When I first started using Dooyoo after previously being used to the Ciao website, one of the first things I noticed was the very sensible attitude on Dooyoo towards rating and commenting.

On Ciao there was an awful lot of very unfair rating and commenting in my opinion and a lot of it was down to new members sticking together and rating each other's reviews as exceptional when they were clearly not or they would be revenge rating members who had dared to give them the rating their reviews actually deserved.

It seems now after a long spell of sensible ratings on Dooyoo that this is now starting to happen over here too. The influx of new members on the site and the churning of reviews that is going on is understandable due to the new reward system of 50p per review regardless of reads or ratings, this is bad enough but we now also have the thing that Ciao had for so long where all the new members or churners just rate every review as very useful in order to hopefully receive very useful ratings in return.

A prime example of this would be a review I read the other day on a CD album, the review had not even reached the word count if you removed the list of tracks from it and me and a good few other members had clearly pointed this out in our comments and had also rated it as not useful. It had six not usefuls, five somewhat usefuls and one useful rating as well as several comments on why these ratings had been given then along came a member (not a new member I might add) and rated it very useful and also left a comment that read " great review, thanks for the info"!

Now clearly everyone has their own idea of what is useful and what is not but a review that has been clearly identified as being in breach of the Dooyoo rules should never be rated as very useful and the comment just pointed towards the fact that this member had not read the review at all because to thank someone for this review was ridiculous it held little or no information at all.

That brings me on to the comments and how ridiculous they can be, not only are some of the comments being left just pointless and nonsense but a lot of them point the finger to the fact that people are not even bothering to read the reviews they are commenting on.

On a recent review of mine which was on a Samsung camera, a member left the comment seems like a good phone, I have also seen lately a review on a kids toy which had the comment "I love this programme" and another review which labelled everything that the author found bad about a movie, it told of the acting being awful and the story line being hard to follow, the author had also given it only one star yet another member had left the comment "glad you enjoyed this movie I loved it too".

It is only too obvious that there are many types of abuse going on, on this site now that never or rarely ever appeared before. I have also noticed that a few long standing members who used to write very good reviews and always rated fairly have turned to writing many more reviews which are all of a poorer standard and have also started rating everything very useful, so it seems like some members are going along the lines of if you can't beat them join them.

Reading and rating by members is just as important as writing the reviews in the first place if the site is to be taken seriously by non members looking for advice on what to buy. I realise almost everyone is on the site to make some extra money but there is more to it than that and if people can't use the site correctly then in my opinion Dooyoo need to make sure people do.

As a guide I am expected to report any signs of abuse on the site but every member can report what they see going on so if you see people abusing the site with revenge ratings or comments that clearly point to the fact that they have never read the review in the first place then go to community then click the contact Dooyoo link and tell them what you have seen going on and get it sorted... It`s you`re site too!!

Thanks for reading (I had to get that off my chest)!


©2008 thebigc1690