I know this has been raised a million times already, but a quick trawl of the current threads and I couldn’t find a suitable one on which to add my rant and so I’m starting a new one.

I like the ability to rate the quality of people’s reviews. As I have said before I find the YES/NO options to be a little limiting – I’d at least like a “sort of useful” option which could be worth 50% – but it’s better than no options at all.

I have also noted people’s complaints in the past about having reviews unfairly labelled as “Unhelpful” just because the person takes offence at criticism. Having just been a victim of this I now humbly request that only owners of items should be able to label reviews as helpful or not, meaning that they would therefore be held accountable for their vote. It would even allow the possibility of having unhelpful votes being overruled to protect people’s review ratings.

I just wrote a 924 word review on ‘Victory’ by littlegreenpills, [please read next post before forming a permanent opinion on this user!!!] which was full of critique and useful suggestions. Unfortunately for him he unlocked it almost immediately and branded it unhelpful, thus allowing me to identify the culprit for reducing my review rating from 98.8% to a 97.5% and thereby send him a vicious message berating him for his childish behaviour, before blocking him.

If the review ratings were less anonymous, people might be a little more honest about their vote, and it would be easier to identify the petty people who only want their egos massaged, and who can’t accept criticism, and gradually ostracize them from Urbis.

What do you reckon?

OK so I overreacted a little on littlegreenpills. He clicked on “NO” by accident apparently. We’ve made up since, but this now suggests another feature – the ability to change your vote if you change your mind or make a mistake?!

Yes, this would be great. It would also be a good idea to be able to withdraw a refund request. One hour is just not enough time to straighten anything out with the reviewer. I’ve had several reviewers write an acceptable review in the comments, but – alas – I had already asked for the refund. Of course, then the reviewer feels cheated for giving the acceptable review in the comments.

Oh, yes. All good ideas. Especially the review quality. But especially the refund withdrawl.

You can withdrawal a refund request. I’ve done it when the reviewer comes back with a decent response in comments. You simply need to notify Lorrie.

I agree on the change helpful rating. Ugh! I’ve made mistakes in voting especially with the dang laptop mouse; trying to open the information profile of the reviewer and the pointer jumps over to the vote toggle instead. Too late!

Good to know.

I’m sure Lorrie has better things to do. Wouldn’t it be better to have a “Remove Refund Request” button?

I’d like a universal undo button on my life please. Clicking it would undo my last action. I dropped my last pot of mini-trifle on the kitchen floor today. An undo button would have saved me the shameful seconds of indecision about whether or not to eat it off the floor.

Ditto. I would like a “Didn’t drink that bottle of wine” button.

Ah yes, or maybe a more generic alcohol related button. Maybe a “DETOX” button where all the toxins you’ve spent money and time on ingesting are instantly filtered out of your body and extruded through some kind of waste tap.

Like a penis?

I was supposed to be going to bed now but I HAVE to respond to that!

No, a penis is too inefficient, as is vomiting. I want ALL the toxins to leave my body AT ONCE. One minute the room is spinning and I’m feeling sick, I press the DETOX button and WALLUP – I’m as sober as a judge.

It’s one of the cruel things about being too drunk – by the time you realise it, it’s too late to do anything about it, you’ve just got to ride it out, and no amount of pissing pooing of vomiting will sort it out.

Having said all that I would like to have a penis, just for a day, but that’s a whole other discussion thread right there….

You guys are cracking me up on your detox methods.

I understand the need to change your review quality vote. Tough one, though, as we don’t want people to have high review quality ratings simply because they are diligent and persuasive.

One option is to offer up an appeals process for Review Quality and/or Refund Requests. Reviewers get a chance to mantain their score and keep their credits, but they need to work for it (by getting a second chance at writing a better review).

I don’t know. This is certainly a great idea for those newbies who just don’t know no bettah.

What about shutting off the voting on quality for people who are not the author of a piece? I get pretty irked when someone votes a partiularly thoughtful review of my work as a 0% quality. It’s as subjective as reviewing, really.

And I’m drunk now. I should’a hit the detox button.

tia – I hope you’re in America otherwise that means you’re pissed and on the Urbis forum at 6.30am.

Steve – Appeals process is a good idea. Not as good as the detox button, but I guess a more relevant one to this discussion. That in combination with the only allowing authors to rate reviews would solve the problem.

Right must go and get a drink…

I am in America, fear not for my liver.

