Carsurvey.org (and related sites) have just had some minor (in code terms) changes made to them, which hopefully will make the sites more pleasant to use.

Firstly, I’ve disabled the filtering of reviews into well written and other reviews. The filtering was based on the votes by visitors and members, and while the data was usually good, there were lots of cases where the voting didn’t seem to correlate with review quality. The filtering of reviews into two pages (well written and other) also complicated the navigation, so I’ve decided that the trade off isn’t worth it, and I’ve disabled filtering in favour of simplicity.

Related to the filtering issue, is the fact that on pages listing reviews for a specific model, the reviews were ordered by year of manufacture (if appropriate), and then by date added. The date added order wasn’t obvious, and anyway, there’s a sidebar and RSS feed for people who want to see the very latest reviews.

Although the ordering by year of manufacturer still remains, I’ve now replaced the date added order by a word count order. The longest reviews will appear at the top of the page or year grouping. I personally prefer the new ordering, but please let me know if you think otherwise.

I’ve also made the sites slightly more aggressive about splitting reviews into pages for each year, as some of the pages were getting a bit too long for my taste.