Not sure how this review got approved

I've kinda lost hope in the peer review system. I see trash like that approved too frequently.

Should I increase the number of approvals needed?

Requiring multiple approvals before a review gets posted has been suggested before. In order for that to work there would probably have to be a lot more people actually looking at the reviews.

Making it part of maintaining VIP would help. Maybe writing a review would get you 1-2 weeks of access and then you can earn the other two weeks by voting on reviews before you have to write another review.

What if you posted who approved the review when of it gets posted. We all could see who is approving some of these crap reviews.

@501 yeah that’s a simpler way. Accountability.

It's the posters only review and the ratings make it look like a shill review to me. I've noticed that there are many one time reviewers that post shill reviews in support of a club or a dancer. There's a dancer in Akron who had continuous bad reviews and comments regarding among other things her being a ROB and suddenly in the past couple days there have been two reviews talking her up, both by first time reviewers.
I don't see any simple answers on fixing fake or shill reviews but perhaps a flagging system to flag them off might work.

I'd suggest:

- Minimum 24 hours
- Minimum percent positive approval rate (like 60% or something)
- Minimum amount of positive approvals (even if 24 hours have passed)
- Automatic disqualification after too many negative approvals

I'd also like to know the numbers that a reviewer puts up and how many reviews they've done in the past. I don't see too many problems with knowing the name of the reviewer. It would also be nice to have a way to take down reviews that have already gone up, if something seems amiss.

On the other extreme, I see lengthy reviews approved that have very little added value in them. Just lots and lots of words.

The downside of having volunteers do the reviewing is the standard varies all over the lot. Speaking personally, that makes me less likely to invest time in a review for fear the review will be rejected out of hand.

For less reviewed clubs, there is a lot that can be said. It’s easy to add something of value. For popular clubs, a typical visit may discover very little new. One or two nuggets of detail might be a reasonable expectation.

@founder naming the review approves is a good idea accountability would go a long way.

I know you name the rejections I received a nasty PM from one guy who’s review I rejected, jes sayin!

Your always going to have some shit reviews slip through. It's not that big of a problem. Everything written on here should be taken with a grain of salt. I'm also occasionally seeing duplicate reviews slip through. I am rejecting the 2nd one. But shit happens.

There have been a few good suggestions already on here: increasing the number of approval before posting, providing the names of who approved, etc. My suggestion would be to increase the number of approvals required while keeping the number of rejections the same as it currently is.

I think I remember someone saying it was 3 approvals or 3 rejections which ever came first. If that is the case I would suggest changing it to 10 approvals or 3 rejections. I could also see a 24 hour cap on the voting so reviews are stuck in limbo just because it is a slow day and not enough people are approving/rejecting reviews.

I also think posting the names of the approvals would help hold people accountable for the quality of reviewz they approve. The possible downside would be that some VIPs may not approve/reject reviews as often for fear of their decision being mocked.

^ I think three up or down is fine some would slip through but my feeling is that accountability would be better, especially with peer reviews.

The more difficult we make the approval process, the fewer reviews we will get. I’d rather have the occasional lame review slip by than have a hard ass approval process that discourages reviews.

Before rejecting a review, I suggest you ask whether there is any info that could benefit another member. For example, simply naming one ROB is worthwhile info for all of us. That can be done in one sentence. I don’t need a 16 paragraph review telling me how many urinals are in the men’s room.

There seems to be more of this situation with certain areas of the country--Vegas being one of them. I'm not sure what the answer is except that the people local to the area of the club reviewed need to speak up as you did when they see something out of line.

-- I agree that the number of approvals should be increased.

-- I think that the review's author should remain anonymous at the time of review, but that the users who approved the review should be public once the review goes live.

-- Bad reviews will get through, regardless. I think that we need to be diligent about reporting them to founder, and then founder can determine if the review should be deleted and/or revoking any VIP benefits.

