Review system - your thoughts

[Mark]

any thoughts on how to handle ratings and reviews? this is usually a heavily abused part of topsites and as you might have noticed has been mostly left out of VisioList up until now.

do we need ratings and reviews at all? and if so, what can we do to make them more useful?

Your feedback is appreciated.

 

[Mark]

anybody? should we perhaps just leave it out and make the review system a plugin that can evolve on its own for those who use it?

 

[Karl]

The review system can be useful if used correctly. It would be great if there was a way to prevent site owners posting reviews and rating their own sites though as this presents a false impression. My only problem with it is the amount of spammers that use the reviews to try and post their stuff.

 

[Mark]

right, the site owner, competitors, and spammers are often the only people using the reviews system which make for a very poor review experience.

spam can be stopped easily enough (I have not had a single spam review posted to my list in almost 2 years), but even without spam I question the value of the existing review system, very few outgoing visitors come back to post a review, so we should really only expect "corrupt" reviews, and that is what we see on most lists.

 

[FordOwnersClubs]

Reviews are posted quite often on mine, however, I would guess that 90% are by the club owner/staff... so to be honest, I wouldn't be too fussed if it went. That said, if there was a plugin, that could be improved on then I would continue to use it.

 

[Anna]

Tbh, I have never really understood how reviews arer suppopsed to work, or where? I can see the approve reviews in the admin panel, but have still to figure out how to use it as a site owner. Where do I click to review a site?

 

[Mark]

In Visiolist reviews are disabled by default for the reasons I outlined above. But you can go into stats.php and enable them by finding:

if($reviews_on == 1)

add this BEFORE

$reviews_on = 1;

note: at this time the review system is NOT supported, you are free to use it but at this time it should not be considered part of this product. We need discussion on how to create a truly "useful" review/rating system.

 

[CraigKoz]

That sounds good to me. I'll leave if off for now

 

[FordOwnersClubs]

I appreciate this isn't supported at the moment, but I don't want to stop offering what was there before so I enabled it, however, clicking on the rate & review with the clean url's just brings up an error as it cannot find the page.

 

[Basti]

fixed in 0.5, currently wrong url helpers are in place.
Since you use clean urls change the following to have a quick fix

<a href="{$list_url}/{$url_helper_a}rate{$url_helper_u}{$username}{$url_tail}">{$lng->stats_rate}</a><br />

to

<a href="{$list_url}/review/{$username}/">{$lng->stats_rate}</a><br />

 

[Mark]

so now that we have some more conversation on this... what to do with this review system to make it more useful?

Well, 1 thing I have seen and like (sort of)... is to open the members site with a "toolbar frame" at the top from your VisioList. This toolbar would ask for rating/review and any other info you might want (ie rate the speed, design, etc) via additional optional plugins.

downside:
-uses frames so the members URL is not visible in the browser address bar
-encourages user activity and input from surfers

upside:
-encourages user activity and input from surfers
-generate return visitors to the topsite
-great for branding your site
-possibility of review tracking, credits, points etc and a usergroup for fans of your niche, not just website owners. (login via facebook connect, twitter, diqus?)

as you can see this would open a lot of doors, but the question is... is this the direction we want to go?

your feedback, thoughts, ideas are most welcome.

 

[CraigKoz]

I think this is a great idea. Anything that will encourage return visitors to the site will help........ it looks like the upside will defiantly outweigh the downside. Honestly I am all for this

 

[Anna]

I can not say that I like the toolbar frame much (maybe I am visioning it wrong). But some of the things are good to include. I would very much more like to have an option (maybe it is allready there. Have not seen how it looks like yet when review is implemented) directly on the stats-site for the member, with all the other info. Like this : http://www.veggiemind.com/veggietoppen/index.php?a=stats&u=siljeveggis&all_reviews=1 (Its in Swedish and norwegian but I guess you get the idea...). However, I would very much like the idea of adding a poll (for q about speed or design) in the sidebar or header.
An idea of preventing siteowners salting their own review is to have it two things implemented: 1)You have to add a valid e-mail adress (that is NOT visible on the review) and 2)Continue having to moderate reviews.

 

[Mark]

yup the review system you see at veggiemind is exactly what I am trying to get away from that is the default review system we are currently hiding, when you enable it that is what you will have.

1) in an era of free email accounts and $8 domains, email verification is 0% effective
2) moderating reviews is fine, but even so, most reviews will continue to be of low quality since the most return visitors to a topsite are the webmasters (as you can see at the veggiemind site above).

I believe for better reviews, we need better users.