That's the way, uh huh uh huh, I like it uh huh uh huh. (Frustration with dooyoo)

Member Name: The Duke

Product:	Frustration with dooyoo
Date:	05/09/06 (394 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: I get some frustrations off my chest.

Disadvantages: Fat chance of them actually being solved.

Frustrations with Dooyoo, eh? Well, what do they mean by "Dooyoo"? It seems an innocuous enough statement, but are they referring to the site or the staff or the members or a combination of all of them?

I'm a Dooyoo fan. I always have been to a certain extent, even when they tried to commit commercial suicide by releasing "Aurora" years ago. Aurora was an all-singing-all-dancing site system that simply didn't live up to its promises and the site effectively died for a couple of years while everyone flocked to the not-as-good-but-at-least-quite-busy Ciao. I've been a guide a couple of times; I've been to Dooyoo meets and met some of the staff and plenty of members and am in contact with several more. In fact, I've gained quite a lot from my membership of the site.

Since July 2005, Dooyoo has been on the up again. A change in community manager brought about a completely fresh perspective and a willingness to embrace ideas from members and, apart from a blip at the start of the year, this is looking to continue. So, drawing a deep breath and getting ready to moan about my frustrations, hoping that no-one notices that my introduction doesn't actually make ANY references to any kind of frustration, here goes…

PEER REVIEW

I feel that Peer review on Dooyoo, as with other sites, is poor. All too often, members open a review, click on Very Useful and get on with 'reading' more reviews, even if the review in question is lacking in core information. Additionally, people read on subjects that they have no interest in or do not understand and still rate reviews in these categories highly.

There is a difficulty here because people see reading as a necessary evil. If you want your name to be spread around the site and you're not lucky enough to be a Guide or a competition winner, the only real way to be seen is to rate and comment. There's a train of thought that indicates that if you rate honestly, then less people will come back to your reviews and give you some reads.

You know what? I think that's true. Those people who seem to give out the 'Usefuls' and 'Somewhat Usefuls' when they think they're necessary are those members who generally have a lower read rate than those who rate 'Very Useful' over 90% of the time. I know that this comment is not going to encourage anyone to start rating a little more honestly, but it is a frustration of mine regarding the rating system.

You only have to look at an average review written by a popular writer. Find one and take a look at the ratings applied by the community. In fact, first, take a look at who's rated and investigate these people. You'll see that the people rating these reviews are all different kinda of people – nerds, technophobes, pensioners, school kids, the well-off, skint students, employed, unemployed etc. With all these different kinds of people, is it really that likely that everyone will rate a review as Very Useful? I doubt it.

The same thing applies to the commentary sections where very little is said of any worth, but people feel that they really must have their name noticed. Admittedly, the problem isn't half as bad as it is on Ciao where people are given worthless points for such actions, but still, "Good op" isn't telling me much.

FONT SIZE

What's that all about now? I'm not Superman, you know. It's getting harder to read reviews on Dooyoo because of the bloody font size and awkward layout, even on my monster of a 19" monitor. Could we possibly have the font size increased a little and perhaps even have the site centred on the screen? By having it justified on the left hand side, for some reason I find this a little harder to read whereas sites centred on the screen are much, much easier to read.

SITE CLUTTER

Personally, I find Dooyoo quite cluttered. As far as usability is concerned, Ciao wins hands down for a functional site with lots of features that doesn't look as if it has everything crammed into as few pages as possible. Additionally, Ciao haven't gone down the route of this reduced navigation that makes manually searching through the database such a pain in the arse.

It's not necessarily the features or lack of them that's the issue, but the amount of well, stuff, crammed onto one screen. The main screen is a prime example of that, I think. It's just all cluttered and messy and ugh.

Grrrrr!

SUGGESTIONS QUEUE

Overall, the suggestions queue is a magnificent idea, but it would be nice if your suggestions actually moved in the queue when other items are added. Recently, I had a couple of items listed at mid-800s and higher. They sat at those positions for a few weeks until they were added while other items were added almost on a daily basis. Eventually, due to the frustration of not knowing what was going on, I had to ask a guide if they were even adding PC Games to the database because of the lack of movement.

I think it's not really worth the effort of having the queue position there if it doesn't drop when other items are added to the database. Perhaps they'd be better off having a different indicator instead like "Date of next PC Games additions: 18th September".

Sometimes, items simply drop off the queue. It's hard to know why sometimes, but for those items that are already in the database, it would be nice to still get an email from Dooyoo to let you know that the item already exists.

