Review
Here at BensBargains we often feel compelled to buy the very deals we post. Some products turn out to be everything we expected, while other products fall short of our expectations. Coming into the new year, I was thinking of how to make this site even more useful, and it occurred to me that we can share our own experiences with these products by doing product reviews. These won't be multi-page write-ups that take 30 minutes to read, but rather a concise statement of how the product performed versus our expectations. Feel free to share your opinions in each review discussion, as well as to contact us about products that you'd like to see us tackle.
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The biggest challenge will be moderating and preventing useless unrelated comments.
Good idea, but How and where ben? Thru the usual discuss link where m0f0 and some bored geeks at work beating each other down?
Especially the ones from bacon. He floods threads with the same pictures over and over. He should be banned.
Great idea since most of the comments posted here by my fellow Ben Buddies are not worth the digital ink.
...isn't that what THESE comments are for?
The reviews on Amazon and Cicuit City usually were a good start for a review but it would be nice if you can come up with something also useful.
Ben, there are a handful of users who post nothing but idiocy and snips back and forth. If you banned those posters, the value of your site would go up a huge amount.
Some posters, like CompWiz17 (may not have his name exactly right), post nothing but valuable information. Do something to encourage folks like him... maybe you could have your drawings truly be something to reward valuable posts.
Or maybe open up a second "discuss" type form, except titled "User Review" and give folks one warning for a non-helpful post, before banning their ID. If you do it right, after a while nobody will even visit anything but the Reviews.
People currently leave useful comments. However, there are people who leaves comments with non sense trash talk. Ben, you should add a anonymous flag to remove comments that is not useful.
I have always found the user reviews helpful if there are useful ones, but if I'm going to really look into a product I'll jump to consumer reports or cnet. What about just linking to product scores off of those sites?
I bet there's some people who has nothing better to do. Let them moderate. Also, let other people besides Bacon to post deals.
Big big hint: PAY people to do useful reviews, give them like $.50. It goes a long way
How about all these complainers tackling a big bag of dïcks.
#5's got a point, but I think Ben is talking about something a little more permanently tied to a product instead of starting the comments at zero every time the deal is posted again. We have a lot of recurring deals on this site and a lot of the questions asked are redundant.
But please continue to provide a way for us to get our daily dose of Lawnsprinkler
Some posters, like CompWiz17 (may not have his name exactly right), post nothing but valuable information. Do something to encourage folks like him... maybe you could have your drawings truly be something to reward valuable posts.
Or maybe open up a second "discuss" type form, except titled "User Review" and give folks one warning for a non-helpful post, before banning their ID. If you do it right, after a while nobody will even visit anything but the Reviews.
Why isn't "bacon" banned? He does nothing but post the same pictures and nonsense over and over again. His posts are ruining these forums.
The review idea is really good, there just needs to be a way to govern and filter out the trash talker from the genuine contributors. Ie. if there is a ways to delete a review\comment is it receives more than '20' unfavourable votes from others, thus leaving the more valuable review behind. my 2 cents.
Is bacon the Omarosa of Bens Bargains?
Easy way to manage bad post is to put what craigslist does. Put a button there to flag comments so when it reaches a certain amount it would then flag ben to delete it. Simple.
Why not add a voting feature like Amazon that you can click on whether or not the review was helpful? Highest votes get moved to top of the review list. Those with mostly negative votes get axed.
I try to read the posts all the time, but when folks get on an off-track rant I quickly look elsewhere. So - Ben, if you want to keep my attention on your advertisers, lose the posters that just love to see their words in print while adding nothing to the product discussion. In the Lean Six Sigma world, these people are considered "non-value added."
#15: well, while the idea is good, what's going to stop bacon or m0f0 or any of the other spammers from just making multiple accounts(like 20), and then removing useful posts?
I do agree with the moderation idea. There are a few members here who are ruining the site for everyone. No one wants to see posts full of obscenities, or insulting other members repeatedly. The current filter system is not at all effective at stopping this, and really just proves to be more of an annoyance when trying to post useful comments and links. It would seem that the only real moderation that's gone on here recently was putting a filter in place so that everything horndoggy11 posted appeared to say "oink" from the main page. This was effective(he got annoyed and left, and even posted that he was doing that), but that, or something similar, really needs to be implemented on a larger scale.
I do like the idea of reviews. There are many helpful and useful user comments on products that are just lost as time goes on and those deals and the posts that go with them are buried. If these could stick around with a product, along with, say, a rating 1 to 5, it would be much more helpful.