reviewwritersforum.co. uk: Cleaning out my closet ..... (reviewwritersforum.co.uk)

Member Name: soundsexciting

Product:	reviewwritersforum.co.uk
Date:	26/05/06 (225 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: individual members are great

Disadvantages: the hidden cult within

With all the stuff that’s been said over the last few weeks about the reviewwritersforum I thought it might be useful to reveal a darker side of the website. I’ve been trying to do this by way of comments on the reviews that people are writing but Dooyoo has removed these comments at the request of certain individuals. Seems they don’t want the truth to be told. I’d like to add that for everything I talk about below I have evidence to back myself up in the form of MSN Messenger history files. Of course these could be faked but the people that have been around during my membership of the website may finally be able to put two and two together and see why at times I was behaving erratically and so out of character.

I joined the reviewwritersforum back at the tail end of 2005 at the request of the owner of the website, a well-known reviewer on both the Dooyoo and ciao sites. At that time I had only written a few reviews and didn’t even know there were forums out there for review writers let alone think about joining one. As a result I was rather flattered by this approach.
I was told that people are asked to join on an invitation only basis and that made me feel even more special. At that time, the website was hosted by a different company than today however this review is relevant to both ‘versions’ of the forum as I was a member on the first and remained so during the transition to the second and for a few weeks thereafter.

When I joined, the site was split into various discussion topics, e.g. ciao, Dooyoo, Epinions, Current Affairs, Fun and Banter and a few other topics. Under each topic were what are called ‘discussion threads’. These threads can be started by any member and once started, can be added to by any other member. Obviously each thread needs to talk about the topic that it was under but for those people, or one person :) that was unable to remain on topic, a further ‘Off-Topic’ heading was created specifically for him :). The site itself is overseen by a team of moderators and the administrators one of whom is the owner herself. When I first joined I didn’t know many of the people there but this changed over time. Within a few weeks I was posting and replying and generally joining in as I became more and more comfortable with the very friendly people there. During this time, I learnt a lot about ciao and Dooyoo and I would like to think I made quite a few friends too and for that period of time I shall be forever grateful to the members of the forum because some of those people I still consider to be friends even now.

At some point during my membership someone started a thread that listed their MSN or Yahoo email addresses and everyone promptly gave their details. Very soon the people who had been communicating with each other via message threads and guest books on ciao and non-review related comments on Dooyoo were now also communicating directly with each other in real-time conversations using MSN Messenger or Yahoo Chat. Very soon I was having regular conversations with the owner of the forum and we discussed all sorts of stuff and generally became what I naively thought were good friends. I say naively because things didn’t turn out that great in the end and looking back over what subsequently happened I see now how I was manipulated almost right from the start.

You see the problem I have is not with the forum. Its members are generally good people, even the chap who sells soap might be a good bloke but I’ll never know now because of the things I was told during one of my many online conversations with the owner. We now have too much history between us for us to ever figure out the truth about each other. The problem is with the owner of the forum. Her behind the scenes manipulation of facts mean that you can never be certain of the truth; you can never be certain whether the ‘truth’ that you’ve been told is the same ‘truth’ that is being told to other people that she no doubt is also having private conversations with.

I’m sure those of you that love reality TV are itching for some specifics and this review will probably end up being a ‘reality review’ with the forum being the online equivalent of Big Brother. Indeed one of the threads on the original forum ended up being an online ‘Big Brother event where people were put into an online ‘house’ and systematically evicted. That was in the ‘good old days’ before it all went pear-shaped – pear-shaped for me that is. I hope the remaining members are still having a great time. Mind you this review may also end up been seen as me washing my dirty laundry in public. What the hell lets go for it because people need to know what they are letting themselves in for if they get too close to the owner of the forum. So here are some specifics:

Chap who sells soap vs forum owner Part 1
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One of the first things the owner told me was that the chap who sells soap (though he didn’t sell soap at the time) hounded her on ciao. He didn’t believe any of the stuff that she wrote in reviews on ciao and he constantly harassed her and essentially bullied her online. She wasn’t the first person he picked on. Apparently he once managed to find the work place details of another reviewer and called up to see if that person actually worked there! Apparently he eventually got booted off ciao but was now on Dooyoo getting up to his old tricks again.

Now why would I be told about this? Well I happened to be told about this a short time after I mentioned in one of our online conversations how I hated bullies. Whether its bullies at school or in the workplace, I just can’t stand them and I will always try to stand up for anyone who is not able to stand up for him or herself. Whilst telling me all about the chap who sells soap, the owner of the website put herself across as a tormented person who was despised by a group of review writers and this chap happened to be part of that group. I was told that all she wanted to do was to write reviews and that other people were out to ‘get her’. Well this was like a red flag to a bull. So from that day, the man who sold soap was marked. I’m ashamed to say that I promptly went on to ‘stand up’ for the owner of the forum purely on uncorroborated evidence. By standing up I mean I used every opportunity to make a disparaging remark about him or his reviews in the same way that I was told he made remarks about the owner of the website; an eye for an eye as it were.

