Is there enough communication between site members and site management?

I have been wondering when hits will actually update to reviews as far back as October of 2007. I emailed GG and Andy about it and was assured that it was being addressed but that doesn't do much when I see 55 people have rated a review but it is only showing that 26 of the hits have actually registered.

That's just the tip of the iceberg. Plagiarism amongst new and established members is out of control, MPA lists are so inaccurate that it's pointless to even look at them and some members are contemplating jumping ship because of other events at the site.

I don't care if it is going to take five months to get something fixed - leaving people in the dark forces them to think of the worst case scenario. A weekly or bi-weekly update on site issues would be really nice. Is this something that Epinions can do on a regular basis? I sure hope so because from what I have been getting in emails from other members, a lot of people are ready to leave the site. And then what will happen? The SH reviews will choke the life out of whatever is left.

While I can't imagine weekly communication (would love it) I think at least monthly communication is reasonable.

Lately I think a ton of us have been feeling a bit depressed about the state of things here. The 10 4 10 is nice but it's not what keeps me here. I love to write and I love it when I can share info about a product, destination, etc. Most of us are not professional writers so the ego-boo is a huge part of why we're here. When we see little or no outside hits, combined with no IS, it just doesn't give me the ego-boo that I am looking for. At this point only a few H&G reviews and my travel reviews are giving me that feeling.

Of course, having GG & Andy leave only adds to the depressed state of affairs. Yeah, they said it was to pursue new opportunities outside of Eps and I can certainly understand that. But it doesn't eliminate that feeling that they were jumping ship off a sinking ship.

No.

See:
http://www.epinions.com/msg/show_~threads/cat_id_~121/id_~20381/forum_id_~441

I'm very interested in hearing how we might have more formal communication with everyone - I recognize there are bugs, I recognize that the proximity of Andy and Garrett's departures don't look great to the outside world. Trust me that we're trying to fill those positions, fix the bugs, and continue to enhance the site.

While I agree that weekly is probably too often, maybe a monthly report would keep people better abreast on the progress we've made.

Look forward to people's thoughts...

(As for the 10 4 10, it has expanded our review count significantly - thus benefitting the shopper - and has not had an impact on quality. So from this perspective, it has been quite a successful program.)

Lots of good points and I'll try to address each of them as best I can. I'll quote you, Freak369, since you started the thread.

Since I am new and don't know who is at the top maybe my perception is off but....

is taking time to respond to message board posts helping in any way? What I mean is I keep thinking if the ONE person at the top is here reading posts and responding...who is running the ship and who is working on issues?

njchicaa is correct. I'm not one of the engineers. I wouldn't know linux from Linus unless someone told me (I'm kidding, I know who Linus is *wink*). But I do talk to the engineers daily so they know exactly what's going on. So until we fill our open positions, consider me and Pehr to be at your disposal for issues, questions, concerns, etc. As I mentioned earlier, we'll do our best to address each one as it arises.

Mona, I'm sure Pehr will see your post, but I wanted to let you know you bring up all great ideas. I'm actually putting together a plan (i.e. writing ideas as I think of them) of how to communicate more formally on a regular basis with everyone here. Not just the frequency of the communications, but the content and delivery of each one as well. I also wanted to add that at the Meet & Greet this past March, we included a "State of Epinions" as part of the event. From the feedback I received, this went over quite well. I was afraid of boring everyone with stats and engineering jargon, but in fact, those who attended wanted that and more. This is also planned for Chicago in June and I see no reason why we can't share the content of those discussions with everyone else after the M&G.

Again, great stuff, Mona. Thank you for your feedback.

-Almar

Thanks for responding, Sue. My turn to answer! =)

Awesome! Thanks for stopping by and updating us! This is exactly what I'm talking about and what we need to see and hear: that you are listening and care.

If you are doing a state of the union at the meet and greets with numbers and fun stuff, why can't you also post those at the site for everyone else?

Thanks,
-Brent

I don't think addressing important issues on these boards is enough.

If you look at who posts here, it seems that there is a core group of people and then some who come and go. I believe that all members should get an email or at least a post should be put up in the member center when the "state of the site" info comes out.

I read the boards every day but often miss things. I would rather there be a neutral place just for management to address the community and let us know what is happening, if anything.

This is not to say I don't love the message board communications because I do. But we have far more members that are in the dark because they either don't go to these boards or miss a post.

Making issues - and progress on those issues - easier to find would be a great help.

I won't even ask when beauty/wellness and outdoor/sports will be fixed, hits counted, reviews seen, MPA and MPR back, etc. I know it's being worked on. And I know no one can give me a timeline of when things will get better. But when something starts to happen, I sure want to know and would hate to miss a post about it.

Patty

Just letting everyone know I need to step away from the boards for a bit. I'll try and check back in later this afternoon.

