Inevitably, I plough through many hundreds of reviews from around a dozen or more sources at festival time. This work has to be done quickly in order that I can provide feedback on the most critically acclaimed shows. This minor rant is based on my experiences.

There are two parts to my rant. The first is fairly straightforward: information about reviews from the previous year should not appear on the same page as the current year!!

The second part concerns the order in which lists of reviews appear. I definitely do not like lists in alphabetic order by show name. While it is fine for ad hoc use by a punter who is looking for the review of a given show, it makes life difficult for the more serious punter who might browse the list quite often during festival time and look at any new reviews as they appear. With alphabetic lists we have to rely on our memories to separate out new from old reviews. In my case the old memory box starts to malfunction around the end of the first week. For me, and punters like me, life is a lot easier when the lists are held in date order with the most recent items at the top.

So a plea to those sites that display list of reviews in alphabetic order. Please consider adding an option whereby punters can select to display the list in date order if they wish. Such a facility does not appear technically challenging to my untutored eye - I say this as some one who worked in the IT business for 40 odd years.