You may have noticed that your Epinions MPA/MPR rankings for Sports & Outdoors has disappeared. This is a known problem that the site engineers are working on fixing.

There's a thread over on the Sporting Good forum that discusses this problem in more detail...

What's happening in the Sports & Outdoors Category?

Jeff

(2/27/08 Update)

There's also been a thread started on the main Epinions board asking when the Sports and Outdoors Category will be restored into the MPA/MPR rankings.

There are a couple of threads over on the main Epinions message board that deal with the status of the Sports & Outdoors Category (along with the other categories that seem to be 'dead' at the moment).

Is There Enough Communication Between Members & Management?

Is There .... an actual rough guesstimated ETA on when Sports and Outdoors will be resuurrected as a category?

Updated Visits?

The Beauty/Wellness Category(relates to Sports & Outdoors too)

I hate to ask

Some additional threads on the Sports and Outdoors issues...

Why is everyone freaking out?

A thread for commenting on the purported status report on the invisibility of postings

What Almar (from Epinions) said about the current situation...

I'll be as candid as I can in answering these questions with the knowledge I have now:

1) Is this is going to be a permanent problem (aka, are the currently dead categories dead forever);

I'm told no. In fact, when the catalog fixes go out, this should fix a lot of the problems. For the "dead forever" ones, I believe we're looking into ways to at least salvage the review and give you the ability to move it (better than the way it works now) if the product no longer exists.

2) If it's not a permanent problem, when will it be fixed?; and

The engineers are working on this right now (and trying to solve the issue of the greyed out reviews) and a bunch of other stuff including missing hits.

3) If it can be fixed, will the hits that are currently occuring but not registering going to be credited back? Will there be any IS credit and will the future, properly credited hits earn IS?

I hate to say it, but I don't think we'll be able credit back the missing hits (hopefully I'm wrong but I doubt it on this one). But if we're able to fix the missing hits, then yes, I think it's safe to assume you'll be properly credited for hits moving forward from the period it's fixed.


Please keep in mind that the answers might change depending on what they discover to be the root of the issues. As with the greyed out reviews, it turns out there was more than one cause to that but what you saw as a result was the same. Hopefully that isn't the case for everything mentioned but unfortunately it's not that straightforward (from what I'm told).

-Almar


That was said in this thread

I'm trying to be hopeful, but it looks like they are hoping a new catalog roll-out will ''fix'' a lot of the problems. Is anyone is Sports/Outdoors getting outside hits on their reviews (besides a few stray ones here and there.)? -Dave

Jeff- Did you have any IS on your Outdoor reviews for May? I couldn't find any for mine. Hopefully they'll get this fixed very soon. -Dave

Well, since such a discussion is evidently too negative for the general board, maybe I'll commiserate with those obviously feeling the same pain and burden.

No. None of May's in the category show IS. Frankly, my IS has almost degenerated to a point where I'm afraid that next month, I'll be back to getting pennies overall. Half of this month's IS comes from a single Outdoor Gear review. Most of my steadily producing reviews in the category have been switched to the /review/ URL; including those that should be and were producing steady hits and IS right up to their changeover.

This is the really frustrating part. Not only did the category get nailed at Christmas vis a vis the usual bump, now that we're in "the season" for Outdoor Gear (especially flyfishing and camping), the lack of registered hits and the resultant nonexistent IS ends up being a double hit. On top of that, those who aren't suffering, spend time crowing on the general boards (including one who has a review in OG and claims IS from last month on that, single review which is over six times my total IS as a Top Reviewer in the category), evidently without understanding, admitting, or recognizing that this "distributed differently" IS concept is really a case of their benefiting, literally, at our expense - as well as the other categories similarly afflicted.

However, when it is mentioned over on the general boards, the responses are: stop being so negative, diversify - don't be so invested in a single category (like that is a "bad" thing; i.e., focusing on those areas where you have some expertise), it'll be fixed "soon" so stop whining, or take advantage of the 10-4-10 (which we have been repeatedly told is not supposed to be substituting for IS). Now, unlike any number who have openly admitted to spending 4 - 6 hrs. a day on the site, it is difficult for me to envision being able to avail myself sufficiently of the 10-4-10 to compensate for the continuing loss of IS.

