As the removal of filtering by review quality has become a permanent change, I’ve just disabled the ability to vote on the quality of reviews. The votes could no longer significantly affect the structure of the site, so facility has been removed for the foreseeable future. Apologies for not getting round to making this change sooner (I was preoccupied with the recent server move).
Voting in the members area, and to indicate whether comments are on-topic, are still available.
I think that’s a good move, Steven…what’s to stop someone voting with malice of forethought? People don’t always have the best intentions.
Thanks Don,
While lots of visitors seemed to vote based on the review quality, a substantial proportion seemed to vote on whether or not they agreed with the review.
I considered offering two types of voting (writing quality and approval of the review), but I came to the conclusion that complicating things further wasn’t going to help.
Review length (currently being used to prioritise reviews) is far from a perfect measure of review quality, but does have some correlation, is simple to implement and understand, and has the pleasant side effect of encouraging visitors to write more detailed reviews.