Oh, and the suggestions queue leads me nicely onto…

SPEAKER'S CORNER

Top Ten Bushisms. Whaaaaat? It's good to see that recently Dooyoo have started applying some editorial control over Speaker's Corner and that the influx of "Top Ten" categories has been reduced to practically zero. There's already one review writer's site on the internet that's been ruined by having cruddy categories added to it, do we need to do the same to another? My suggestion is that we don't and look forward to seeing a lot of categories that force people to think and by association to provide commentary sections that are interesting to read.

I think that only adding categories that add worth to the site is even more important on Dooyoo than on site like Ciao because all categories are paying categories on Dooyoo. As a result, the responsibility doesn't just lie with Dooyoo to add worthwhile categories, but for members to think about what exactly they're suggesting for Speaker's Corner.

MOVIES CATEGORY

Ciao's Movies category is an unholy mess if you're trying to find information. Dooyoo's was always much better, until recently. Now it appears that everything on Dooyoo will eventually get merged into an all-singing-all-dancing 'Films' category.

As someone who does like to buy DVDs for the extra features sometimes, this is a hugely irritating thing for me. The Ciao system means that I can't pick out reviews that include the extra DVD information and as such, I'm effectively reading 'blind'. Hearing that Dooyoo are going to implement something similar is making my blood boil. Some members have already decided that by adding [FILM], [DVD] or [FILMONLY] to their review titles that they're helping with that issue, which I think is a good move but two things strike me about this move to an all-in-one category: firstly, why should the members come up with a good solution to the problem? There have been no indications from Dooyoo so far that people will be able to identify the type of review before reading, thus rendering any ratings a joke. Secondly, are Dooyoo in the market for providing information any more or is Dooyoo simply a site to attract click-throughs? By hiding the information that a fair proportion of consumer members (and by extension, non-member consumers), you do have to wonder why this is happening.

MEMBERS WHINING ABOUT CROWNS/READS/LOW RATINGS

Thankfully, this is a lot less frequent than over on Ciao or here in the past. It's still annoying when it happens, though. The easy ones to address are the Crowns/Reads moans. If you want more reads then give something back to the site by reading around yourself. If you simply post and run, how do you ever expect to get recognition?

If you're expecting Crowns, then think more carefully about what you write. If your grammar and spelling isn't all it could be, then think about using a dictionary or spell checker. It might not eliminate everything, but I doubt most people are looking for perfection. From my perspective, a decent standard of English is a pre-requisite for a Crown, if Crowns are an indicator of quality. The content matter is something that's extremely personal, so as long as you include the stuff that's important to you and avoid trying to include every single detail, then you should be fine.

The low rates thing is something that you'll never get rid of. Everyone's capable of getting a low rating, irrespective of the opinion or review because everyone has differing tastes or experiences that effect how useful a review is to them. If I'm 700 words into a review and I still haven't read anything about the subject at hand, I'm well within my rights to rate lower because I don't find that kind of waffling particularly helpful. If you've used a PC for half an hour before writing a review about it, then it's not going to score high marks on the 'helpful scale', is it? Get used to the fact that people will have different opinions to you on what's helpful and what's not and you'll enjoy the sites a lot more.

Additionally, if there were a wider variety of ratings given out relating to how useful people found reviews, then people wouldn't get so uptight about the odd lower rating.

I think the whining is perhaps indicative of a wider problem where people expect something for nothing. In the case of the review writing community, it's Crowns and good ratings without putting in any work. It extends to other things like arranging meets or swapping information. I've found that if you give a little within the community, you get a lot back. It's worth putting in the effort!

WRITING FOR THE COMMUNITY

"As you all know, I love beer, me" or "Lovely Quentin asked me to write this review" or other, similarly crap, community referential openings to reviews are crap. Ok, so I've used crap twice in the same sentence, but it's crap, innit? Perhaps some people don't mind the incestuous comments referring to a community that a lot of people don't know exists, but I think it influences how people see your reviews. Personally, I find it hard to take on board what people say if they write things like "Thanks for reading" at the end or name-drop their mates or assume a level of familiarity that can only be gained by regularly reading that author. To me, that always plants a seed in my mind that the authors are not writing to be helpful and offer information or advice, but are trying to impress their peers.

It can be different in other media. Newspaper and magazine columnists, for example, thrive on their readers being familiar but often these columnists are the reasons that people buy the paper or magazine. In the wide, wide world of Internet, this isn't as common. In the Google World, people only tend to use the top dozen or so search engine results. Brand loyalty isn't really an issue, is it?

Write to be helpful, not to impress your peers. You'll be a better writer for it and you won't appear as a sad, needy individual in my eyes either.

And finally...

PEOPLE WHO WRITE REVIEWS COMPLAINING ABOUT DOOYOO

Oh bugger. Erm... I'll get me coat.

Summary: The Duke gets some frustrations about Dooyoo off his manly chest.