CaptainD’s Advice to Epinions Members Wanting To Cross-Post Their Reviews
Nov 09 '07 (Updated Nov 12 '07)
The Bottom Line Cross posts... just why are they cross, anyway?!?
CaptainD’s Advice to Epinions Members Wanting To Cross-Post Their Reviews
The matter of cross-posting has been a thorny issue on the past, but was generally accepted wholesale. Now we have a definite (though not necessarily definitive) policy on cross-posting your reviews or essays to other sites. Here it is:
“Update: Cross-Posting Policy Clarification
Posted: Tuesday, September 12, 2006
After much internal discussion and conversation with many of our members, we've clarified our policy with regard to cross-posting the same review on Epinions and other sites.
Cross-posting of reviews to other sites is not a violation of our User Agreement, nor is it grounds for down-rating of reviews. We've clarified the language of the User Agreement and several FAQs to establish this.
Reviews cross-posted to price comparison sites on or after September 13, 2006 may disqualify selection as a Top Reviewer, Advisor, or Category Lead. We recognize members' desire to publish their content wherever they wish, and we want to support that. At the same time, it makes sense for Epinions to highlight those members who promote unique content on Epinions. We've provided guidelines to help members understand which sites the policy pertains to and how to differentiate their reviews.
We rely on our Top Reviewers, Advisors, and Category Leads to support Epinions' User Agreement as well as our objectives as a community and a business. Selecting members for these roles is a process managed in cooperation with the community, and we will begin considering unique content as a factor in that process. Like all aspects of the nomination and selection process, this factor will be managed in cooperation between the community and Epinions.
Important points to keep in mind:
If you are not a Top Reviewer, Advisor, or Lead, and are not interested in becoming one, this does not affect you.
This is not retro-active. Only reviews posted from September 13th, 2006 and onward will be taken into consideration.
Members can alter or differentiate their reviews to avoid any disqualification. Our rule of thumb is that your Epinions review must have 1/3 different or new content, plus a wholly different review title. See the Review Writing FAQ for more information.
Only price comparison sites (such as PriceGrabber, Shopzilla, Amazon, Ciao, Dooyoo and others) are relevant. Smaller enthusiast and personal sites are not affected. See the Review Writing FAQ for more information.
Because these criteria will be a part of our regular hat selection process, it is not necessary to use down-rating as a response to cross-posted reviews, even if the author is a Top Reviewer. Please report any instances you find to us and we will take them into account at the next round of hat selection.
We recognize that the recent lack of clarity on this policy was a source of confusion and strife for many members. We apologize and offer our thanks for your patience. We owe a special apology to our Advisors who did what they thought was right in cracking down on cross-posting site-wide. We appreciate your passion for keeping the site clean and we hope that bringing clarity to this formerly mixed message will make your roles easier. We are relying on our Advisors to resolve any outstanding disputes about cross-posting, and to please withdraw any negative ratings already given on these grounds. Please let us know how we can help assist you. We're here to help.
Your needs and points of view are incredibly important to us and we thank you for helping us arrive at a policy we believe will work well for the Epinions business and community.
The Epinions Team“
Good grief, I had no idea all this sprang up over a year ago - I must be getting old!! It’s still a subject that comes up quite frequently on the Message Board though, - and in fact has done so recenty - and I think writing this essay is still worthwhile (plus the fact that, to my knowledge, there have been essays commenting on the policy but not actually how to work with it).
You will notice that there’s a fair bit of ambiguity in the policy statement. Breaking the rules if you have / want a Category Lead / Top Reviewer / Advisor hat (nothing was mentioned about the Moderator hat so I assume that’s excluded) “may disqualify [your] selection”. Time will tell what the reality of this is, as no-one to my knowledge has actually lost a hat because of cross-posting identical reviews, and as to whether anyone has been prevented from getting one is unknown to all but the Epinions staff and perhaps the CLs. Clearly, the rules were intended not to be overly restricted, and I think most of us truly appreciated that it wasn’t. Most of us probably also realised that such a policy was ultimately necessary for Epinions to protect its market position - with other sites being given preference in search engine rankings for identical reviews, Epinions could theoretically have lost a lot of money. Maybe they did lose a lot of money. The policy was, therefore, a very necessary thing. (Not to mention the confusion caused among the ranks by the User Agreement before this amendment!)
There are two types of people who can in fact cross-post identical posts with absolute impunity - those who are not interested in having a hat, or those cross-posting to a site that isn’t a competitor site - i.e. another Price Comparison site. (One word of caution though - some sites that don’t start out as competitor sites may become so in the future. This has happened with at least one site - Viewpoints - in the last year or so.) If you want to get / keep your hats, however, it would be sensible to stick to the rules when posting to competitor sites - which I do occasionally (Ciao and Dooyoo). And when it comes down to it, the rules are very simple:
1 - One third different / unique content
2 - Different title
The second rule is pretty unambiguous, though just how different does the other title need to be? For example, technically speaking “Greatest Game in the World!” is a different title to “The Greatest Game in the World!” - though that’s a pretty extreme example of a similar name. It’s not that difficult to think up an entirely new title. It is supposed to be “a wholly different review title“, indicating that at least you shouldn‘t be able to recognise the two titles as coming from the same source.
