Some of you may have seen my offer in some of my reviews floating around, but if not, I just wanted to offer my services to anyone who is looking for a spell/grammar checker prior to submitting something to the Portal. Spelling and grammar errors drive me nuts, so if maybe English isn't your primary language, or you just want another eye to make sure everything is kosher, just hit me up and I'll be happy to lend my grammarnazi-ism.

Ok... to continue my rant from before... another BIG problem I have about this site that I have no suggestions to get around is when people submit crappy Flash animations to the Portal that they KNOW will get BLAMmed, but they enlist the help of their friends that massively rate 5 to allow the submission to pass Judgment. Basically, they submit these one-frame pictures set to music, which involve almost no Flash knowledge whatsoever, or 5-frame looping animations of an eyepatch-wearing gay biker humping the air, or a poorly-drawn face rotating clockwise in front of an epilepsy-inducing flashing rainbow background... what fucking point do these animations serve? They involve minimal, if any, skill, and are grossly annoying to the general public. But, because these people can enlist the help of others to rate their animations high, they pass Judgment.

You know, I thought that by giving animations a low rating when they deserved one, I was doing a service to NG as a whole... telling the community "No, this animation is a piece of shit, don't fucking bother watching it." But, it turns out, that crappy animators unwilling to improve their skills have lots of friends at their disposal that more than outweigh my lonely "0" rating.

I don't know how this rating system could improve, maybe only allowing any user to vote on a submission once ever instead of once per day... I dunno. Most submissions in Judgment status aren't here for that long, so that solution probably wouldn't help anyway. I just think this system is broken, and needs definite fixing. I want my fucking BLAM points. These animations deserve to not only be BLAMmed, but deleted from the author's computer forever with no hope of retrieval.

Okay, I haven't been here very long, but I'm noticing something that is really pissing me off. Review scores are totally inaccurate, as the moderators feel the need to delete low-scoring reviews unnecessarily, even when they have not violated any Review-posting rules, and leave bullshit reviews that score way too high for something. A good example is an animation recently posted called Loldog. It is an 8-second animation that has no sound and required very little skill to create. Somehow, this passed Judgment... that part is bad enough. But to see that the only two reviews that are left both score the animation a 10/10, thus giving it a 10/10 average score pisses me off.

This animation is FAR from earning anything anywhere close to a 5, much less higher than that, and to see that the only reviews left give a 10/10 is obviously BS. One of the reviews has a subject of "wow" and the text is "that sure is one smart dog". This person obviously didn't even watch the movie, as the review has nothing to do with the content of the movie. And yet, this person felt the need to rate the movie a 10/10? Bullshit. The second comment down (aka the first comment posted) has a subject of "i agree" and the body "the dog is indeed very funny"... the dog's image is changed into an outlined T-Rex/Dog hybrid, and ROAR! is written next to it... that's all. If this person finds that funny, he needs a serious change to his sense of humour, ASAP. This reviewer also rated 10/10.

Might I remind you that this animation is only 8 seconds long... why would anything that short be rated a perfect score? Even some of the VERY BEST animations on NewGrounds aren't frequently given perfect scores by reviewers due to minor problems, i.e. lip syncing, audio, minor graphical/programming bugs, etc. There is, in many cases, something that the author did not catch before posting that might make the difference between a score of 9 and a score of 10. So, if a very good animation that someone (or multiple people) spent weeks/months drawing, animating, scoring, fine-tuning, etc. does not receive a perfect score from reviewers, why would something that someone spent 3 minutes creating with very little effort get perfect reviews?

It's bullshit, because due to review deletions, submissions receive scores they don't deserve. Will a poster ever try to improve his Flash skills if he submits bullshit and gets perfect scores every time? Hell no, there's no incentive. Why create something over the course of a few months and involve hundreds of man-hours in the creation of something decent when you can just whip together something in 3 minutes, one-handed, without a Wacom and have the moderators remove the haters and keep all the higher rated scores?

I see the NG community as a place for Flash animators to submit their work to a large audience so they can receive suggestions on how to improve their work, or to showcase their abilities. When people deliberately post junk animations or games, it defeats the purpose of this site and wastes everyone's time. But, of course, when a low-scoring review is left for the animation, it is deleted and you receive a Review Ban with no explanation as to why, even though you didn't violate the rules. I've been here a little over a month, and so far have received 3 Review Bans. One of them was merited, I'll give you that... but the other two were over reviews that scored low and politely offered suggestions on how to score higher in the future.

Basically, I just feel like this system is useless; I mean, I take my time to review submissions to help people out, and then I end up punished because of it. If a submission deserves a low score, for fuck's sake let it get a low score... that says to the community and to the author that his submission is not up to par, and to work on his skills.

Anyway, I've been drinking and have started to repeat myself, so I'll end my post here... feel free to leave comments, though I'm sure no one will ever read this.