Tuesday, Jan 03, 2012 at 19:29
I can assure you Peter (and everyone else) that the review comments and questions
forum interface has nothing at all to do with increasing site traffic or page
views. We have way more page
views per month then we can successfully deal with. The interface has been provided to allow for not only the consolidated storage of the data but to allow users to interact within the reviews, questions and comments system as in a number of cases we do not use every product nor are we the experts on everything so in many cases "your" (meaning all
forum users) answers to peoples reviews, comments and questions can be most beneficial.
I do agree that a number of the Reviews are light weight and have no real content however an automated system cannot understand this in every case and we are working on a method to prompt people thru a system to provide a more concise review. We must remember however that reviews are only a part of the review, questions and comment system that is provided on almost every page of the ExplorOz system. The system is basically a categorisation method for linking
forum posts to articles, products,
places,
treks etc and in all cases is bi-directional (thus a review on the
Battery Power article will appear in the article with a link to the
forum and visa versa, same as product review or questions).
We have just had a meeting in the office about this issue and I have been strongly disagreeing with supressing this data from the system as to me there is nothing different from someone asking about a tyre choice as someone talking about a product they have just purchased or reviewing say, the
Battery Power article. But we have compromised and have decided to add an option to the
forum index to allow members to suppress all Review, Ratings and Questions posts in the index view. This will be an optional turn on/off type
check box on the
forum and will be implemented in the next day or so.
David
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