People often use the forums to request reviews. They link to the game in question in their post, and generally expect to get links to reviews as replies. Often it makes sense if they begin to review the game on their own, as this helps to show their thinking more clearly and it helps to guide the reviewer. However, there is a problem. When the reviewee requests for a review of a game that he has partially ‘reviewed’ already, the reviewee has control of the review. Within the framework of OGS itself, it is impossible for the reviewer to take that game, comments and all, and apply her own comments to each node of the review.
One can download the game and then upload it to the library and then review that, but that is is a clunky way of doing things. Why not just expand the existing idea of ‘forking’ a game to one that allows forking it as a review – which is the type of copy I’d want to make by default, anyway. In the process, you could add an option to label the original reviewer’s comments by username (checked on by default) to help distinguish between the comments of the original reviewer and the new reviewer.
That’s something that I’d want too, though I was concerned about how to activate the option in context. Sometimes the review owner wants to be the sole reviewer and sometimes the review owner wants to open the nodes to general commentary. The UI needs to help the user make the choice or it needs to give sensible defaults that work most of the time. Maybe a big ‘prepare to post in the forum’ button on reviews that does a lot of tweaking to the way a review is handled, and maybe pushes the review link to your clipboard as well?
And maybe while we’re on the topic of reviews and big red buttons, a big button for initiating a review, and not just one for requesting a rematch?