Saxguy said…

One question: how come VOTING on a review isn't incented? I would think it would, particularly since you are incenting receipt of votes. 

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My take on the no-points-for-voting is similar to someone else's; it's painfully easy to simply go through a bunch of reviews willy-nilly and vote "Helpful" without reading anything just to get points. 

One odd thing to point out.  When I save a review as Draft, it tells me Congrats this counts towards my writer status.  I got worried for a second there that I had published on accident, but nope it is still a draft.  I even went and saved it as draft again and got the same message.

Hi all. Wow! Love getting all the feedback... the good and the bad.

Believe it or not, we spent months thinking through all the mechanics of the program. I know we didnt get it perfect, but it is looking pretty good!!! :)

Here are a few things that we spent a lot of time thinking about:

1. Gaming. How can we ensure that people dont just game the system- you dont want to award points too easily- while at the same time, you want to get people into the system.

2. The tiers. VIP is very hard to achieve. There are hundreds of thousand of users of the site and only a super small number of  people at this level. So, if you made it to VIP, kudos to you. You rock the system.

3. Annual versus Lifetime points. So, several of you asked what happens at the end of the year? Your points start over. With that being said, we will carry over your previous year badge so that our members dont have empty status at the begining of the year! Several of you also asked why we arent doing lifetime points versus yearly points. The thinking is that we want to give new people a shot at some of the awards too!

4. PC Badges. We planned to officially retire the PC badge. That means that if you made it before we cut over, you will get that exclusive badge. If you didnt, that means that you set your sites on the VIP badge now. :)

5. Creative. We really like the rainbow of colors, but hear you loud and clear on the years. We will see what we can do there.

Please do keep the feedback coming. We love hearing what you all have to say. (even you, Bob. LOL)

The V.I.P. program looks amazing. I love all the changes made on VP.

vivasuzi said…

One odd thing to point out.  When I save a review as Draft, it tells me Congrats this counts towards my writer status.  I got worried for a second there that I had published on accident, but nope it is still a draft.  I even went and saved it as draft again and got the same message.

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I was just going to mention this.  It happened to me twice tonight which kind of freaked me out for the few seconds that it took for me to check my home page again and find them under "saved drafts".  It was unsettling.

Love the  badge.

Susie.

njchicaa said…

vivasuzi said…

One odd thing to point out.  When I save a review as Draft, it tells me Congrats this counts towards my writer status.  I got worried for a second there that I had published on accident, but nope it is still a draft.  I even went and saved it as draft again and got the same message.

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I was just going to mention this.  It happened to me twice tonight which kind of freaked me out for the few seconds that it took for me to check my home page again and find them under "saved drafts".  It was unsettling.

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It happened to me too and I thought I published a VERY undone review. It turned I didn't but it was another step I had to go through to get back to the review. I save mine a lot because Firefox loves to crash lately and I lose everything. I know I should write reviews in a word processor and transfer but I don't. I use the save as draft button to protect reviews in progress.

I definitely freaked out when I first saw that new message.

I really like everything about this new system! i wasn't in the old one very long, but still....

I am completely impressed that you were able to make such a huge switch-over without taking the site down or having lots of glitches. maybe doing that is easier than I know. If it is, just pretend you are technical gods... XD

(round of applause for everyone involoved!!!)

Are you saying you have to get 50,000 points in ONE year to get V.I.P. status?  If that's the case, I don't like that at ALL.  

Fardreamer said…

Saxguy said…

One question: how come VOTING on a review isn't incented? I would think it would, particularly since you are incenting receipt of votes. 

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My take on the no-points-for-voting is similar to someone else's; it's painfully easy to simply go through a bunch of reviews willy-nilly and vote "Helpful" without reading anything just to get points.

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True but no one is voting! OK, some are. I mean that I know I get kind of down when I post a review and, the next day, it still has no votes and sometimes only gets 1 or 2 now. Used to be we got many more. I thought it was just me but I see when I go to rate other long time members that their votes are way down too.

