VERY Inconsistent Review approval

It is amazing how much can happen when you don't have internet for one night. I received 14 e-mails from you yesterday - 9 entitled "Other Deferral" and 5 entitled "Review Not Posted". ALL were dated 7/8/15. When I tried to pull up the referenced link at the bottom of the e-mail, nothing came up. The 9 of the e-mails had a link at the bottom to be clicked to correct the review. 8 of the links were "campgroundreviews.com/review/edit/258754" and 1 ended with 258695. The 5 e-mails that followed indicated that the reviews would not be posted. I submitted those reviews 5-10 days ago and your notice goes directly from deferral to rejection.
For the last several moths I have been contacting you with the "Report Concern" button after reviews about reviews I thought were not adequate. I would usually get no response and, at least once, was told that an Admin had decided that the review was sufficient. Back in mid-June I saw a review that was typical of the ones I had complained about. Here is the full review "Sites sort of small but OK for a stopover en route to someplace else". Rather than complain again to a "deaf ear", I decided to use that same review on the parks I stayed at the beginning of my 2 month summer trip. Each park did have fairly small sites and many people would consider these parks as just overnighters and not stay for more that a day. This above one sentence review was for Indian Campground and RV Park in Buffalo, WY posted for a June, 2015 stay. (I have been to this park many times and actually disagree with the content of the review.) The fact that this review was approved a month ago but not now show a unacceptable inconsistency in review approval.

 

Rather than start a new thread, I will just bring up a new complaint about the judgment of the admin(s) who approve/reject reviews.

As an aside, it would certainly appear (was this thread closed to responses?) that my above post from back in July had no responses. I was contacted via e-mail by an admin who basically told me that the consensus was that the review I singled out would be rejected by most admins. It would seem that reviewers don't have to follow YOUR "rules" as long as the admins don't care about informative, reasonably well written reviews. Evidently my complaining about crappy reviews is a bigger problem than admins allowing crappy reviews. Since then, I have seen (just by looking at new reviews for parks I have stayed at) several useless 1 or 2 sentence reviews every day. I started to make a list of them, but gave up in July once the list got to dozens. Now I just send a "concern" comment when I see one of these. So, the situation has certainly NOT improved. It seems to have gotten worse.

Finally, on to my new complaint: I recently saw one of my final (a belated review of the Butte, MT KOA) reviews of my summer trip post. The admin took several lines of my review and put it under the "Tips for Other Campers" section. While, as is to often the case with the NEW system here), there is no ample explanation of what should go in this section, I disagree that the factual information I wrote about amounts to a "tip" If all admins would start correcting the grammar, content, and spelling in reviews as required by YOUR rules, I might be more accepting of their judgment. I would appreciate my review being posted as I wrote it - all in the review section.

 

Jerry, I'm really curious about something. Are you ever happy with anything that the admins do on this site? It seems to me that all you do is come here to complain about the site. I may be wrong but everything I have read just looks like complaints.

 

Jerrys - thanks for your input. We try to make the review approval process consistent but because we have real people with different experience sets overseeing the process there are naturally some variation. I took a look at that review of the Butte KOA and this is the text that was moved out of the body of the review and into the tops section or your review:

Tips for other Campers:
There is a Butte tourist office right next to the park and a Safeway about half a mile away. For a place in town, there is not much else within walking distance. I thought the prices at the Chicken Shack (in the main building) were a bit high for (mostly) fried fast food.
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Good call, imo because this info is useful for others but not about the park itself. Even though tips are displayed just below the body of the review they are also displayed separately in the right side bar and we want them to reflect area interest and experiences.

There is some text in both reviews submission box and the tips box to help clarify what info belongs in each area.




Thanks for your reviews - they are a great help to other campers!

 

I couldn't disagree more with your IMO. I do not take advice or direction from somebody who writes things like "the bathhouse was awesome" in a post. Why are some of my reviews held to a higher (in this case questionable) standard? If you can make a change to my reviews, why can't you send those crappy ones back? By your logic, saying that a there is an interstate highway next to the park should be in the tip section since that interstate is not in the park. I guess I should not mention the casino and hotel resort that the RV park is part of in the body of my review of since they are not in the RV park.

The basic problem seems to be that you claim to have standards and rules, but are unwilling to tell people (both reviewers and admins) that they are not meeting these rules and standards. Are you afraid to hurt their self-esteem? I can understand the occasional typo or misspelling slip through, but not abiding by YOUR OWN rules is pathetic.

