Suggestion Box

 (This message was edited by storymaster on 02-21-04 @ 1:51 pm EST)

While not always the case, it can be generally assumed that people are more likely to reward reviews that are positive about their work rather than negative. Thus, authors can not be objective about reviews they receive directly. So, the better option is what we're already doing, which is to allow a public accounting of what is said in the reviews. For these reasons and more, the system only ranks public reviewers and only allows the rewarding of these reviews from a global public reviewing page.

To keep the system more objective, we're more interested in reviewers being rewarded by people they didn't review. As previously stated, the person who receives a review will have a skewed impression of the review because it's directed to them. Their opinion of the reviewer is not objective. Therefore, friends who review friends are more likely to provide an inaccurate overview of the reviewing landscape. This is especially true if private reviews that could not be monitored for cheating the system were included.

While it is true friends of friends can still head to the Reviewing page to reward their friends, it is, as you point out, not so easy. So, the mere inconvenience of it helps to curb such inconsistancies in the system. And since the reviews ARE public, cheating is pretty easy for me to point out and correct by removing all of a reviewer's reviewing credits.

It's also important to note that the majority of reviewers that send private reviews don't wish to compete in an open forum anyway. Most likely they have no interest in competing at all, thus keeping their reviews private. While Writing.Com uses the competition aspect of public review system to increase participation in reviewing and overall review skills around the site, Writing.Com is really about writing! Reviewing's most important aspect is that it helps other authors improve (while improving the skills of the reviewers themselves). Private reviewers are rewarded plenty just for reviewing.

Overall, we're very happy with the system the way it's working. We're in the middle of some additions to the entire system which we'll be announcing soon.

Thanks for your comments.

~~SM

FORUM

Technical Support Forum  (13+) Members help other members with technical questions and problems using Writing.Com! #303715 by Writing.Com Support