the wrong side. Getting code changes made is slow and time consuming, and it's ultimately up to the site owners what their priorities are.

We could already do 90% of what's been suggested ourselves - organise a team who will delve through various sets of guides and choose the best ones. We then put them into sections, give them ratings on whatever system we decide (e.g. the one Xyrus suggested) and post up the finished article as a sticky topic. This would give the developers an incentive to link/promote/whatever it to make it as visible as possible to new people.

For instance, we could have sections for new, intermediate and experienced players. We could have sections for hero, general gameplay, current meta guides etc. We could rate the guides we list on say "Gameplay Info" (i.e. how to use that hero), "Skill and Item Builds", "Presentation", "Accessability" and whatever. 3 guides for each topic/hero would seem sufficient.

This can be updated periodically to reflect new good guides we've seen, remove older ones, and give an incentive for the writers of those guides to update them, etc.

What do you think?

Questions that popped up:

What happens to "bad guides"?
What if there is a huge variety of opinions?
How does this team organize this?
Will the team check back?
What if something goes outdated, even a small detail? Will the team do something about it (notify/delete the rating)?
Will the team tell what's good in the guide and what is not?
Will the team have guidelines which they use when rating?
How will this team be picked?


Also there are some practicality issues, devs can't rush these and changes take time.

Bad Guides - nothing, it's not our place to change one of the primary beliefs of dotafire. We offer an alternative for finding good guides.

Opinions - either the primary organiser makes a call, or there's a collective vote, or some combination of the two.

Organisation - unfortunately there's no way I have time to do this myself, but I'm sure someone suitable might volunteer. After this, other members volunteer to take part, and the most suitable ones picked. I'd happily volunteer to help.

Updates - the team/organiser may change over time, we could make it say a monthly thing to identify any real good new guides that might be suitable. They'll be fairly obvious as they'll be the ones getting lots of upvotes!

Outdated - see previous point.

What's good in the guide - yeah, we could implement a rating system next to the guide. Something fairly simple and easy to read. You could even make it the deciding factor in the max 3 guides - "Most informative", "Best Builds", "Most up to date" etc.

Guidelines - yes, the organiser/team can decide on the guidelines. I think you obviously bar people from judging their own guides/rivals, give them a rough scoring system and then let them go at it. If you had say 3 people to each hero/section/whatever, they'll probably agree on most of the choices. If not, expand the pool of people involved to get a decision.

Picked - team is made up of volunteers, you'd work out approx how many you need to cover the areas in a reasonable time, how many you need for each area etc. Put people in their area of expertise, say "int supports" or "agi carries". If lots of people apply, pick the most suitable - it's not for me to tie the hands of the organiser, but I'd say if we did a quick straw poll of people you'd want to be involved, you'd get 80% of the same names quickly.

If you want to be more rigorous, do it on Moderator -> Veteran -> Editor -> Member, number of +Reps or whatever.

What happens to "bad guides"?

What if there is a huge variety of opinions?

How does this team organize this?
How will this team be picked?

I don't think that rep/status matters at all - a reviewer would only need experience with the hero/topic of the guide.

Will the team check back?
What if something goes outdated, even a small detail? Will the team do something about it (notify/delete the rating)?

Will the team tell what's good in the guide and what is not?

Will the team have guidelines which they use when rating?

Also there are some practicality issues, devs can't rush these and changes take time.

how about this.

no changes except one.

green flame.

easy to do.

literally so easy to do.

and all it is, is veterans/editors feel a guide is good they will green flame it.

greenflame meaning approved for current meta and is a good guide. green flame guides show first and top of the page.

heres the kicker.


green flame will only appear if more then 10 editors or veterans or moderators have green'd it.

that way you have

- consensus
- approval
- peer review
- accuracy

all the guides are there still but this will stop a lot of the flaming and annoyance (me in particular when i see some stupidity in a guide) because you know that it wont ever get green'd.

GIFF GREEN FLAME PLS