Hmmmmm, some suggestions! (Feedback and General Suggestions for dooyoo)

Member Name: theanarchistkid

Product:	Feedback and General Suggestions for dooyoo
Date:	05/03/01 (84 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Lots of features already implemented

Disadvantages: It's not perfect!

Dooyoo as a platform for providing independent consumer advice is excellent but the problem is that sometimes this is a bit too independent. What you've got to ask yourself is 'How many non-members come and read your opinions?'. In the case of my account it's a very small number and I think that this could be the downfall of Dooyoo. I've never seen Dooyoo advertised anywhere, the only way that I came across it originally was from a friend. If Dooyoo wants to provide advice to consumers, it either needs to attract more members or appeal to non-members. Currently I believe it's doing the former, which isn't a bad thing, but it would be nice to have more non-members on the site. I'm not sure about this bit, but I don't think you get paid for non members reading your opinions. I don't know why this is, or whether this is still the case but it certainly raises some interesting questions.

Another thing that I would like to see incorporated into Dooyoo would be a form of opinion rankings. I know that we already have the Premium Opinions but I think that this covers too narrow a ground. If Dooyoo could introduce a scheme like they have over at Ciao where each month there is a Premium fund it would be a lot better. The way that it works at Ciao is that the best opinions get £15 and they work down from there. Don't think for a minute though that Ciao pay more than Dooyoo, because all their other payouts are much less. Having a scheme like this on Dooyoo would be trickly to implement but it would be nice for the members to know how their opinions rank. Think of the sense of achievement that you'd get if you made it into the top 10 opinions. Maybe if this does ever get implemented, you could also have yearly awards with even bigger payouts. My cunning plan isn't without flaws however. I can appreciate that maintaining such a list of ranked opinions would be a very long and arduous task that nobody would really want to
take on. However, if they can do it at Ciao, I'm sure that with a bit of effort, it could be achieved here.

The amount of money that Dooyoo pays its members is never going to be perfect but it's pretty damn good. In a way I would be in favour of not getting paid for opinions unless they get crowned. I'm sure that this would encourage the members to write much better opinions which would be more like magazine articles. Also if Dooyoo did this, it would free up some funding to pay for my other cunning plans. Personally, I have only written 100 opinions on Dooyoo and I have made a lot more than the £10 that I have earned solely from writing opinions. This just shows that getting paid for writing opinions isn't the primary money earner on Dooyoo.

Obviously, other members won't take too fondly to not getting paid for writing opinions which is where the next part of my plan comes in. Why not offer different rates for people reading and rating your opinions. Maybe if we said 10p for a VU, 5p for a Useful, 2p for a SU and nothing for a Not Useful. This would encourage writers to write much better quality opinions and in the long run, those that write the best opinions, will find themselves making the most money. The way that is seems to work at the moment is that the more opinions you read, the more of yours get read. This means that a member that writes poor opinions yet reads loads of others currently would get more money than someone who writes stunning opinions and reads very few. If we introduced different rates of pay however, the person that was writing the good quality reviews would start to earn more money because he would be getting more Very Usefuls. I'm surprised that this hasn't already been implemented on Dooyoo because I think that it provides a solution to a major problem.

Another aspect of Dooyoo that could be improved slightly is the means by which they pay you. Over on Ciao (I'm sorry to keep com
paring) they will pay the money directly into your bank account which saves you having to go into town and paying in a cheque. This isn't a major gripe, but it would be nice to see the same thing on Dooyoo. Just enter your bank account number and sortcode and then request payments whenever you reach say £10. Much simpler than having to ask for a cheque, wait for the cheque to arrive, go and pay in the cheque and then having to wait another 4 or 5 days whilst the cheque clears. I don't know about the financial implications of this to Dooyoo because they might have to pay money to have the money transferred into our accounts, but it would make life much easier.

Another minor gripe that I have about Dooyoo is the speed at which new categories are added. I appreciate the difficulties with new categories having to be approved by community managers but sometimes it can be very frustrating having to wait up to a week when you want a category adding. When I suggest that a new category be added, I normally want to write an opinion on that topic at that time and unfortunately this isn't possible. I don't really have a direct solution to this problem, so I'll leave that up to Dooyoo to come up with any suggestions.

Increase the minimum word length of reviews! 75 words is absolutely nothing and there are still some people that only stick to this minimum figure. It is impossible to convey enough information in 75 words and I would much rather see this increased to 200 or even 500 words. This might put off some members, but I'm sure that it would improve the general standard of reviews. On some of the 75 word reviews, people just say "This product is good" and then go on to give contact details about themselves such as "If you agree or disagree why not email be at ........ and let me know what you think. Also please leave a commentary because I like them". It's far too easy to fill up 75 words doing this and it mea
ns that a lot of the opinions on Dooyoo are totally worthless. I'm sure that the community managers probably reject most of these opinions anyway, but introducing a greater minimum review length would surely make their job a lot easier.

One of my final little complaints about Dooyoo is the speed of the site. I'm using an ISDN connection at the moment and the site is still very slow. Sometimes it is unbearably slow so I can't even use it. There are other times when I can't login to my account which is a real nuisance. I know that there must be a massive strain on the server, what with all the members that are constantly on the site, but surely it could be made a little bit quicker? There are times when I just can't be bothered to go and read any opinions because of how slow it is. This is normally during the evenings though. Early in the morning Dooyoo is very quiet and a pleasure to use.

It's very easy for me to compare Dooyoo to Ciao and other schemes similar to this and knock it, but the truth is that Dooyoo is by far the best. For a start, it's the easiest to make any serious money on, it's well designed, easy to navigate and there are some great personalities on the site. It's not perfect though and other schemes have some features that I would like to see.

It would be nice to be able to see a list of the 10 most recent opinions because when you've spent ages writing an opinion like the one which I'm writing now, it's nice to see it on the Dooyoo front page. Sometimes though if you're really unlucky, it'll only be on the front page for about 10 seconds and someone else will submit a review and be on there for 10 minutes. This is just the luck of the draw but having a page on this site which listed the last 10 opinions would give you more of a chance.

As I have said, Dooyoo is generally excellent, but it's not perfect. I hope that Dooyoo will carry on improving like it
has done over the last 9 months or so. This is my 100th opinion by the way, and all I can say is that I hope I get the chance to write another hundred. Goodbye, I'm quite tired now.

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