Fact boxes for the Animal Toy Blog

[AnimalToyForum]

As per the ongoing discussion on the DTF I've had the idea to add a fact box to each Dinosaur and Animal Toy Blog review. Something akin to the boxes on the genus pages of my Plesiosaur Directory site: e.g. https://plesiosauria.com/directory/genera/elasmosaurus/ For authors, there will simply be some separate fields to fill in on the back end. I think this could provide a handy resource at a glance and provide some consistency across the site. It could include the following data:

Company name(s)
Line name(s)
Year of release
Year retired
Length (cm and inches)
Height (cm and inches)
Width (cm and inches
Scale

Two questions. 1, what do you think of this idea - any problems with it? 2, if I go ahead with this idea, is there any other data that we could or should add?

[bmathison1972]

It's a great idea (I put those as suggestions in the 'Submit a Review' page), but if an author (guest or otherwise) doesn't want to research the material, what do we do? Will reviewers be hesitant to contribute if they don't want to take the time to research this information?

When I've posted guest reviews on the ATB, I have at times added scales based on the measurements provided by the author (when the information is easily calculatable, such as complete body lengths or shoulder heights). And several authors (me, Gwangi, sbell regularly include scales). I add release year to mine when I know it, but not retirement year.

as much as I like this information, I don't want to enforce it if it discourages reviewers. I suppose, Adam, you and I could go back and fill in as much of the information as we can if the author doesn't?!? A lot of that information is available on TAI, but sometimes the dates are incorrect.

Interested to hear what others think.

[AnimalToyForum]

It's a great idea (I put those as suggestions in the 'Submit a Review' page), but if an author (guest or otherwise) doesn't want to research the material, what do we do? Will reviewers be hesitant to contribute if they don't want to take the time to research this information?

When I've posted guest reviews on the ATB, I have at times added scales based on the measurements provided by the author (when the information is easily calculatable, such as complete body lengths or shoulder heights). And several authors (me, Gwangi, sbell regularly include scales). I add release year to mine when I know it, but not retirement year.

as much as I like this information, I don't want to enforce it if it discourages reviewers. I suppose, Adam, you and I could go back and fill in as much of the information as we can if the author doesn't?!? A lot of that information is available on TAI, but sometimes the dates are incorrect.

Interested to hear what others think.

That sounds familiar now you mention it, maybe that's where I got the idea from. We can always go in and edit old reviews. On the DTB that could become a time consuming task. For new submissions we can request that data but not make it mandatory. In many cases we might not know all the facts, so a question mark would have to do. In fact, I can make the default field values question marks.

[Advicot]

I also like the idea, it will be helpful as the size can be hard to determine if it has no measurements or something to show scale

[sirenia]

Definitely up for it.