Please rethink your policy on review post counting
 

I request you to please rethink your policy on counting reviews for products where reviews already exists.

If reviews are counted, then perhaps more people will review their favourite distros. At the moment, I have submitted a Gentoo distro review, but my review count still remains zero.

I think that the review count is a small incentive that will acknowledge my humble contribution to the LQ community. I know the reasons for not counting reviews for products which already have reviews existing, but won't more reviews just add more value? More opinions are also useful.

I again ask that *all* reviews should count towards review post counting and not just "unique" reviews. I know that many people post one-liner reviews, but is this such a big problem to handle? I'm sure the moderators can actually remove reviews which are too short.

In the end, I think that all reviews should be counted and acknowledged not just the "first" reviews for a particular product. I also think that this will help stop some of the "first" reviews which are rather hastily written just so that people can increase their review count before another person can post his/her review first.

Regards.

yes ,
i too agree on that

I have to disagree on the most part and feel the way things are in place now make more sense.

When Jeremy created the Reviews and HCL entries to display on users profiles, we all agreed that when a user posts a new product, it should count. And those that review don't.

I'd say the main reason for this is to prevent those from making quick replies that don't contribute to the actual review process don't get counted, for that reason. It's how General works, most of the threads and posts can be pointless or quick replies of nothing, so they don't get counted as we found many would abuse this to bump up their overall post count. And as hard as it may seem to some, members were doing this very thing for some odd reason.

To me, overall total of posts, HCL and Review counts of members contributing means nothing, its just a number and score. It does not in any way say one member contributes more than the other. It's not the quantity but quality of such things.

A member who goes thru the trouble of actually adding a new product actually does work to get credit though. A member who comes along and reviews the latest Redhat by simply saying.. "yeah, I installed Redhat, it's a great distro" and that's all should not get a point to their total.

If members only made reviews to get a point added to their tally of reviews next to their name, they should rethink why their posting a review. They should be posting to help others by educating, sharing experiences they've had and so on.. not to get that point added next to their name..

I can see both sides to this one really. To test, we are currently displaying both. What are the thoughts on this?

--jeremy

I'm not saying that I created a review just so that I can have a point added to my name.

But the incentive and the recognition I get is something I feel is my due for having spent a long time writing a review and posting it. It's about a small acknowledgement on LQ's part for my contribution nothing more.

It's not as though LQ spends $5 for every post count that increases.

I can understand the reasons for the current system, but I think that denying the regular members the recognition for posting reviews just because a few people might misuse this privilege and post one-liners might be a bit hard. Also moderators can remove those reviews which are deemed unfit and thus deny these people an increase in review count.

I ask this only because when I see the review count : 0 in my posts, I feel that it is a misrepresentation of my contribution to the community.

Otherwise completely removing the review count from every user post would be better.

Thanks Jeremy. I posted my previous message before I could read your post.

That's a cool idea and it's really what would solve the problem :) :D

Excellent move!

EDIT: I think a more descriptive text like : "3 reviews / 0 unique" would be nice.

Thought I'd add what the downside to this is. In the current implementation is means an extra query for *every* post displayed on a page.

--jeremy

I'd also say most will be confused and ask what does the 0/1 or 1/0 all mean.. and so on.. ;)

And you know most will now want it for the HCL entries as well, once they pick up what it means..

I think the argument equating "General" post counting to review counting is not quite right.

I don't think it's right denying the fact that the more reviews there are to help people choose a distribution or know more about a book, the better. While the reviews will be subjective (otherwise why are they called reviews?) it is there for the reason of sharing your knowledge with the community and serves a purpose. Therefore, the more reviews there are, the more "objective" the overall scenario will be with so many varying opinions and help balance out the larger picture. This will also actually encourage more people to spend time writing meaningful reviews because there is some sort of acknowledgement from LQ towards your contribution.

Also "General" post counting is a totally different issue from this which has been handled differently and I totally agree with that.

This is an interesting question, and I can see both sides of the argument. In the end though, personally, I'm of the "it it ain't broke, don't fix it" school of thought. I don't really see that there are any significant shortcomings with the way things have been set up so far, and I'm unsure that changing things would make that much of a difference. (Granted, if you write a review that doesn't get an acknowledgment it can be disappointing.)

Comments (this is strictly my own opinion, nothing more)

1. Counting any review at all would likely mean that some folks (not everyone, of course) would flock to the reviews section to add a "Yes, me too!" or "What he said!" type of "review" just to get a point. IMO this would not add any particular benefit, and actually could dilute the quality of the reviews section.

2. As trickykid explained, post counts and the like really don't have any meaningful value. Some folks with low post counts contribute a lot more than other folks with high posts counts - it all depends on the information contained in the post, nothing else. In other words, as I see it, if a post solves a problem, it really doesn't matter whether the poster had 50 posts or 5000, because the question got answered. Personally, I don't look at the post count as either a competition or as a scale for weighing the quality of the post -- it's the content that's important. Nothing more, nothing less.

3. I'd also agree with trickykid that displaying both the "all" and "unique" scores could have an unintended side-effect, namely that it creates a potentially confusing ratio. In other words, someone who had an "all/unique" count of 7/4 comes off looking worse than someone with a 12/1 ratio, since the first person's ratio is less than two, but the second person's ratio is twelve. On the other side of the coin, if you switched it the other way to become "unique/all", you could end up with ratios that looked like "0/4" or "1/15", which gives the appearance that the reviewer's comments were being voted down. I'm not sure this would help.

Maybe the best solution would be to change the caption for "Reviews", to reflect that it's a count of the original unique submissions. As always, this is just my own opinion -- J.W.

As I said before, I am aware of this problem. But this problem really doesn't have to do with the issue I have addressed. Of course, you're going to have people submitting useless reviews -- that's just the nature of a community website where you have some good members and some not-so-good members.

Post counting should never be an incentive to post. But what I mean is that the "recognition" aspect is a very real part of post counts. People feel recognized for contributing to the community and that is part of what makes a community grow.

I agree that 1/5 or 4/0 is a confusing aspect. So definitely a slight change is needed (but this is just a cosmetic issue).

Again, a cosmetic change and I totally agree with changing captions to reflect the information in a clearer manner.

While this may be true for experienced users, a lot of people new to Linux, or forums in general, may (and probably will) see a post count as a type of experience ranking, thus seeing a person with 500 posts answers more believable than a person with 50.

Another idea to limit the one-line reviews is to have a minimum word-limit or character count for reviews section.

Admittedly not a very foolproof suggestion, but could go some way in preventing the problem addressed by trickykid and J.W. viz. the one-line "me-too" kind of reviews.

It's true that some folks may initially give more weight to posts from members with high post counts, but in the end, I would say that what matters most is whether a recommendation actually works or not. To put it another way, would you rather get one reply that works from someone with 50 posts, or a dozen replies from people with 5000 posts, none of which solve the problem? Granted, at least initially a high post response may appear to have more credibility, but as they say, the proof is in the pudding.

Please understand, I'm not trying to argue here. As I see it though, the reality is simply that post count != experience/knowledge, which was the point I was trying to illustrate. My apologies for not being more clear. -- J.W.

Lose all the counts.

As stated above, they are at best misleading.
Content is the paramount consideration - readers without the experience to determine the value of a post are potentially going to be mis-led by falling back to a reliance on the post count.