Topic: What's the intended interaction for rating releases?

I'm trying to be a good citizen, and rate my favorite albums in order to build up the site's content. But I'm finding the interaction necessary to do this rather frustration. The only process I've found for doing this is to find a release through whatever method and then tag it as "in my collection" or whatever. But from the release's details I'm not able to rate it, at least not that I can find. Instead, I've got to go to my personal "Releases" list, which does have a dropdown for rating.

Am I missing something? Or is it that you're not all that keen on building up the ratings and stuff?

Hi! I'm thrilled that you are taking an interest in the site! Of course I want to make it as easy as possible for you to rate your favorite albums.

The "standard" way to rate an album is to go to the release page and to edit everything on the "edit" tab there. You need to select a familiarity level first, but then you can directly edit the rating.

One way to speed this up (it's tedious to look up every single album and go to the edit tab) is in the discography tab of an artist. There you'll find a dropdown that you can change from "Overall Tags" to "Assign Rating". That will enable you to quickly rate the entire discography. For every release there'll be a dropdown (first for the familiarity level, then for the rating). I need to change the design of the dropdowns there, currently they're difficult to see (right in front of the album names).

Yet another way is to go to the charts page (https://tagyourmusic.org/chart). In the standard template (as well as the cover matrix view) for each release there will be a dropdown button that allows you to select a status, then a familiarity, and then a button to launch the editor which also contains a rating dropdown.

Do all these strategies work for you, basically? I'm sorry for the inconsistency, and I think I can make that third path a little better by aligning it with what we're offering in the discography (a special mode to quickly assign ratings/familiarities).

Let me know what you think, and let's keep in touch to optimize the process!

Thanks, I've got it now. Part of my trouble was that I was looking for relatively stand-alone control for the rating, since that seems to be the most important tag in my mind. I now see it as the first among equals, over above the text review. But also, as a web developer myself (I'm not a UX designer, but I work closely with two of them), I've got a philosophy of revealing to the user everything they could do, but in a way that suggests that it's disabled. This IMHO helps the user understand what they might be able to do, if something of the current state was different. By contrast, we call the approach where you hide anything not currently applicable as "disco lights" because of how things can flash on and off, and think it detracts from the user's understanding of the overarching model. Just my two cents :)

Good point! I'm not usually working on frontends, so I appreciate any comments about how the UX might be improved.

I'm down with avoiding the "disco lights" effect, but I'm not sure how to do it in this case. Showing so many disabled inputs might also be confusing/frustrating. I'll give it a try ... maybe it would work if I highlight the key inputs that need to be edited to enable the others.

I hear you. Yeah, I can see that you're already tying to manage a lot of content there, even resorting to the tab-like interface for various groups of tags. So you might be right, the desire to provide so much rich attributive data is somewhat in tension with a simple, clear flow through the process.