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At the top of the signmeto homepage is a link to an online questionnaire that many of you have kindly filled out. The answers and responses people have sent through have been extremely helpful to us as we are working through all the development priorities, bugs and so forth.

Now that signmeto has had some chance to mature a little bit, it appears that there are a few regular issues that continue to crop up, especially in people's survey submissions. So I want to address them directly in today's blog.

Problems with search

As stated in earlier blogs, we are well aware of the deficiencies in the search functionality at signmeto. Too often a band will join, go to the search page and try and look themselves up, and.......well, you get the picture. We have sent this problem through to our programmers and asked them to investigate it - and we hope to have some insights soon enough as to why some bands are not being properly indexed.

In addition, we have identified search as a major candidate for an upgrade in future versions of signmeto. It needs to work better, and give a much more intuitive set of answers when someone puts in a keyword or search term.

Navigation

This is another persistant complaint - the inability to locate new bands because of the deficiencies in the scrolling systems. We know that it is dumb that on the home page only five latest bands per genre appear and that a more comprehensive list of new artists is hard to find (you can go to the specific genre pages and find the exhaustive list of latest bands that way).

Thus it goes without saying that we are attempting to address the issues with navigation in our current improvement plans for signmeto.

Ratings

There are three major issues that repeatedly come up with respect to the ratings system:

1. Technical problems: yes, the skull system with the roll over mouse is probably not working as well as we would like. And if you rate a band it is difficult to go back and change your mind. So we have been thinking about introducing a "ratings wizard" that makes the process more involving, thereby asking a scout to offer more consideration when they are making their ratings choices. We are also looking at the way the algorithms work that determine who the top rated bands and songs are - I discuss this a bit more in my blog from the other day entitled '10 Things We Are Working On At signmeto'.

2. Lack of A&R ratings: embarrasingly, this is related to a technical problem. As it currently stands, the system is not working properly in that our A&R staff should be able to rate bands in the A&R ratings section. But, as I stated in an earlier blog, there is also the wider issue of whether A&r staff at RR will actually rate bands. Having thought about this a lot, we intend to change the rating system somewhat, making the burden (and expectations) on our A&R people less prominent at signmeto. So instead of asking our A&R to score bands on a range of categories that mirror the fan rating system, we plan to change it whereby A&R staff only have to give an indication like "hot, warm or cold".

This change is planned in the next round of improvements and enhancements - once it is in place there should be more direct involvement from staff. But what I can ABSOLUTELY assure people of is that our A&R staff are 100% supportive of signmeto and are listening to music and exploring artists on the site every day. Of course, this is not a guarantee that bands will be signed from the site - but it does get them on to the playing field.

3. Anger over people supposedly 'gaming' the ratings: many people have expressed suspicions and displeasure to us about bands apparently rating themselves favourably and deliberately rating other bands down. We have investigated some of these, and have ignored other complaints.

My own feeling is this - most systems can be cheated and gamed and if we were to spend all of our development time and money trying to stop this stuff, we would not have resources available to make the site work better. We are looking into some ways of making it more difficult to game the system, but ultimately if a band is shit, but rates themselves up and other bands down....do you guys think we would consider signing them??? Shit is shit, irrespective of where they might sit on the signmeto tables.

And that goes to the heart of the issue here. Signmeto was set up as a fun, innovative and interesting experiment to see if bands and artists would like to post their music online for RR to consider, and most importantly, for other fans to consider. IT IS NOT A COMPETITION. What do I mean by that? Well, it is not some sort of contest whereby the highest rated band somehow gets a record deal. Read our terms of service for the site again: RR is under no obligation to sign anything that goes up at the site. We created signmeto to give artists another outlet to reach fans, as well as make it easier for us to access new talent and find new bands.

We are fully aware of the technical and functional problems at the site. Believe me - I sweat over them obsessively and wish I could make the site perfect tomorrow. Unfortunately it is slow going.......but I am super committed, as our many others involved in the project, in making it better for all of you guys.

Stay patient and play nice!!
 

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