Well, there are a lot of good thoughts here. I, too, have been with the site for years, and for years, there have been multiple tech problems. But until recently, I've never had reviews vanish.

I've had two disappear in the last month, both on the very day they were published. One has been gone nearly a month (April 30). (I can see a piece of it on a Google cache page but only about 5 lines.) The other went up and then vanished Tuesday. The one missing the longest shows the book in the catalogue and seems to allow me to write a new review and I'm tempted to do so. The second one says the item doesn't exist in the catalog at all. Both were reviews where I'd flagged the authors or PR houses (I do that every once in a while) and now they can't be seen.

I understand mistakes and the corporate issues but honesty and communication go a long way. Telling us that the search engine is improving or that things are "known problems" is infuriating. Some explanation on the site itself would help a lot and trying to fix problems rather than generate a huge pile of new reviews would seem to be another.

I've already said on my profile page that I'm going to be taking down 100 of my reviews, most of which are the only ones on that item, and will post them elsewhere because I simply no longer have faith in epinions ever getting this fixed. I'm tired of working hard to produce for Epinions, only to have my work vanish and no slightest bit of courtesy of a response when I ask what has happened to them.

Your last paragraph is the one I've been fearing. We've already lost a slew of our finest writers, for a variety of reasons, not necessarily related to the problems under discussion. So I've been dreading the almost inevitable loss of even more due to problems that don't really have to exist, or that are fixable.

There has to be a reason for people to continue to post here; one of the few things I remember from Psych 101 is that people perform for reward, however they define that. Either we get paid for our work, or we take satisfaction in knowing that X number of people have read and enjoyed or benefited from it.

When the system is so wonky that hits don't count, leading to loss of IS, or worse yet, our hard work disappears into the ether, there is no reward for our efforts. Why should a reasonable person continue to put forth effort on behalf of an entity that doesn't know how to treat him or it, and worse yet, doesn't acknowledge us when things go wrong? There's no payback for our work.

I haven't experienced the loss of my reviews - yet. And I continue to get paid for them. So I'm not going anywhere. But I completely understand why other people are leaving.

I'm not a techie; all I know how to do on a computer is e-mail and writing. But I observe other websites with databases as big as ours, ones that constantly change, probably faster than ours - eBay is the most obvious example - and I wonder why they can do it, but in nine years, we haven't been able to. It IS do-able.

Margaret, sad

Forgive me for entering the discussion late, but I can't help but wonder why they don't just switch to a different search paradigm, at least on the initial search.

For example, when a user types in a book name or author, why doesn't the search engine just do a "google" type search on the entire database (or at least more than one key field) and then return a list of possibilities? Then, after the user gets to the right area of the database, a drilldown by feature or category could be initiated.

My experience is that, in many cases, Epinions search gives you completely irrelevant products to your search critera, while ignoring tons of products with nearly identical key words. In other words, I don't think the search function is reaching all the relevant areas/fields in the database. Either that, or it goes wild and gives you products you completely don't expect, like all the r-rated stuff.

I'm hope my idea is clearer than mud, but I don't know how google can search the entire internet and return thousands of relevant URLs, but Epinions search comes up blank or wrong again and again.

Just curious ~ Jennifer