Other than continuing patience, the real question is: "What other option is there except not to 'play' anymore (which isn't really an option - yet)?"

At least for the overall MPA list (sitewide), it seems that the invisible reviews for Outdoor Gear & Sporting Goods reviews have been re-incorporated into hit totals (though the reviews themselves aren't counting new hits - it's just counting what you had already gotten pre-/review/ bug). However there's still no tracking for the reviews themselves and if you try to get hit counts for the individual category, it's not there.

I guess it's some sort of improvement.

Jeff

Interesting. My overall standing didn't change too much. I see some people on the main boards mentioned they dropped in the overall standings with the new data added in - LOL. I wish the powers-that-be would tell us something about what's going on. -Dave

It looks like the MPA/MPR is somewhat up. I don't know about others, but at least for me, it seems to be pretty significantly messed up though.

I'm ranked down at like 138 in the Sports & Outdoors Category and it's showing that I have just over 5900 total hits. I've got Outdoor Gear reviews that have more total hits than that by themselves so the stat tracking stuff isn't picking up all the reviews and all the total hits I guess. Anyone else noticing issues? I sent in a bug report, not sure if it'll do anything.

I posted this over on the main board too.

Jeff

Same thing here. I've dropped from something like #20 in Outdoor Gear to #560 and it only shows a fraction of my total hits within the category - I have individual reviews with substantially more hits than the list is showing as my total in the category. I'm wondering if this is indicative of why IS has been so severely slashed.

I still have reviews that were going along well up until the middle of April when they were /reviewed/ and now show absolutely no hits despite being readily accessible on Google (which means they are getting hits or they'd be dropping in the Google search because I don't have to use "Epinions" in the search terms to find them). Even my newest reviews have the issue of showing fewer total hits than actual member ratings - forget any outside hits.

Bug reports? I've kinda of come to the point where I think bug reports are little more than a placebo for the discontented. At this juncture, if the ratings are an indication of the IS issues, I think they probably already know wherein lies the problem and I'd just like to see it fixed before we're, yet again, out of the season.

Mine's the same way - showing 4,997 total hits but I have some reviews with over 5,000 alone. Perhaps it's just picking up the total since 'Black Tuesday'? I didn't notice any hits recorded since April yet either. I guess they are working on it though. -Dave

All,
Thanks for your patience on this issue. We just rolled out another update. Please check the lists again.

Yoel

Thanks for the update. I have no idea if the counts are right, but at least we're moving in the right direction. -Dave

Gotcha - looks good to me - I think the rankings are back to normal at the moment.

Now we've just got to get those reviews to record their hits!

Jeff

It appears that any fixes for hit counts in the dead categories (Sports & Outdoors included) are being pushed off into the future...

Ugh...

pertinent thread

I've started a thread on the main board in an attempt to get some information on the status of the fixes for the hit counts on reviews with /review/ in the URL.

/review/ Reviews hit count status?

In that same thread, Eps staff got back to us and said that the fix for the /review/ url'd reviews should be up and running in a week or two when they run the June IS. When the IS is run, the hits for June should show up on the formerly dead reviews and from then on out it should be counting I guess. That's the impression that I got from the answer.

The answer is right here.

It appears that most reviews in Sports & Outdoors for me earned at least some IS (though the hits still aren't showing), so hopefully we're on the road to recovering our category.

Jeff

The IS is in thread first mentions that hits will start to show next week. Later on Yoel confirmed that they will continue daily from then on.

Yes!!

pops

has anyone noticed the June hits for outdoor reviews? I haven't looked that closely - I know they are supposed to come in at some point this week.

Jeff

I haven't found any outside hits for June as of today. Some of my popular reviews in Sports/Outdoors are back to getting their normal amount of hits in July though. -Dave