Taking Feedback/Suggestions for Service Reviews

Posted 5 years, 6 months ago by admin

New reviews/feedback feature?

295 Votes Replace the Service Reviews forum with a new Reviews feature. It'd be easier to use and will help cut down on drama.

221 Votes Don't need a new Reviews feature, it'll be overly intrusive. Just keep the Service Reviews forum.

98 Votes Remove the Service Reviews forum and don't replace it with anything, it's harmful and PSAs should stay in bulletins.

44 Votes Other

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I've been looking over this forum recently and it's not really what I imagined when I first put it up... I do like the idea of a public space for transparent discussion of business transactions, but it feels counter-intuitive (eg. not everyone'll check for a PSA before doing business with a user) and at times overly hostile and personal.

I originally got the idea for a reviews forum from BJD trading forums, where negative reviews are just a thread you make when you receive substandard service or products from a user (or don't receive it at all), and they were more like small posts about single transactions, rather than big compilations of evidence about why the viewer shouldn't do business with so and so. I think it'd be healthy to try moving towards a model where users feel comfortable just commenting on individual good or bad experiences you've had without having to make a case against a user's character. If a user has a large quantity of a certain type of review from a bunch of people, a viewer can more or less imagine what working with them would be like and draw conclusions from there, and it prevents the responsibility of managing a large PSA from falling onto a single individual.

To that end, I'm currently fiddling with the idea of replacing the reviews forum with a reviews feature attached instead to each individual user's page, where users can leave reviews and comments. This would be intended to be a replacement for the Service Reviews forum. It has some upsides and downsides, so I wanted to hear everyone's thoughts.

Basic outline of the feature:

When posting in the commerce section (Art Marketplace, Design Marketplace, Adoption Center), or when sending a PM, a user's review ratio is shown next to their username badge (this would be a percentage, 0% for all negative reviews, 100% for all positive reviews). This links to their reviews page.
Any user (blocked or not) can leave positive or negative feedback.
- All reviews have to be directly relevant to a single business transaction (maximum of one review per business transaction). Some form of proof has to be provided (eg. a link to the completed product / traded character, or a link to a thread, or screenshot of the transaction or receipt).
- Only the reviewer and the reviewee can reply to each review, but all replies are publicly viewable.
- Reviews can be deleted, closed, or edited by the user who posted the review.

Pros:

I feel like it makes more sense than PSAs; it's immediately visible as a warning when doing business with a user, but also doesn't bring additional outside attention to the matter like PSAs do, which can lead to witch hunts or harassment.
Easier to browse feedback attached to a specific user (instead of having to search the Reviews forum), and encourages independent users to come forward with their own feedback, rather than having a single person take on the responsibility of collating a large PSA.
Would encourage people to leave positive reviews which is nice... positivity is good...

Cons:

Wouldn't support off-site users.
I'm not sure if having a rating attached to an account would make people uncomfortable; this is the reason I specifically don't want it visible as part of a user's profile page, and want to keep it to specific areas of the site. I understand that it could create stress for users who don't want to see it, but being able to turn off the feature defeats the point of having it at all, since people with poor reviews could just turn it off.
- There could be an option to hide ratings from the site so you don't have to see or think about them, but other users would still be able to see your rating?

Regarding Moderation:

I've received some requests lately for reviews/PSAs to be more strictly moderated, which I imagine will also apply to any new review feature, so regardless of outcome, I'll be looking at revising the rules for reviews.

From the threads I've reviewed, the main issue seems to be people who present one business transaction with evidence, then use it to piggyback irrelevant accusations, such as personal disagreements, proof-less transactions, or speculation. This is toeing the line on breaking the rules, so I'll be adding another clause clarifying that every section/paragraph of any PSA must be directly relevant to a business dispute with proof, and not just arbitrarily tacked onto the end of a PSA.

If you'd like to see additional moderation for PSAs or reviews, please suggest any additional rules you think would help improve the quality of the forum (or any future features we may add).

Please do chip in with any thoughts or suggestions, either via the thread or by filing a ticket if you're not comfortable speaking in public. Thanks as always for your patience and help.

Hyexur

I would like the removal of Personal PSA's as well. As someone who has posted a PSA ( About an artist not doing their work. ) I'd like to be able to look at other posts like that. I also would love a rating system, personally. It might have saved me from a lot of sour trades in the past. I also would like more stricter guidelines in the service review area - I just feel like some of the PSA's are worthless and I end up reading a bunch of text only to gain nothing. I don't want the reviews to be gone but I do want them to be a bit better.