-Almar

I for one am quite pleased to see that on the same day a question is asked about communications between Epinions and its members, not one, but two staff members immediately reply and address the concerns.

THank you Almar and Thank you Pehr!

Sometimes I think we all get into a negativity spiral, so I am glad you both came in to comment!

EC Mark aka shopaholic

Just ditto-ing Mark. :o)

I'm relearning my way around the site. I see the new promotion and it sounds kind of cool. I just wonder how we get to the "cap" for awards. I really don't know how many reviews get posted here in a month. Does the site hit 30K in two days, rendering everything else for the rest of the month less valuable? Do the plagiarized reviews count toward the 30K?

I see some wonderful stuff being written here, but I see some major crap as well. I see folks posting a huge number of reviews in a day.

Okay, I played hooky from work today. I read a lot more reviews than I normally do and I see some horrible writers posting a LOT of reviews. I would be sad if they ate up the 30K and left outstanding reviews unrewarded.

I don't know where to look for this information. At least I've not found it yet.

~Susan

Plus it is capped for each person at 100 reviews max...so a person can't do 300 reviews and earn more.

My recommendation for the type of information that is appropriate for an internet community is a regular newsletter that goes out to every registered member, augmented by responses to questions that are sent via email and some weigh in with the discussions that happen here. The bulk of the communication can't happen on these boards, because the discussions meander and are difficult for people coming in in the middle of a discussion to follow. I do think that chats are a good idea if they allow access to a staff member outside of the community liason role.

I believe that everyone in the community wants to see some accountability for the site, but I also believe that this is true to varying degrees with different members and the communication strategies should reflect that.

ETA: Now that I've read through the thread, I see that others are interested in a newsletter too. I apologize if my post was redundant.

This is all great feedback everyone. Thank you for your suggestions. We'll do our best to put together something that will accommodate as many people as possible, both community and Epinions staff alike.

-Almar

Before all the recent changes, a newsletter was something we were working on. In fact, it was on my plate. I still think it's a great idea and once we're back at full strength, I plan to pursue it again.

-Almar

That's a very nice looking newsletter.

But it's still missing the list of known issues. (Or maybe they don't have any???)

It seems to me that we are going through a period in which Epinions is operating on dramatically reduced resources. We seem to have lost our Project Manager and Community Liason, one right after another with virtually no notice. I may be mistaken but I think we've lost 3 (or ist it 4?) Epinions dedicated engineers recently.

I think before we get excited about creating a newsletter and diverting whatever resources remain, let's wait to see what resources are replaced.

But that's just my opinion.

Rudi

*snicker* See, this is why I don't bother calculating my hits or complaining about anything because I know I'll just get frustrated and my feathers all ruffled.

Anywho, I agree with Patty about updates not given strictly on the Message Boards. I've been here for 5 years and I only recently discovered the boards 2 or so years ago.

Heh...I always envision Epinions staff consisting of 5 engineering guys and then 5 others of different positions. It's easier to think of it in small terms when things stay wonky for so long.

Which is why I'll admit, I was shocked when two bugs I reported were fixed weeks later and I got emails about it.

However, I also think it's funny that the newsletter is being brought up yet again, and while it always seems to get rejected by the Epi-heads, suddenly it sounds like an awesome idea...what makes now different than before?

NT

I believe in possibilities, and after seeing the complete hash other sites trying to run reviews of my own product specialty have posted, there is a lot right with Epinions. We have a few things which annoy people, and we have some bugs which seem to recur. My shopping list for what I'd like to see is this:

(1) Come up with a review mechanism for products. A lot of stuff doesn't have a photo. A lot of obvious product tie-ins don't exist (try to fing iPhone's bluetooth headset, for example).

(2) Fix the search engine. There is a bunch of stuff on our site which doesn't come up in the search engine, even if it has a review. The way people find our reviews now is through Google searches.

(3) Get rid of anonymous ratings. I don't know of a single non-abusive use of this feature. The entire point of this site is a user takes credit for what the write and builds a reputation. Anonymous back-stabbing isn't part of that model.

(4) Switch the 10-4-10 with something more quality based. No one wants to do a search to find a half-hearted check-the-box writeup. I personally put a lot of effort into my reviews to make them the best they can be; better than what searches of other sites show. A lot of other people have done that, and it is why Epinions matters. Can I do 10 high quality write-ups a month? Yeah, but not if I'm going to be a dad to my little kids.

Epinions has some new faces in leadership roles. I appreciate them asking what can be done to make things better. Things are different now than when this site started. Changeover of personnel is natural for any organization to stand the test of time. Things change, times change, and new ideas will always be needed. A time when there are some problems is the best opportunity there is- you can make your influence felt by making things better. After all, if there wasn't anything wrong, the only way people could make their presence felt would be to screw things up. So let's do some good.