I don't want anyone to vote for points (without caring about true helpfulness) but maybe there should be a certain sector that is assigned to trying to be sure that not just newbies but everyone's reviews are looked at and voted on. That's a HUGE task, of course, But I have been seeing long time members with very good reviews that have no votes at all on them and they were published months ago. I went through recently and rated a ton of older reviews (phantomly as is my style often) because the reviews deserved to have at least ONE helpful vote..

I know seeing votes with or without comments really makes my day. I just don't know how to encourage people to do it. It seems the level of voting has dropped off a lot as CL's are looking for newer people to welcome and "take care of" and other members are more concerned, in general, with writing, (Obviously some people DO vote and I love them for it. When they take time to vote on my reviews, I always am grateful.)

I don't know the answer but it is something that has been on my mind for months now (as poor Jolie and Meredith are well aware).

PattyTherre said…

Fardreamer said…

Saxguy said…

One question: how come VOTING on a review isn't incented? I would think it would, particularly since you are incenting receipt of votes. 

---

My take on the no-points-for-voting is similar to someone else's; it's painfully easy to simply go through a bunch of reviews willy-nilly and vote "Helpful" without reading anything just to get points.

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True but no one is voting! OK, some are. I mean that I know I get kind of down when I post a review and, the next day, it still has no votes and sometimes only gets 1 or 2 now. Used to be we got many more. I thought it was just me but I see when I go to rate other long time members that their votes are way down too.

I don't want anyone to vote for points (without caring about true helpfulness) but maybe there should be a certain sector that is assigned to trying to be sure that not just newbies but everyone's reviews are looked at and voted on. That's a HUGE task, of course, But I have been seeing long time members with very good reviews that have no votes at all on them and they were published months ago. I went through recently and rated a ton of older reviews (phantomly as is my style often) because the reviews deserved to have at least ONE helpful vote..

I know seeing votes with or without comments really makes my day. I just don't know how to encourage people to do it. It seems the level of voting has dropped off a lot as CL's are looking for newer people to welcome and "take care of" and other members are more concerned, in general, with writing, (Obviously some people DO vote and I love them for it. When they take time to vote on my reviews, I always am grateful.)

I don't know the answer but it is something that has been on my mind for months now (as poor Jolie and Meredith are well aware).

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I'm with you on this Patty.  It is very discouraging to see a review you've written with few or no helpful votes and it seems to me that, over the course of the 2 years I've been here, the voting has dropped way off.  I too see lots of really good reviews with little or no voting.  We all like that feed back.  If you are a writer and don't care about getting feedback, who the heck are you writing for, anyway?  I know I LOVE getting feedback and get a little discouraged when I get none.  How DO we get people to vote, MEANINGFULLY??

First of all, I really like the new system although I still am a little mystified by some things. 

The Helpful Votes will never be what it should as long as people who read our reviews have to join up in order to vote or comment on something.  That's one problem.

The other is -- and I don't think anyone wants to hear this -- that our reviews are going to be read less and get less votes now that so many people are involved with Twitter, Facebook, etc.  You will notice that most of your votes and reads are coming from people who only concentrate on ViewPoints.  I have noticed myself that I now spend less time on ViewPoints and more time on Twitter and other things. 

This is actually what the crew at ViewPoints wanted us to do.  It seemed important to everyone that we all got involved with Twitter, Facebook, etc.  It's not necessarily a bad thing but there are only so many hours in the day and some people tend to spend the whole day on Twitter now instead of just signing in and out every now and then. 

I'm not saying that's BAD, I'm just saying I think it is going to affect the reads and other activity in ViewPoints ... BUT I've got to add that the badges are great and everyone seems to have done a super job!  I have thought all along that ViewPoints is one of the most tech-savvy sites I have ever encountered.