I agree with DC Allen about giving us more than one hour to decide whether to refund a review or not. Why not 24 hours? It would give the author time to seek clarification of the review from the reviewer through the comment section, and may eliminate the need to refund the review. If, after 24 hours, the author can’t get clarification from said reviewer, then he can still request a refund.
I can’t say that I agree with Bravis about having more extensive review ratings. A review is either helpful or not; yes or no. I don’t feel that it is necessary to get overly technical in this particular area, since the whole thing is purely subjective. I am on the fence about whether review ratings should be allowed only by the author of a piece. On one hand, it is their work being reviewed, and they should be the one to determine whether a review was helpful. How would a third party know whether a review was helpful to the author or not? However, if the author labels a review unhelpful, and he is the only one allowed to do so, I can see this leading to many arguments between authors and reviewers. I guess I like things the way they are in regards to review ratings.

Let me play devil’s advocate against myself for a moment. If a reviewer posts an erroneous review, but redeems themselves through the comment box, their unnecessarily low scores of your piece will remain, adversely affecting your rating/ranking. So maybe it is best to request a refund in these situations.

Yeah, I’m torn. On occasion I get a negative review that I think is helpful, but most negative reviews are the “I don’t like this” and “this didn’t work for me” type of reviews. I would never write that crap in a review. I don’t really want to have a conversation with this reviewer . . . well not a pleasant one. If a reviewer takes the time to understand what I do and critiques me harshly, this is something totally different. I really want to talk to this person. I want to print the review and read it several times. I really do want to be a better writer.

All that to say, I don’t think one hour is long enough to offer the reviewer the opportunity of dialogue or, in the case of the “didn’t work for me” guy, a scuffle.

How about a ‘suspend review’ button? Extending the grace period to 24 hours.

I think we can all agree that 1 hour is far too short. 24 hours seems reasonable. As for the change helpful rating. Ugh! I’ve hit it by accident a few times, especially on a laptop when the mouse jumps around.

I actually do pretty well out of non-owners rating my reviews high. To me this sort of compensates for all the reviews I’ve done that the item owner never bothered to open. Most of which are so old and the owner so long gone they won’t benefit from the newer rules.

I could understand if only people with a quality rating above a certain level were allowed to vote in addition to the owner. You would assume they know a little of what they’re talking about—but then you enter the territories of both petulant and simpering votes.

Here’s a couple of things I’ve noticed recently when opening my reviews:

I voted someone’s review as helpful – it was shorter than my other reviews and quite negative, but ultimately it did make me think and change a couple of things. However their score on that review was 50% because one of my other reviewers had voted them unhelpful, probably because they disagreed with the comments. Now as Blue Eyes suggests, surely I am the one who should vote it helpful or not. I certainly gave it serious thought, whereas I’m betting the other person who voted made a snap judgement and clicked on No without much thought at all. This is because it is anonymous – there’s no way of knowing who cast the NO vote – and so people are liable to be meaner with their vote for some reason.

I wrote a review for someone and had it rated helpful by the author (because I asked them what they voted), but unhelpful by someone else. A quick look up and down the list and I spy someone who I gave a harsh review to a while back. They appeared to accept my critique ok at the time, but maybe they decided to take it out on me in an anonymous way. Once again, there was no way my review deserved an unhelpful vote.

Another thing – I have voted all my reviews on my latest item as helpful apart from two. These two are about 500% shorter than the others and are not really specific enough. I also don’t really agree with a lot of what they said and they don’t seem to have really understood the story. However, they have tried and I don’t feel comfortable voting them unhelpful. They were trying to help, they just don’t match up to the other reviews I got. So I haven’t voted on them. This annoys me – I want to be able to vote them “Sort of helpful” giving them a 50% score.

What about the person who only read 30% of my item? This is still 3000 words worth, but the review was a little general and didn’t really help me. It made comments on writing style and tense when both things changed in the later sections that they didn’t read. Do I request a refund on the 294 credits it cost me? Do I vote it unhelpful – they did try after all, but ran out of time…

I still want a middle option I’m afraid – Was this review helpful? YES / SORT OF / NO
And I still want only authors to vote on review quality. If the author thinks it’s good then that’s the end of it.

I disagree with not letting others vote on reviews.

Sort of is not an option for me.

I think it works. Even if I hate it. I have complained about it myself many times.

A way of achieving that might be to make it a graded scale. So:

On a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is very unhelpful and 10 is very helpful, how helpful did you find this review?

Type of question. The difficulty with those is the more complex you make them, the less likely people are to bother.

(and yay for my first successful formatting attempt!)