Maybe the easiest solution to a communication problem, would be a normal, everyday writer, working with someone from site staff to present the newsletter worthy information to the public as a whole. It could be a voluntary position of sorts, with someone from the writer-base helping to relay the information to everyone else.

Just a thought... but it would surely help put information out there, and give a link to employees of the company that could be queried if important topics were to come up.

--R(3)

Continued . . .

Now, in my utopian Epinions world, Mona can still contact staff and get answers to questions either on the boards or via email, especially when her question matters to people other than her. And the site management still has to take responsibility for communicating major issues that affect all of the categories, and empower the CLs with all of the details they need. In some cases, CLs may just be sharing what they learned from site management verbatim, but I would hope that they would be the ones anticipating some of the questions pertaining to their categories before they are asked and help site management to prioritize a bit.

Meagan -

I just wanted to chime in with a thought.

Some times CL's (current, past & future) have varying investments in the site. And currently I feel not all are active or always quickly accessible.

I certainly don't mean that being a part of this site precludes all other life's duties.

I just mean that I see them less and less happy along with the general membership, less and less answering emails, adding SAP's, reading & writing on the site -- and some seem disenchanted with the current state of things.

So adding them as another layer, to me, is only as effective as they want to be a part of that step.

Kimm

Let's go ahead and take a poke at the elephant in the room: Newsletters are cheery faces to the world publications. If we had a newsletter, it would have to be the Disney version of what's going on with the site.

What people are talking about here is a burning issue board.

Plagarism: That's huge- someone may decide to sue one of these days.

Treatment of Members: That's our survival. It needs to be policed.

Accurate plotting of traffic: Again, huge. People wonder if they are getting cheated for their work if that stays open.

We need a board where people can squawk problems and then rate how serious they are (Search can't find the #1 hottest product in the category vs. Someone suggesting the default background be changed to pale green).

And this would allow tracking, so there is some accountability. And the big one is setting priorities to make the site work. No name calling- just a working venue.

I have heard some responses to concerns along the lines of "you aren't one of the engineers" in the vein of "What do you know?" That isn't a constructive attitude. The membership is the only group of people who have an interest in honestly and accurately pointing out issues and methods to fix them. And that's right- we need to propose fixes and not just whine about what isn't perfect. While I am not one of the epinions engineers, I and one in real life, and I know there are a lot of epinions members with a lot of experience- it can be leveraged for good. It has to be.

But a newsletter isn't a mechanism to do what we want, though it will have lots of photos from the last meet and greet. No one is looking for whitewash- they want the house fixed. And there has to be a two-way discussion about what people can tell is broken, and what they just don't care about. There is a perception that a lot of the maintenance and site work is in the vein of modifying invisible items at the risk of breaking the site for reasons no user will ever see. Sort of like hearing the differential cover in your car is being replaced over and over while the front bumper is missing. If there was a burning issue board, there would be a spot to keep visibility to the important stuff, and get the word about what was being done about it, and take credit for good work.

I'd guess you just said what most of the community is actually thinking.

Rudi

I should have quoted you directly earlier. Complex, not complicated.

This thread means something to me, so I've weighed in more than usual. I hope that people will feel comfortable continuing to discuss the topic at hand. I'm sure that Almar and other staff are interested in everyone's opinions - not just those by the people who have already had their say.

ETA: Mobi, if you'd like to continue our discussion via email, I'm happy to do so.

I just sigh and shrug when I think about the fact that the wretched "Search" function that didn't work in 1999 still doesn't work, and for the same reasons: outrageous duplication in every category I've searched in, inability to search by more than one criterion at a time, inability of the Search function to recognize what's right under its nose...

The list goes on, and I could probably quote you every excuse that's been offered in the past 8+ years.

And so far, they've all amounted to the same thing: "We're working on it."

Meanwhile, the PTBs go off in other directions, like mergers, and combining databases when the one we've got doesn't work very well, and promotions that encourage mobs of SH reviews.

At this point, I can't think of anything the managers could tell me that would make me feel optimistic about the future of the site, because I've heard 'em all. I'm not an engineer, and I don't know what it takes to fix Search, but I do know that ANYTHING can be fixed in eight years, and this hasn't been.

So short of some real, hard, specific, tecnhnical (which I wouldn't understand anyway,) time-limit-driven information, I'm just as happy not listening to vague promises that "we're working on it."

But I agree with the people who advocate for a monthly State-of-the-site e-mail.

Meanwhile, I ignore 10-4-10 and just keep cranking out the reviews, grumpy as ever, with no expectation that Search will ever work properly, or that we'll ever get any real take-it-to-the-bank information.

Margaret

Mobi, knock it off. Semantic nitpicking that ends up locking a thread that's really important to the site and the members right now is lunacy. Leave it be.