I know I am new, but I have written a few reviews... I thought it was just mine that were not "helpful" now I see from these posts that it's a trend. I think it's hard because of the sheer volume of the reviews to actually gauge who is "helpful" or not. I think a "not helpful" vote is probably more telling in this case... I go through the community activity and read interesting ones almost everyday, and I go on peoples' review pages that have "fanned" me and read theirs. But unless I am searching for a particular thing, I am sure there are tons of great reviews that are not voted "helpful."

The "helpful" thing is really subjective and I think it's making people self-conscious. My top review has been read like 700 times and has one helpful vote. I used to wonder what I could possibly add to that thing to make it more helpful. I decided not to torture it - or myself.

Maybe when people navigate away from the review, a line of text could scroll - WHY? WHY didn't you vote? I am actually relieved some upper-level people are having this problem and talking about it. Being new doesn't stop my over-achiever streak.  :) Mostly it just bothers me because the more some are read, the less helpful they are seeming...

ANYONE can vote. They do not need to be a member to click. I suspect that most visitors don't realize this as everywhere else, before voting, you have to at least sign in (even Amazon). I also think the votes we do get from the outside are probably not helpful ones because people are more prone to click that button if they don't agree with an opinion than they are to click helpful.

Having said that, it's sad when the MOST helpful reviews have 6 rates on them. It used to be 26 or at least 16-18! I know we're all busy. I am super super super busy as I'm sure everyone here is. But rating, in my opinion, is a part of making this site better. There are some really BAD reviews out there that need to be Not Helpful clicked or even marked as inappropriate. VP management can't know if we don't tell them about the gibberish and other crazy stuff that is posted (and I see a lot of it when I am going through new reviews as well as writing summaries).

Like I said, I don't know the answer but I have hesitated to write more than one review in a 24 hour period because I felt that would hurt my chances even more of being rated. But to heck with it. I'm going to write as often as I want and I WILL continue to rate and try to rate MORE if I can. I try to get to my email alerts as often as possible and then catch up with reviews I missed from my friends but one reason it's a bit....of a pain is because, unless I leave a comment, the reviewer doesn't know I was there.

I like people to know I was there and took the time to read and rate their reviews but I don't feel like I want to comment every single time I rate. Sometimes, a review is helpful but I have nothing really to say except "Great review" which I do say. I think, if we could privately see who rated us (not if they gave us NH votes), maybe that would make it easier for us to rate and not feel we need to comment on every review as a fingerprint that "we were there".

I agree, Patty -- if we could just leave a Helpful Vote without a comment, I would be inclined to read more reviews and vote more. 

Good point! 

AnnaBanana said…

The Helpful Votes will never be what it should as long as people who read our reviews have to join up in order to vote or comment on something.  That's one problem.

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Actually, you do not have to be a Viewpoints member to vote on reviews. Any non-member can drop in and vote... next time you're at the library, go to Viewpoints without signing in and vote on a few reviews.

I'm with the rest of you in thinking that there needs to be some incentive for people to vote on reviews, and the same incentive should exist whether you vote "Yes" or "No." I suggest a single point for voting. Even if you vote on reviews "willy-nilly," you're not going to get a lot of points through voting.

Actually, if anything encourages willy-nilly activities, it's earning 10 points for forum posts. At least one VIP member got more than half the way to the VIP level because of heavy forum posting. That would be okay if Viewpoints was primarily a social site, and I do agree that encouraging some social interaction is a good thing. There may be too much of a good thing, though.

Maybe there should be a graduated point scale for forum posts -- a forum post that says "LOL... you made my day!" shouldn't be worth as much as a detailed post that actually gives some information. Perhaps the point scale should be 2 points for forum posts of less than 100 characters, 5 points for forum posts between 100 and 200 characters, and 10 points for more than that. Such as this one... :-)

--Bob

Patty says: It happened to me too and I thought I published a VERY undone review.

You sound like me.  I often start a draft with just the highlights.  If I had published my review, it would have been just headers and no review.  I don't write in word processes and don't think we should have to.  I actually have not had many troubles with VP so I just write right in the window.