As an add on - I want to double down - I think the PSA's should be art/design/adopt ETC. Related. Personal PSA's should stay in bulletins.

bluevelvet

Keep the board if it can be moderated, axe it if not. Reviews seem much but I'm impartial on it, though I think people would just account hop.

Titheling

Lotor I think lack of pointless conversation is also very necessary and a voting system wouldn't be terrible per say but I think ONLY having a voting system kinda makes things difficult. Heavier monitoring and moderation - as well as a form - seems more ideal. A voting system seems like it might be okay but honestly I think the most important thing is still just moderation of what's going up and strict rules as far as pulling stuff down i.e. you put up a baseless personal beware post or you put up heavily cropped images or anything that doesn't 100% fit in the guidelies of what should be up here.

And the more I think about it the more I HATE the idea of a rating system put into place on the site....I like this forum existing as someone who commissions frequently - but I also don't have any interest in being on a site that is going to rank and rate me based on how much I trade things when I don't do this often.

Milkweed

I don't think I'd want reviews linked to a user's page. That system works well on BJD trading sites because they're heavily commerce-based, there's zero anonymity, and at least on the best-known site there's extremely heavy moderation beyond what the mods here could reasonably provide. I worry that here reviews would just become a less organized version of the issue we're trying to solve here. It'll be 100x harder to moderate and it won't stop people from leaving massive compilation posts.

I'm strongly opposed to the rating system. People will end up voting based on art quality rather than the professionalism of the artist. It won't be a useful metric.

I think it would be better to just moderate this forum more aggressively, have users submit PSAs for moderator approval before posting, or axe it altogether. I agree that there'a a huge issue with people leaving PSAs that are mostly personal rather than business-oriented. It would be nice to keep positive service reviews, though -- those are nice, and AFAIK people aren't abusing that.

aquapyrofan

I feel like it should be made more obvious when a PSA is resolved, and also that it should be less visible as the "only" review of that person, as someone who royally screwed up in the past with reacting to a situation and has since changed everything to fix the problems (that I was unaware of having) with what I did before. The posts themselves caused so much anxiety I had to block them, but I know they're still there and probably still making people think I'm a problematic person to buy from, even though the issue has been resolved for years. I can't be the only person who changed after a PSA and has this problem. I really have been considering leaving this site over that anxiety, and screwing up once in a relatively minor way really shouldn't do that to someone.

mothgf

I want to change my opinion on this.
I think the review system would be fine, IF and ONLY IF you guys get capable moderators for it. This place needs moderation.

lilligant

i don't feel too strongly about what system we use exactly because i don't really do much in the way of business here, but while we're still in invite beta, my opinion is that we shouldn't have a system which allows us to rate off-site users, period. these huge compiled psas are a problem for all the reasons outlined but also because it can be impossible for an off-site user to defend themselves, which is an issue considering the personal nature of some of these call outs imo

physics

small addition to reviews (i havent read all the comments, sorry if its been suggested!): i think just a positive/negative rating would work a bit better than a numerical Rating Score... at least i find that less stressful. then you could view a users positive and negative reviews, like they have on steam eg? not sure!

it's hard to say how i feel about it, but i know the site was intended for the adopts community (of which i am not a part), and i think reviews make sense in that context.

i do think reviews for art commissions and for adopts sales/trades are pretty different contexts though, if you could maybe associate preset tags with reviews and have those be filterable when looking at a users reviews? ie "view [negative/positive] reviews for [adopt trades/adopt sales/commissions/]". perhaps a "was this review helpful?" vote too.... the only issue is i see that that feature might be easily abused, but that's hard to fully avoid with social media (i do like the idea of evidence of a transaction being required for reviews though, to avoid some of that!)

scribbletoby

I like the concept of a reviews feature that has kudos and negative feedback because I have been on websites that have this feature. A lot of people talk about how others can be spiteful and while I get that, I've never actually seen this happen. All of the review systems that weren't for positive feedback had a list of things to be checked off explaining the reason for the review and were tied to the account that they were signed up with. I get people's hesitance to accept this sort of idea, but I really haven't ever seen it abused when properly implemented. Plus, having a reviews feature tied to an account specifically would allow people to very quickly find out what kind of trader they're dealing with considering thumbing through page after page of PSA in the forum can be arduous.