Several of the books I thought about reviewing show that they' ve got several reviews. Then I click on them to read what other people have said and I'm told that my review is the first to be written. The books already have ratings and a number of reviews, but the reviews themselves are absent.

Any ideas why this is? Are the reviews so old that they've disappeared? Or are they just too crap to show up?

If you have your site settings set so that you can't see NH and SH reviews, that could be the problem but my guess is that you've found the same bug I ran into with a product not too long ago. You can check your site settings and if that doesn't work, file a bug report. I believe it's a known issue, but I don't know if it's isolated to particular products or categories.

Yes, file the bug reports. It's hard to say, since no official explanation has been given yet, but it appears that certain product listings are messed up somehow, with this being the result.

I do hope they find a fix because it's highly annoying.

-Andy

WHY it happens, but I read this solution on the message boards and it works great for the time being: just take out the /reviews part of the url and most of the time the reviews then reveal themselves. For instance:

http://www.epinions.com/reviews/Book_Harry_Potter_And_The_Deathly_Hallows_J_K_Rowling

turns up only 2 reviews, both SH. This:

http://www.epinions.com/Book_Harry_Potter_And_The_Deathly_Hallows_J_K_Rowling

is the same link, just without /reviews , and it shows the other 25 reviews for the book.

What's frustrating is that most people, and certainly non-members, would have no clue there were thousands of reviews lurking beneath the surface of the site waiting to be unlocked. I can't tell you the number of times I've been at the library looking up books in the Epinions database to see if there were already review of a title, saw nothing, then found not just one but multiple VH and top-notch reviews when I logged in at home. Our stuff is not visible out there, man.

Of course, somewhere lost on the site are far more than 25 reviews for that particular book.

-Andy