TLDR summary: after the reviews are published, allow members a second bite at the review apple. Full thought:

I would look at the issue differently. Accept the current review system with its positives (speed, ease of use, anonymity, user managed) and negatives (sometimes bad ones slip through).

I agree there is an issue with shill reviews but I don’t think the best way to handle it is an overhaul of the approval system. Maybe some tweaks like 5 ok’s to approve, 3 nays to reject.

I think the better way to handle it is input after the initial approval. Only after it’s posted do we have the reviewer’s name, history, rating numbers, etc. to help identify poor reviews. Also, and most importantly, we then have local members who know the club focusing on the review who can best identify incorrect, stale or faked commentary. This is the ‘second level’ where we can better weed out the bad. We sort of have this system with the comments, but it does allow the rating numbers to slip through. I think a button allowing recommendations for post- publication rejection would do the trick. Maybe have the ability to recommend rejection allowable for 5 days and if nobody questions the review in that time, it’s final?

I’m sure there are other solutions but my vote is we need a finer tooth net after the initial screen.

TLDR summary: after the reviews are published, allow members a second bite at the review apple. Full thought:

I would look at the issue differently. Accept the current review system with its positives (speed, ease of use, anonymity, user managed) and negatives (sometimes bad ones slip through).

I agree there is an issue with shill reviews but I don’t think the best way to handle it is an overhaul of the approval system. Maybe some tweaks like 5 ok’s to approve, 3 nays to reject.

I think the better way to handle it is input after the initial approval. Only after it’s posted do we have the reviewer’s name, history, rating numbers, etc. to help identify poor reviews. Also, and most importantly, we then have local members who know the club focusing on the review who can best identify incorrect, stale or faked commentary. This is the ‘second level’ where we can better weed out the bad. We sort of have this system with the comments, but it does allow the rating numbers to slip through. I think a button allowing recommendations for post- publication rejection would do the trick. Maybe have the ability to recommend rejection allowable for 5 days and if nobody questions the review in that time, it’s final?

I’m sure there are other solutions but my vote is we need a finer tooth net after the initial screen.

Finer mesh net. Finer tooth comb. :)

For some questionable reviews, I suspect that asswipes with multiple accounts with VIP status are orchestrating approvals. If you have 4 or more accounts with VIP status, it's not that hard to do. I'm not sure if that was the case with this one or if a crappy review just slipped through, but I have no doubt that this is happening for some of the blatant shill reviews.

But with that said, overall the review quality has still improved dramatically over the old system. Nothing is perfect, but I'll take this over what we had before any day.

@Rick Dugan if you’re correct the quickest way to eliminate those type of reviews would be to show who approved the reviews it would become obvious after a very short time.

This review is pretty bad. But TUSCL is a strip club site, not the New York Review of Books. Many reviews will be substandard and we can only try to reject the worst and encourage the writers to do better.

@25, no argument from me. I'm not opposed to having that information made public.

Yeah - that review looked pretty-generic and likely a fake-review in order to get free VIP.

As Mark94 mentioned, not sure if putting more hoops to jump thru is necessarily a good-thing - but not saying things can't improve but I'm not sure what that may be - and "reviewing the reviewers" per a 2nd-level reviewing seems overkill - and naming-names may be counterproductive.

Perhaps upping the # of approvals would help - but I think approval/rejection thresholds should be equal, and as someone suggested have a 24-hr timeout that if a review has not gotten to the threshold then it gets auto-published.

In the past, there were aholes that would just copy paste the same sentences over and over again in order to get the review approved - those were the ones that pissed me off the most and seems those are now not getting thru, or even being submitted (seems the aholes got the point "there was a new PL-sheriff in town") - but now they seem to put more effort into making them look less fake.

The peer-review system is good but not foolproof - i.e. there are peers that are morons - there are reviewers that write weak reviews that get approved and these same weak-reviewers then approve other weak reviews.

I don't see how a review that sounds generic is necessarily bad when new reviews are getting posted for clubs that closed, or ones that are obvious employee reviews get approved.