As happened earlier this year when an admin on this site compared the lack of computer skills an older friend of mine exhibited by not being able to operate his new Kindle with somebody not being knowing how to read a book, I find the admin attitude on this site very "we are always right" when they are questioned about many of the changes in the past year. Either that or they ignore the question. For example, I am still waiting to hear why marking a review as "Not Helpful" is not recorded on the site as are the "Helpful Review" votes are. I raised that question in a thread months ago. Finally, I have yet to see (with one exception) any of my dozens of "Report Concern" I have made in recent months result in changes to the reviews I found lacking/inaccurate/misleading/etc.

Not to long after I started submitting reviews on this site, I was asked to be an admin on this site. I turned the offer down because, as I told them, I would be changing or returning too many of the reviews.

Let the bashing begin.

 

Jerry,

Thanks for your feedback. It's much appreciated. Also, thank you for all your reviews over the years, it's RVers like you who make RV Park Reviews such a great resource.

As you noted we have relaxed some of our standards for grammar, punctuation and spelling as long as the review remains easily readable. The point is that it is more important to make people comfortable and encourage them to submit reviews than it is to insist on the proper standard of English usage.

We are also being more flexible on reviews that "lacked information" in the past. The reason for this is that the comment "the bathhouse was awesome" might not mean much to you but to someone else it might resonate with more value. It's up to the readers to determine the value of each review. Our vision for the Helpful and Unhelpful buttons is to use that data to help surface the best reviews. Our plan is to offer folks like you a way to easily hide reviews that have been marked as less helpful so you don't have to see them. We also want to find ways to showcase the most helpful reviews.

As for the comment about unhelpful votes not being shown, we do this because we are trying to create a community that focuses on positive and not negative feedback. So we do allow people to mark reviews as unhelpful but we don't show that information in public at this time.

Thanks again for your feedback and contributions.

Andy

 

I also forgot to apologize about this issue:

It was probably a hung script or other server based email related glitch. As you know, you are supposed to get only one email each time our system sends on out. If you get more than one please contact us using the Contact RVRP link in the footer on each page.

 

Mike,

The option to turn off unhelpful reviews would be something a user would have to explicitly opt into. So unless you go to turn them off all the reviews will stay showing. It was our way to try and find balance for folks who really don't like some of the less quality reviews. I hope you all can appreciate our trying to find a balance here.

 

Some of the fun of RV'ing is meeting all those folks along the way. Some become friends, others maybe not. But I have yet to regret meeting anyone, park staff or traveler. There are some characters out there!! The folks that do reviews are like that, some are probably characters but I enjoy reading their reviews. One might say, "The bathrooms were awesome!" ; the next might give us the dimensions of the showers. I'd like to meet both and I'm sure I would enjoy their bathrooms. I'd like to sit around a campfire with everyone on this forum and just "bs" all night.
No one should need to show credentials or demonstrate an educational level just to post.
You could miss meeting a lot of nice folks.

I always like to check my favorite parks for recent reviews. You know, did anyone else like it too?
I recently found this post for one of my Kansas favorites:
"Went 18 miles out if our way because of previous reviews. So glad we did! This park is immaculate. Nice level sites, perfectly placed utilities, view of small lake."
Ahh ha, I had the last reviews, one in the Fall, one in the Spring. I hope it was my reviews that helped. What fun, to think someone had a nice evening off the road because of me.
Full-Timing is not unending adventures, sometimes it is two people in too small a space. This forum and its regulars are often a fun diversion; I'd hate to have to take a test to participate.

For those that have a problem with RVPR, Good News! Good Sam's site is now accepting park reviews. Probably figure they could do better than a rating system that is seldom accurate.

 

I view down votes as a way a person can disagree with the facts presented in the post. If they are not displayed, and only up votes are shown, the reader will get the wrong impression that everyone agrees with what was stated in the post. If, for example, there was a post that stated "campgroundreviews.com is a worthless site and all the administrators are fools" and it got 3 up votes and 3000 down votes, the reader would only see the three up votes and think no one disagrees with that viewpoint. The down vote is not a reflection on the poster, it is a tool to help the reader evaluate the accuracy of the review.

 

I don't pay attention to whether someone finds a post helpful or not. If someone is looking for a fancy RV park and stays at one that isn't fancy they can give it a bad review. Others are possibly looking for a decent, quiet place for the night might find the same park perfect. Anyone that posts gives a review on what they are looking for. I try to judge from several reviews and form my opinion of whether or not the park will meet my needs. We had a reviewer post about a problem with their site that could have been easily fixed if they had bothered to report it rather than giving us a bad review. The funny thing is that problem had not occurred before they stayed here and has not happened since they left and we check every day for problems like that If someone read their post and found it helpful it would show that they trusted the post when the complaint itself was invalid.