Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

After sleeping on it, I have some more ideas on how to proceed. I want the
system to maximize ease of use and usefulness of information. I want to
limit the number of favorites a person may have, so that no one will dilute
the significance of his favorites by having too many. I could do this by
fixing the same limit for everyone or by graduating it to levels of
seniority. I had thought of graduating it to duration of membership, but
the database doesn't include that information. Other factors to graduate
it with may include whether someone is an editor or a contributor. To allow
game inventors more favorites, I may decrease the cost for favoriting
one's own games. That's just easier to calculate than going through the
whole Item table to find out how many games someone has invented.

Another idea is to weight favorites based on how long it has been a
favorite. This would be measured by the difference in time between a
person's last login, which I'll add a column to the database for, and the
time a game became a favorite. For authors of pages and inventors of games,
the starting time could be the creation date. For others, the starting time
would be the time it got marked as a favorite. In case of death or
inactivity, using the last login time will keep someone's favorites from
having disproportionately more weight than others. One benefit of weighting
the favorites by duration of activity is that it prevents abuse of the
system by spammers. Someone wouldn't be able to use dummy accounts to
artificially raise a game's favored status without putting in the effort
to keep those dummy accounts active.

I have started to implement the favorites system. When you are signed in, a
special menu will appear on the menubar if it is a game page or if you have
already chosen favorites. This menu will be designated by a heart. The
heart will be red if it is on a page for a game you have favorited. It will
otherwise be grey. You can use the menu to favorite a game, to unfavorite a
favorited game, and to see a list of your favorite games. Presently,
editors get up to 24 favorites, contributors up to 18, and everyone else up
to 12. 

I have removed the top result of the old rating system from the What's New
Page. It was a sophisticated rating system that could not be used on all
games, and it hardly got used, making its results worthless. The same game,
European Chess, remained on top for a long time, because no one was using
it. So I'm deprecating it. The comment rating system will remain
unaffected. It is unrelated to the favorites system.

As I have more time, I will add features that display the most favored
games, maybe a Top 10 submenu and an Editors' Picks submenu under games.

Favorite games now appear on a person's information page. Click my name
next to this message for an example.

The heart menu has moved to the left, and it will show up on all pages
using the main header. If you are not signed in, it will instruct you to
sign in to favorite games or view favorites. If it appears on a page for a
game you have not favorited but other people have, the heart will be
PaleVioletRed. It will appear red if you have favorited it or grey if no
one has favorited it. If more than one person has favorited a game, the
number of people who have favorited it will appear before the heart.

I cannot mark as favorites games which are three levels down the file
system.

Give me an example, so that I can tell what the problem is.

Catapults of Troy, Centennial Chess, Invasion, Maxima.

The problem with them all that is that they are using the wrong header.
Fixing this will involve updating files. I already wrote a PHP script for
this, but I'll have to modify it to go deeper.

I fixed the recursion in my script, ran it again, and fixed many pages,
including the pages for Invasion, Maxima, and Catapults of Troy, but it did
not fix Centennial Chess. When I come back, I'll look at what's different
on the Centennial Chess page and adjust the script to replace that.

Centennial Chess and many more pages have now been fixed. Note that the
conversion process also converts a page's character set from Latin-1 to
UTF-8. Editors or page authors who have used non-ASCII characters may want
to check that everything looks right.

It seems I can pick only 13 favorites.

Okay, that bug is fixed.