However when it comes to the review itself, the rule of thumb that “your Epinions review must have 1/3 different or new content“ is a little harder to interpret. (A further ruling that: "It's not just that the reviews need to be 1/3 different. Your EPINIONS review must contain 1/3 new or different content and its own title. In other words, don't copy your Epinions review onto a comparison site and then add to it on that site. That will make the two different. But the rule is worded to make sure your Epinions review isn't just a subset of what's in the other review.”- made it a little clearer what was asked for - and a little trickier for the Epinions member to comply with!
So how do we define “different“ or “new” content? Do the same wording but with different formatting count as different? Do 1/3 of the individual words have to be different? What counts as the review - just the body text? What about a list of links at the end? What about the Pros and Cons?
As we can see, the seemingly simple question turns out to have about a million sub-questions, which have not (and perhaps cannot) be easily answered. But thinking back to the original reason this all came up (apart from the ratings issue), it seems most sensible to view it in the terms that search engines do - KEYWORDS. Which is quite handy, as there’s a free tool for comparing different documents online:
http://www.comparesuite.com/online/try_for_free.php
When you do this there’s quite a bit of information that comes up, but the most important for the purposes of our 1/3 different or new content is the Similarity. Because I include all the body text of the review, including any links etc that might be in it, often use the same Pros and Cons, and occasionally the same Bottom Line text, I aim for a similarity of under 66% at most. That way whatever criteria is used to determine the different or new content, I should be safe.
The reason I don’t post many reviews on Ciao or Dooyoo nowadays is that getting your review that different to the original isn’t as easy as it sounds. There have been times when I’ve felt that it actually takes longer than writing the review in the first place!! However there are a few tips I’ve come up with to speed up the process, which I will now share with you.
On the compare suite screen at the top, you will see:
Text 1:? ? byte(s), ? word(s), ? unique word(s)
Text 2:? ? byte(s), ? word(s), ? unique word(s)
With the question marks being the actual figures, of course. What I find best is to cross-post only my longer reviews where I can actually take out a chunk of them without the review suffering too much - for instance, in some of my game reviews I add a hints section - it doesn’t actually stop it from being a good review if this is missing. This gives a head start in having different content. Then a quick look at what might be phrased directly - saying basically the same thing with different words. Then un compare suite again.
You will probably be at around 80-85% by this point - still nowhere near enough for the magic third. The key then is to isolate the keywords that only occur once. At the top you will see the unique words in the two documents. What you want to aim for is to take some of the one-time appearing keywords from the first, and replace them with a keyword in the second which is also unique.
After the top of screen info already mentioned and both texts in their entirety with keywords highlighted, you will have a list of common keywords, then unique keywords for each text. Look at the unique keywords in document 1 (assuming that you put your original document as 1), and find them in your document (Ctrl-F). See if you can replace them - preferably with a word that doesn’t appear in the first text (you don’t need to scour the document to see what you have used in your original review, just use a term that you seldom use and that should do the trick). You can also scroll to the bottom of the common keywords, and look at the words that have only a single occurrence in each document. These should be changed if possible. Check the similarity of your documents after you’ve changed a few to see how you’re doing.
It does seem like a lot of work, but I can tell you from experience that once you get used to it, it gets quicker and less arduous. You don’t necessarily need to stick to replacing single words - change the way the sentence runs, change a sentence here and there, wax creative. Since it does take time and effort though, ask yourself which is more important to you in terms of the time spent writing. I tend to only do it when I don’t feel like writing a new review. To me, it’s still a better option than having to write a review from scratch (with who knows what similarities to the original in terms of keywords?!?)
Case Studies
- 1 -
Knights of the Old Republic 2: Sith Lords
On Dooyoo it is posted at: http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/pc-game/the-bard-s-tale-pc/1064926/
Here are the statistics from compare suite:
Text 1: 17,20 Kb, 3134 word(s), 251 unique word(s)
Text 2: 12,15 Kb, 2139 word(s), 64 unique word(s)
Common words number: 608
Similarity (by keywords): 65,9%
- 2 -
The Bard’s Tale
Dooyoo: http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/pc-game/the-bard-s-tale-pc/1064926/
Text 1: 11,87 Kb, 2193 word(s), 198 unique word(s)
Text 2: 8,51 Kb, 1556 word(s), 55 unique word(s)
Common words number: 488
Similarity (by keywords): 65,9%
(Okay so I only just squeezed them under 66%, but I still did it!!)
Shorter reviews may not have as much content that you can simply dispose of, but they should be easier to get under the 66% mark. I haven’t yet tried shorter reviews to be honest - the real home of my writing on the net is Epinions, the others are just holiday homes! (Which is kind of ironic, as they are both UK sites and I live in… the UK!)
So cross-post away, but remember - Garrett and Andyman are watching you!! Well.. they're probably not, but it's not a bad tag-line for an Epinions movie... :-D
This of course is assuming that you write your reviews for Epinions first, then cross-post - it is possible that some will write first on another site, then the same principle will apply the other way round.
See also:
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Guide to Epinions - Third Edition - only updated to the third edition today after years of inactivity!!
How to build a WOT
My guides to writing Very Helpful reviews in:
Movies
Books
Games
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