Revu-It: A Powerful Community-driven Review Platform
What began as a dream has finally become a reality. Two years ago, I began my journey into the unknown, a journey that has brought me great enjoyment and a great deal of stress simultaneously. But today I announce the launch of our new website called Revu-it: A community-driven website that allows its users to define the content, the ratings, the reviews, and the comments.
Why?
For many years, I have been on the hunt for films that lurk in the shadows, forgotten masterpieces of bygone eras, independent films with little to no marketing, and films that time has forgotten. Predominantly, all that I found were large commercial entities like IMDB, TMDB, and Rotten Tomatoes. (The latter being the least biassed.)
The problem with these sites and/or similar ones is that they all pull data from the same dataset. Sure, you can argue that they all have their own, but that is just in name.
It's now more than ever people look to the past to find and remember movies that defined an era, shaped a generation, and pushed the boundaries to their limits!
Too often, I have watched a film that has been rated a 7+ on these websites and have been utterly disappointed. Too often have I then gone into the user reviews and found a huge disparity between what the people are saying and what the website is reflecting.
It is with this in mind that revu-it has come to life!
How does it work?
It was so important that I made this as user-friendly as possible. I have stumbled upon sites in the past that have tried something similar, but I found the UI to be dated and the process of adding to the database to be overly confusing.
Sign Up and Profile Pages
The process is simple:
- Go to the revu-it website
- Sign-up for your account
- Upload a profile image, which will be displayed in the comments
- Head over to one of our Recommendation Forms (currently: movies, TV shows, or books)
Recommendation Form
- Enter the required fields
- Tell people why you recommending
- Upload the poster or book cover
- Submit
Your recommendation in action
BOOM. You're done!
Within a few seconds, your recommendation will populate on the site. You will also get bragging rights as we display your name or alias (whatever floats your boat) on the upload you have just completed.
The Backend
Now, this is where we come in.
Even though you have uploaded your content, the details page (we'll get onto that in a second) will have missing information. Our job is to then go behind the scenes and populate the missing information. We'll add things like a thumbnail, trailer, box office, runtime, age rating, etc.
And before you know it, your recommendation has now transformed into a fully detailed movie information centre.
The Comments
Now, for me, this is the magic of revu-it.
So far, and for the sake of transparency, I will admit that we do populate the synopsis of the Media from the likes of IMDB (Movies/TV Shows) and Goodreads (Books) as well provide a rating from these websites.
We do this for 2 reasons:
- Corporate shithousery can't alter the synopsis of a movie (can they?)
- The Rating is a guideline and a snapshot to the disparity we spoke of earlier.
Ok, back to the comments!
The most effective way to get a rounded review on anything, is to read the comments from real people. On the details page you will find the comments section in prouf view, for all to see. You'd be amazed at how people carry such different views on things. Example below😇
Yeah, not a fan😆
Upvotes Button
Last but not least is the good old upvote button. This is a quick visual representation of user agreement. The more upvotes, the more people agree on it being good.
Sadly, we are unable to generate a downvote as we are not programmers (yet).
Affiliate Links and Ads
Boooo! Boooo!
I now right. But let's face it, we don't live in a cave. As much as I enjoy giving away something for nothing (add the past 2 years into evidence, your honour), we need to make a living.
The only 2 means of revenue from the site will be affiliate links to purchase a title through Amazon (who owns IMDB, by the way) or a streaming link to Amazon Prime. The other will be in the form of placement ads on the site itself (coming soon)
Future Developments
- We hope to be able to integrate a Just Watch widget
- We plan on opening up a guest blogging section and allowing users to write blog posts.
- We plan on creating paid "User Tiers," which would allow editing functionality and a few other perks.
- Opening up on additional Categories (Board Games and Whisky are in the pipeline)
- And a few more tricks up our sleeves!
Well, I really hope you have enjoyed this little introduction to Revu-it, and we hope it brings you some level of enjoyment or use case. As always, please drop us an email if you have any thoughts, suggestions, or just want to chat!
We hope to see your recommendations coming in soon!