Anyway, I have a new problem and wondering if anyone else did.  I emailed Meredith too but was wondering.  Last night when I finally finished that draft, I went to publish and got the same msg as if it was published, but it's still a draft.  It's not publishing, although it is saved in my drafts so I didn't lose it.  I will let you know if I hear anything about that.

AnnaBanana said…

I agree, Patty -- if we could just leave a Helpful Vote without a comment, I would be inclined to read more reviews and vote more. 

Good point! 

 

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You can leave a Helpful Vote without a comment. You can! You can!  :)  I must admit, though, I like the comments almost more than the helpful votes.  I like feedback so I know if I'm hitting the mark.

Sounds really good...can't wait for it to go live!

AnnaBanana said…

First of all, I really like the new system although I still am a little mystified by some things. 

The Helpful Votes will never be what it should as long as people who read our reviews have to join up in order to vote or comment on something.  That's one problem.

The other is -- and I don't think anyone wants to hear this -- that our reviews are going to be read less and get less votes now that so many people are involved with Twitter, Facebook, etc.  You will notice that most of your votes and reads are coming from people who only concentrate on ViewPoints.  I have noticed myself that I now spend less time on ViewPoints and more time on Twitter and other things. 

This is actually what the crew at ViewPoints wanted us to do.  It seemed important to everyone that we all got involved with Twitter, Facebook, etc.  It's not necessarily a bad thing but there are only so many hours in the day and some people tend to spend the whole day on Twitter now instead of just signing in and out every now and then. 

I'm not saying that's BAD, I'm just saying I think it is going to affect the reads and other activity in ViewPoints ... BUT I've got to add that the badges are great and everyone seems to have done a super job!  I have thought all along that ViewPoints is one of the most tech-savvy sites I have ever encountered.

 

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Thanks for the support and honest feedback. We do want to hear it - even if you feel it's negative.

First, to clarify... non-registered members can vote on reviews. So the more traffic we drive to Viewpoints, the more likelihood for people to read and vote on reviews. Now we can always work harder to push registered members to vote more. I think we are getting some great insights on this topic here and agree with you that voting is very important as it surfaces the best content. Which brings me to my next point...

Our ultimate goal is to build a thriving community where people can help each other make better buying decisions. Facebook and Twitter have totally different objectives and offer different levels of interaction than consumer review sites like Viewpoints.

Our whole crew loves social sites too which is why we're there... (que the shameless plug of our social network page which can be found from the home page!) 

Imagine writing a helpful review in 140 characters or less (Twitter-style)! That's why we give more points for more content. View the point levels by clicking on any badge you see across the site. You will be taken to the Frequently Asked Questions page where all the details are listed.

Thanks Vivasuzi! We're looking into this... sounds like a glitch.

Meredith said…

First, to clarify... non-registered members can vote on reviews.

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Hmmm... what's a "non-registered member"? Can someone become a member of Viewpoints without signing up? Or do you simply mean "non-members"?

Enquiring minds want to know!

--Bob

Ha! Sorry Bob, my reference to "non-registered member" made about zero sense. You are either a member by registration or not a member at all because you are not registered.

I have always known that we can leave a helpful vote without commenting but I for one always leave a comment so that the writer will know that I was one of the members who stopped by.  I want people to know I am supporting them.

However, when I first joined I felt compelled to read EVERY review that EVERY one of my "friends" wrote.  It became overwhelming to keep up with such large volume but I didn't want anyone to think I was ignoring them or paying more attention to another member.  Now, I just do the best I can with the time I have.

Regarding Twitter: Yes, that's a happening place and we are staying very active over there.  My excuse is this: On Twitter I have more personal friends that I can communicate with.  I have been reunited with friends from college and so forth.

Sometimes I will just bounce back and forthe between the two sites and about the last 4-6 weeks ago I began posting my reviews as links on Twitter to get those people interested.

I, myself, have noticed a rather unhappy downward slide in ratings as of late.  No matter what category I write in, sometimes I consider myself lucky to receive (earn is a better term) one or two helpful votes even though the stats will show that over five persons at least read a review.

