Depending on my mood, I go back and forth on the issue of whether volunteer testing is actuallyhelpful or not – especially on weekends when things always change and there are so many traps to fall into for the person not familiar with how things work in radio.
A few things need to be explained, I guess…
– if you registered with an email address that doesn’t work, or it takes you a week to respond to a question from me – there is a good chance that your ability to test will be suspended until you get in touch and we sort things out
– if you “test” an item and the player comes up with an obvious error, and you go to the station’s web site and their player works – that is a FAILED test, not a successful test. That’s the entire point of having humans in the loop. Attach a note to the station saying the player is broken and do NOT click “It worked”.
– the testing confirmation gives you a ratio of your test time to other similar tests… the higher the testing time ratio, the more I believe it. If the average test for a program is 357 seconds (because it is very hard to ID the program), and you “test” it in 23 seconds, you either were very lucky or you aren’t actually testing.
– before changing a schedule, always consider the possibility of sports preemptions – schedule changes are for permanent changes, not one day events like coverage of the county fair. If it isn’t a permanent change, add a note – not a schedule change.
– when thinking about whether to update a schedule, ask yourself – Does anyone really care? If you find a station that is supposed to have a local investing show, and you think it is an “infomercial”, we may just have a difference of opinion. In either case, zero people care about the program (other than the person paying for the time on the radio station)
Start from the presumption that what is in the database is correct unless you find solid evidence that a change has happened – but that does NOT mean you should just click It Worked based on the belief it is probably right. Listen until you’re sure.
f you aren’t sure what you are hearing, don’t click “it worked” and don’t click “It’s wrong” – just ignore it and go on to test something else.
Sadly, I hardly ever have time to test anymore. I would love to help out with the site but I changed jobs 6 months ago. This has put me on a very different sleep/work schedule and severely limits my time to listen to any radio (much less to have the time to report on what I am hearing by testing).
I (obviously) still find time to read your blog posts and I enjoy much of the discussion here. I hope that my inability to test much anymore will not prohibit my being able to read and post here.
Thanks for all you do!
And thank you for your help. You have been one of a handful that knows how hard it is to do the testing. People want to be helpful and “jump in” and “test ” 50 things the first hour. I lack the soft gloves to guide people into doing it right without scaring most people off.
But that’s the price of relying on volunteers to help – more generally, not just this web site. If people aren’t being paid to do something, you really can’t tell them what to do, or you have to have people skills that I just don’t have.
Hey Art: Just a quick question, How come no points or tested total is added when we test a music (country ex.) station?
They need testin’ too : )
No biggie, I was just wondering. I like testing. That Bill Press is a nut sometimes. I have heard some new stuff out there. Its easy to test a cumulus station, they generally don’t have a video to load at the beginning.
Thanks Man ! awesome site,
Best Regards
Parrott
I probably broke something.
The problem of people fixing things that aren’t broken continues to be a problem, or marking things that are working when they clearly aren’t. To try to deal with that, I pushed out the minimum testing times to discourage people from making it a race.
Behind the scenes, I’m doing a lot of hitting the Del key, deleting local talk shows, sports talk, schedule items with sports conflicts, etc.
If you are prompted for a topic (because the show is live, needs a topic, and nobody has set the topic) and you blow that off, you get no points. My assumption is you weren’t really listening closely enough to be sure what you were hearing.