The other forum vs forum owner
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Later I was told that there was another forum out there. A rival to hers called opinionators. However this other forum consisted of the rest of the group that the man who sells soap belongs to. I was told that every now and again this group would get one of their members to join her forum purely to cause trouble. I asked her why she let them join in the first place and she said that the forum was ‘open to all’ and that in order to appear impartial she had to let anyone who wanted to join her site access to that site. Now in hindsight this seems odd.
When I first joined I was told it was via invitation only but now I’m being told that anyone could join. So why was I approached in the first place. Why was I made to feel special or part of a select few - hand picked to join the forum? I believe it was to make me susceptible to the owner’s charms. I would be less likely to question her stories or her motives later on. Anyway, I was given names of about 5 or 6 forum members who were there as she put it to ‘cause trouble’ and indeed reading the posts and replies on the forum it did seem as if these people had some kind of agenda to undermine at every opportunity the efforts of the owner of the forum. The implication was clear in one of our conversations. Lay into those people in the same way that they lay into the owner of the website. Of course me being the gullible idiot that I am, I did precisely that. It worked too; the number of posts that subtlety attacked the owner of the forum decreased markedly.

Dooyoo vs forum owner
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Dooyoo keep rejecting her requests to be a guide. Why?
Because Dooyoo guides are selected by existing guides and the existing guides all hate her.

Established member of CIAO vs forum owner
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There is an unofficial competition to see who gets a gold coloured spot on ciao first. The forum owner is winning but the other people who don’t like her are deliberately downrating her old reviews so that another member can over take her in terms of community points and get the gold coloured dot first.

Chap who sells soap vs forum owner Part 2
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The chap who sells soap eventually joined the second incarnation of the review writer’s forum. The forum owner was really worried about this given her past experience of him. At this point I got into a bit of a spat with the admins and moderators of the forum regarding rules about naming.
Naming is a term used on the forum to describe a post that is too specific. Specific in terms of identifying an individual or in terms of identifying a specific review. I happened to post a thread that the admins decided was too specific in terms of indirectly identifying a review that I’d recently written. I was told that it was too easy to figure out which review I was talking about. The chap that sells soap made a ‘complaint’ about this and it was upheld by the admins. This seemed odd to me. On the one hand the forum had all sorts of threads that indirectly referred to reviews just as my thread had done yet no one had complained about those yet as soon as my thread went up it was removed because the chap who sells soap had complained about it. To be fair he may have been right, but then why was no one complaining about the other threads? I went around the forum and made a note of the URL’s of all posts where it was obvious which review a person was talking about. In an MSN conversation with the forum owner I pasted links to about 6 thread on her forum that indirectly referred to reviews on Dooyoo in exactly the same way that mine had. I still have those links in my MSN Message history. The forum owner said she had no choice but to remove my post. When I asked whether the other posts would be removed she said she’d look into it but weeks later they were still there (I’d left by then). It seemed to me that over the weeks and months that I’d been on the forum, the forum owner had accepted that I would stand up for her against the group of trouble makers but when it came to a point where I needed her support in return, she decided not to. That was when I realised how I’d been a complete mug and that was when I decided to leave the forum.

You’ve probably spotted a common theme here. The owner of the forum is convinced that everyone is out to get her. Is always her verses someone else. Its always her the weak vulnerable person being attacked by big bullies or groups of bullies.

As a forum the website is pretty good. The individual members are what make it a success. Even the moderators when they do their job right are good people. The problems start when you get too close to the owner of the forum. When you start exchanging private messages and engaging in real time chats over the Internet, that’s when you realise that within the forum there is also an undercurrent of tension between members. These are the members who are pitted against each other so that eventually one of them leaves. Hopefully the one that leaves is the one the owner of the forum wanted to leave.

At one point I decided to leave the forum. Forum members can delete themselves if they wish and a request goes to the admins who will then arrange for your account to be deleted. I did this a few months before I finally did leave and one of the admins immediately got back to me and instead of asking me ‘why?’ she asked ‘is it because of xxxx. If so we can remove him’. Before I managed to send off a reply saying that I wanted to leave for my own reasons I discovered that ‘xxxx’ had been deleted from the forum. In that example you can see how the owner of the forum already had her sights set on a particular person to be removed but lacked the excuse to do so. She used me in order to get ‘xxxx’ removed. Why did they want him removed? Simply because one of their rules was that forum members have to join with a username that is identical to that used on Dooyoo or ciao and this person used his real name. He was a bit of a rebel in that sense but as far as I could see, that was the only thing that he’d done to annoy the owner of the forum, and they used my message requesting that I be deleted as an excuse to delete him instead. No doubt they told him that he’d been removed for causing me some kind of offence.

So there you go if you’ve managed to stay awake this far.
All (well almost all) my dirty laundry out in the public.

Having written this I actually feel a lot better now. Better out than in as they say :)
Of course the owner of the forum and/or the chap that sells soap previously the worst of enemies and now the best of mates may manage to find something in my review that breaks Dooyoo rules and ask for it to be removed in the same way they’ve done with my recent comments. If so then the truth will remain unknown and people will continue to join unaware of what they may be letting themselves in for and people will continue to think of me as a mean sod who likes to have a verbal argument with complete strangers for no reason whatsoever.

Update.
I've already read a few comments kind of apologising for a U or SU rate. For the record, I didn't write this for the rates. I wrote it because its a story that needs to be told.
I would urge everyone regardless of whether or not they think of me as a friend to rate this review according to the dooyoo guidelines. Heck I get the 3p anyway :)

Best Regards
Soundsexciting

Summary: Watch your back