The new VIP system is, for right or wrong, going to be heavily skewed in favor of those VP members who have loyal followings who read/rate every review.  I'm fairly popular here...or at least I seem to be, but I have noticed that either the division of attention between VP and social sites (ahem, Facebook!) has affected my in-house reads and rates considerably.  I post my reviews on FB and every so often Tweet them, but it is still not resulting in an uptick of votes.

Regarding Helpful votes, I vote on every review that I read and seldom leave a comment.  If it's a particularly interesting review or if I can tell that the writer spent a lot of time on the piece, I will take the time to comment.

I have noticed that helpful votes have gone way down, as well.

What bothers me MOST is when I have 4 comments and only 2 helpful votes.  What?

Also, I will use the social networking sites to draw attention to my reviews here at Viewpoints by posting on Twitter - "Check out my review on such and such here" and posting a link. 

I know that Patty does this as well.  Does it draw in more users, readers, reviewers?  I don't know but it's worth a shot, right?

A tip we include in the FAQ's...

How can I help increase the number of reads for my reviews?

It's easy! You have many options-

1. Post a link to your review on your Facebook or Twitter status.
2. Send an email to your friends to let them know you just posted a new review at Viewpoints.
3. Link to your review on your blog.
4. If you're a member of other forums, share a link there.

It helps to tell readers a little about your link before you post it, so be sure to mention the product in a little blurb. For example: "I just wrote a review of my mattress on Viewpoints!" and insert your link.

With that said, we are working to correct a bug we have with internal linking on Viewpoints. But you can still link to your Viewpoints reviews from other sites like those listed here.

Her's something that just hit me. Someone emailed me (I won't name names of course) and said they enjoyed my review of a certain product but didn't give me a vote because....it would add more points to my score and make it harder for them to catch up with me.

My jaw dropped.

People aren't going to be even less inclined to vote now that others get points for helpful votes are they? That's taking "competition" way too far. I refuse to even think that way. But are there people who DO think that way (besides the one who emailed me)? Scary.

Bob, I agree with you about the point system for message board posts. Totally. And have said so since I learned of it. I think posts for categories and welcoming posts should be granted a small amount of points but I don't think general game playing should be. It's a friendly thing and a fun thing but I don't see how it encourages community in a way that generates more reviews or gives information to readers.

I would, if I were queen of the VP world, assign points to people who post in the specific category areas and in the Welcome areas. I would move the games and things to a secondary board or separate area or, if they can't be moved, leave them but not assign points for posts made there.

I jump in and play games at times so I am not dissing those threads AT ALL. I just feel that games are a totally social thing that some people engage in and enjoy (which is great) but don't inform or even discuss anything having to do with the areas that people write in like the category boards and certainly the welcome and help boards.

A badge for frequent posters is great. I love that idea. But points? Not so much.

Not complaining, just sharing.

It always takes me a little time to wrap my mind around changes.

I think the new award system is a good idea, because it includes many different ways to shine on the site and with incentives for various activities.

As far as suggestions:

1. Photos add a lot to the reviews and the site and support the overall mission, so I'd include those in the VIP tally vs a Shutterbug tag (although that extra badge would be fine as well). Often it takes more time to do the pictures than to do the writing.

2. Perhaps discussion posts and comments could be a special badge (along the lines of the shutterbug badge) rather than on the tally list for VIP. It seems that the VIP indicates writing with the other labels as listed, and the social end seems like a different animal.

3. Advisor seems kind of odd. I'd prefer something like senior writer. Not a big deal. But, I think you're getting large amounts of material from the writer types, so it seems like writer gets ranked lower as set up. Kind of the . . . "Oh, I'm JUST a writer" thing.

4. I tend to be a builder rather than a clean slate type, so I'm not looking forward to Jan 1 and going back to the beginning. That's my personality type though. I'm slow and steady vs. coming out of the gate fast.

5. I know it's a couple of years down the road, but it might be nice to have stars or something for 5 yrs, 10 yrs etc.