Judging by the number of reviews that have been reported since the new features rolled out, I would say that people are pretty happy to have this feature. However, it seems that some folks are not quite getting how this is to be used, so I thought I’d post a little “how-to” guide for using the reporting button.
The following are the things that I really want reviews flagged for:
- Are blank or contain less than 10 or so words.
- Contain website or email addresses.
- Contain contact information ie phone numbers, postcodes etc.
- Appear to impersonate someone else.
- Are considered likely to disrupt, provoke, attack or offend others.
- Are racist, sexist, homophobic, sexually explicit, abusive or otherwise objectionable.
- Contain swear words or other language likely to offend.
- Break the law or condone or encourage unlawful activity. This includes breach of copyright, defamation and contempt of court.
- Are written in any language other than English.
- Contain links to or addresses of other websites.
- Are considered to be ‘spam’, that is posts containing the same. or similar, message posted multiple times.
(all of those, by the way, are taken from the Terms and Conditions of using the website, which I recommend that you review if you haven’t in a while.)
You will notice what is not on that list. There is no item on the list that says “You disagree with the Reviewer, who must obviously be wrong/mean/a shill for a competitor. We all have individual tastes and highly subjective experiences of tobaccos. I really don’t care one bit that Bob Smith has written reviews of every one of your favorite blender’s tobaccos and roundly criticized all of them.
That’s how it goes and you should grow up and stop basing your personal beliefs on whether or not people agree with you. Yes, people disagree, with you, on the internet. That doesn’t make them wrong. Even if it did coincide with them being wrong (and there’s only a 50% chance of that, now isn’t there?) it wouldn’t matter. If collective reviewing and rating is of any use, then the obviously wrong reviews and rating will fall to the bottom of the heap anyway. Geez, I even gave you a way to vote against reviews you think are bad.
Anyway, you can tell that a lot of people are using the Report This Review feature for the wrong reasons and it’s gotten under my skin a bit. Now that I’ve explained exactly what I want, and do not want, this feature used for, I feel comfortable saying that anyone from this point forward who misuses the feature will have their access to it (and perhaps the entire site) removed by me summarily, depending on my mood at the time I have read through all of their reports.