Things I Would Like To See On Bleacher Report

I love this place, I really do. My long suffering girlfriend will testify to that. But there are still one or two things I would like to see introduced or addressed.

They are not criticisms of a very well-run website, but are just issues I think might help improve the Bleacher Report experience—certainly for me anyway.

I write this article to see if anyone else is affected by these issues and to see if there is something we could do about it, if needs be.

Editing

I think I am right in believing that editing articles contributes to writer rankings, I’m not completely certain, but I think a couple of B/R writers have said that somewhere along the line—but I could be wrong.

I have witnessed, on a few occasions, one of my articles will be edited by someone, but they don’t actually do anything.

They will remove a relevant tag or change the title...and that’s it!

To add to that, they will slap an auto-pagination in for good measure, so it leaves the article with a ridiculous page-break half way through a list of stats.

It is certainly a good idea for ridiculously long articles that require a couple of pages, but as far as I am aware, it is not a directive of B/R and it doesn’t request that I MUST have pagination—so why do some people feel that every single one of my articles must have pagination?

Then there are the editors who didn't bother to read the Bleacher Report style guide or studied the editors' cheat sheet in any great depth.

They plough through your article and change "percent" to % or "seven" to 7 without care and some will even completely change the layout and presentation of an article.

My articles will normally contain subheadings for different sections of the article and I will put a double line break between the end of one subheading and its relevant text and the start of the new subheading section—just like the B/R article formatting and presentation section tells us to do.

I also like to add double line breaks inside sections of text that signify a different topic within a sub-section—as well as breaking up large chunks of text to make it easier on the readers eye—just like the paragraph you are reading now.

All of this is perfectly within Bleacher Report boundaries and their own standards set in place—that’s how I have interpreted them, anyway.

To finish it all off, the editor doesn’t bother to leave any form of input or response to his "edits" and makes you feel like you have come home to a ransacked house after just being burgled.

Now I know this is easily fixed by pressing the revert button, but it's not so much the time spent correcting mistakes in peoples "edits" that bothers me; it is the issue of these people climbing the writer ranks without contributing to the quality of the site.

I am by no means trying to suggest we get rid of the entire editing side of B/R, which would be a very bad idea as it is one of the reasons why the site is so successful.

There are some fantastic editors who promote positivity and spend hours proof-reading and remove all of those little mistakes we all sometimes miss.

I also have terrible punctuation issues and spending time checking an editor's changes to my work has taught me a lot of things I had forgotten since I was last at school.

What I would like to see is two buttons the author can press once someone has edited your article.

If the author is happy with his editor’s contribution, they press the "yes" button and it adds to the editor’s rankings. If they press "no" then the editor gets no credit for their lack of input.

This point is obviously irrelevant if editing articles does not contribute to your writer ranking and I must apologise if this is the case.

Tags

When I first joined Bleacher it took awhile to grasp the basics of the site. I would add ridiculous amounts of tags to articles as I believed it was the best way to get as many reads as possible.

Once I found out what was required in regards to tagging articles, my opinion changed and, even though I still have that urge to stick an extra tag on to generate more reads, I now know it can aggravate other writers.

I have now become one of those annoying editors because I glance through the Liverpool community and find articles that shouldn't be there. I then remove the irrelevant tag and explain the reason why it shouldn't have it.

But then it comes straight back.

An author will write a piece that has been put up as the front page article for the community he is writing for; the longer it stays up, the better it will be to promote the article.

But then along comes an article that has nothing at all to do with the community and replaces the other one as the top article on the community page.

Articles written about the community in question will not get as much front page time as they might do if the incorrectly tagged article had not been posted.

I am not sure if there is a solution to this issue.

Community

This is not so much an issue, more of an idea.

I would like to see two writer ranking lists for each community—one will be for the supporters of the site, for example, Liverpool supporters on the Liverpool community page. The other list would be contributors to the community—other writers who chose to write about the team.

I know of a Bleacher member who said they left because of certain blogging website authors who kept pushing them down the writer rankings for their community—thanks to the bloggers' numerous articles that consisted of very poorly formed opinions and slanderous writing, giving nothing to the quality of the community.

The core members of the community in question should have more weight on their community page and their articles should demand a better placing in comparison to contributors to the community.

I am certainly not suggesting no one else can contribute to a rival community page or trying to create a divide on each community.

Perhaps there is an Arsenal supporter who contributes to some extent to their community page, but because there are ten other top writers who contribute to the page with their own articles, that Arsenal supporter is pushed down to 20th place on the community writer rankings.

It may be that he happens to be the third best Arsenal supporting writer on the community, but this is not recognised on the community page itself.

I would also like to see some form of award system that doesn’t just promote the good articles.

There are some absolutely horrendous articles on this Web site—not a great amount—but there is definitely a few contributors who reduce the quality of the site with their input on a constant basis.

I am not sure if choosing to not rate an article out of five stars is worse than giving it just one star out of five, but I think there should be some form of negative feedback you can offer that will have an effect on their rankings.

I don’t see leaving a comment and stating your disapproval as a worthy way of dealing with this poor journalism issue, as it just adds to their read and comment count which in turn, increases their rankings. The idea is to reduce their input if it continues to be of such a poor standard.

Article of the Day

I would like to see a World Football community page that contains its own “pick of the day” article section.

The American side of the community simply dwarfs the rest of the communities, making it a remarkable feat to get your article on the front page and as article of the day.

The American articles can generate five or six thousand article reads in one go, leading to a better chance of getting the “pick of the day” article.

If the World Football community had its own “pick of the day” section, then more writers will get recognition amongst their own peers and by discussing the subject at hand—football for example.

Play-by-Play

I don’t know if I am the only one who finds it irritating that I have to constantly keep going back to my profile page every time I want to check for activity.

I would like to see some sort of inbox added somewhere along the black “My B/R” bar to inform me every time something happens on my play-by-play.

This would only be a live inbox that remains active when you are online. When you are offline, the inbox doesn’t work and all activity is recorded in your play-by-play like normal—which would be nice to have with more than a handful of things recorded at one time.

If there is a great deal of activity happening on your articles, you lose some of what has happened if it is pushed off the list quickly.

So that is about all I have to say for now, some may see this as a moan or an attack on the Web site, but it is simply to generate some conversation about niggling issues I have.

Problems are always better discussed as it gives you more points of view on a subject, leading to a bigger picture to better find a solution to a problem.

Someone may just point something out that shows it is not actually a problem in the first place.