Get Rid of Old Park Ratings

[QUOTE="Texasrvers, post: 49725, member: 5430"
And I have another one. What if we could "button up" all reviews that are older than 5 years (or those not in the summary table) with a button to expand the list if someone wants to read the older reviews. I think this would help unclutter the park's listing and hide the more irrelevant information (if there are a lot of reviews that go back 5-10 years, that is a pretty long list) and yet this would still make all the information available to readers if they want to look at it.[/QUOTE]

See post #4...

 

Well, aren't we both the smart ones! Great minds.

 

I think the 5 year cutoff for numeric scores to be figured into the single score of each park is a great idea. I think many people are lazy and just look at that one number, and very old scores could either make a park look better or worse than it currently is.
An alternative would be to make the composite score only the last 25 or 50 or whatever reviews. That would prevent a park with very few annual reviews from having it's overall score manipulated one way or the other.

 

Maybe a program could be written that would include either the last 50 reviews (for example) or the last 5 years--whichever number is reached first.

 

Our plan is to keep all reviews but to calculate the rating where newer reviews get more weight than old ones. For example, reviews from the past couple years might account for 50% of the ratings, reviews from 3 to 5 years old for 40%, reviews 6-7 years old 8% and reviews older than 7 years 2%.

These numbers are just an example, we will need to play with the formula to find the right balance. This is something we can do after we make some major backend upgrades to the system that runs behind RVPR.

 

I'm not sure that you wouldn't solve 99% of the perceived "issue" by adopting the idea that TX and Dutch have suggested--rolling up the older reviews so they're normally not visible and having a button labeled VIEW OLDER REVIEWS along with a summary table which could be switched to .show either ratings for the past 5 years or "all ratings"

If you read back over this thread, the problem clearly seems to be that some users are turned off by multiple screens of reviews even though they are presented in chronological order and no one forces them to read through all of them. My guess is that they'd be quite content if you could just make those old reviews look as if they had "gone away" and I would think that from a programming perspective this should be pretty simple.

The problem I have with the "discounted review value" concept you mention is that it doesn't work well with parks that have only older reviews. Even if you discount older reviews, if there are no newer ones they will still have the same relative value no matter what you do (for example, if reviews >5 years old are only worth ~10% of newer reviews, but if there are no newer reviews then the "reduced value" will still be 100% of the value). Even if you can create an appropriate discounting formula, if you don't remove the older reviews from view you still won't address the problem that people have been complaining about!

By comparison, if a park doesn't have any reviews in the last 5 years, the "default" listing for the park would show "No recent reviews" with a button that says "View Older Reviews". That would give users an instant perspective of whether or not they want to spend any more time researching this park. We can't help the fact that some readers treat the situation as if it's a park's fault that they don't have more recent reviews.

 

I agree, the "Button Up" feature would be nice to have.

 

I don't like the Calculation methods suggested by Andy R for the same reasons as stated above.

 

Here's the main reason I vote to keep the old reviews as it is now:

There is a park in our area that is an inner-city park, not in a good part of town. The reviews discuss hookers and police activity onsite. The only reviews are from 2006, but I would vouch for much of this old info, since the park has not changed (I have used the dump station, but would not stay there).

If you remove the old reviews, you may end up getting an unsuspecting traveler staying here, due to the lack of info.

My 2 cents.

Chris g.

 

With the "Button Up" idea, those reviews would still be available, but a person interested in the park would be made aware that the reviews are quite old, and conditions may have changed. Or not...