Anyway - I am more than willing to go through and pass on information as it pertains to Movies. If there are issues that apply specifically to Movies (and there are), Almar may not be as versed in the specifics as I am. Not because I have more information or knowledge or ability than anyone else, but because things already filter through me - and the other CLs - members write with problems or questions and we troubleshoot and poke around in the category every day.

One benefit to passing info to the CLs is that there are fewer of us and using the message board is a viable option for disseminating information to everyone who needs it.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be a newsletter, I'm just saying that if Eps staff wants to have the CLs pass category specific information on, I'm happy to do that.

Expressing my own frustration doesn't make me less invested in the site or less willing to do what I can to help the staff. If anything, it makes me more motivated to help if I can. One of the things that is most frustrating, I think, for all of us, is the feeling that we can't help.

As always, my two cents only, which will probably inadvertently kill the thread, for which I will apologize in advance.

Sue (known inadvertent thread killer)

I didn't know about the SAP for a while. I believe that I suggested some things to CL's and got no response.

I don't know the scale. If I was a CL, I don't know how many emails one might get in a day to add listings.

I'm a seller on Amazon and I have to add listings all the dang time. I sell a lot of obscure books that don't have existing listings. It takes less than five minutes to create a listing from scratch. If I got ten requests a day, that's fifty minutes. Is that a reasonable amount of time to request from a lead?

I don't know. I don't know what is really required of such positions.

I did finally get a response on SAP submissions (once I figured out how to make one.). It was very congenial.

I believe he means that comparison shopping happens here as opposed to within the individual reviews pages. Comparison shopping links do appear at the end of most reviews, though, so I might be off there.

Hey,
I just saw a new look on the reviews (mainly on top of it... with 'compare price', 'read reviews', and 'view details' being tabs rather than just links now... and the review body space is wider, too). Did that just happen today or what?

Hey BigC! Thanks for the confirmation, bro. Good to know I'm not hallucinating after all. ;o)

Smorgy
PS: Hi to BabyVisdo!

Ok, maybe it's just me, and I really don't mean to be rude or non-appreciative, but it just makes me wonder about priorities and just how many people are actually working on things as a whole.

Some of you may still not be able to see it - maybe it's just when you get into www99 mode (as I realized I am in again)- that you see the new (or beta, whichever it's supposed to/going to be) style with the tabs (in case you haven't seen them).

Ok, um, why are we working on this? While tabs are neat, why are we bothering with them when there are obviously SO many things that need to be fixed first? I can't seem to wrap my little brain around it. All it does is change the style of the page - that's it. I notice on another page I'm on (product that hasn't been reviewed yet) that price comparison links appear more readily available even while reading a review. I suppose this is to generate more revenue, but still, I don't know why this is being worked on when the search engine is ridiculous and people worry that hits are getting beyond help.

Ok, maybe I'm stretching, but listings are still jacked up and the search is still - well we know what it is. I just don't get why this new thing is even out there with so many other hiccups around. Isn't this sort of counting chickens before they're hatched?

NT

...on yet another note... Now that the thread that was supposed to be pinned at the top of the board to update others on the status of things on the site is locked without any reason given. How is communication getting any better?

Communication? There is the peculiar scattershot and very dubious status report on the morass of searching (not just the massive failures and deterioration of the epinions search engine but the apparent downgrading of epinions in general by/on google).

Now there's no there there (user liaisons in Brisbane, which is not all that far from the place about which Gertrue Stein wrote "there's no there there," Oakland, CA on the sunny side of the San Francisco Bay.

I received information from "management" that we (advisors) are supposed to rate reviews on their quality and leave determing plagiarism to them -- but reporting plagiarism is difficult, and nothing seems to be done about clear instances, so vigilantism will continue, hanging a few newbies plagiarizing themselves along with the miscreants.

And showing epinions rated "somewhat helpful" was a good idea, but encouraging the proliferation of SH "reviews" by 10-4-10 was not. Well... was not, if the company cares about quality, which there is much reason to suppose is a faulty assumption!

One thing I didn't really mention that is a factor in this entire scenario is that you plan ahead by putting things on a project calendar or project plan.

With the SP release, it was on the calendar to be done at a specific time and when done, the next project was scheduled to be worked on. Because of things that happened to our team, the plan couldn't go out in like it was supposed to. We lost resources and there were certain hiccups that were unpredictable.

As a result, we needed far more clean up time than was slotted. But since you have a plan, you move forward to other things, which is why the new product page format is there. That thing was scoped out many months ago. It was just time for it to finally go out.

Basically what I'm saying is that when you see things that happen on the site, there's not always straight line as to when they were started and finished. Engineers don't just stop working on SP bugs and start working on something else. They are working on many things at once including things that the community doesn't see that affect the bottom line.

This is in no way an excuse. I'm just trying to provide a little color to the situation.

I think they have a bulletin board on one of the main pages. You might check it periodically.