New Garden Watchdog

Just looked at the merger of the Plants by Mail and the Gardenwatchdog. Nice job. One suggestion - how about including a section on the bottom 20 companies? Lots of folks would immediately be forewarned and I think would greatly appreciate this information.

Oofta!! What a suggestion! hehehe. Call it the "Watchdog Bottom-Feeder 20"

:)

Dave

Groan. You know, the old PBM-FAQ had a "worst companies" list, and I honestly don't know how they got away without being sued. (Joe and Peter's list was totally subjective, not based on number of negative comments or anything.)

At any rate, you can call me Pollyanna, but I like to think we accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative (to borrow from an old song.)

I can't really see any good purpose in putting such a list together - if someone is searching for a company to order from, they're going to find (and mentally eliminate) the negatives from their list of contenders. To allow people to browse a list of negatives just invites trouble from the unfortunate (and probably surly) business owners who would be represented there.

LOL Terry, I think if I were a disreputable dealer it would be very helpful to me to know when my reputation had hit the bottom feeders list....I'd know I had about reached the limit on new suckers and that it was time to change my name and address...

Zany, if some of these guys don't know they've hit bottom yet, there's no hope for 'em. If we have an email addy on file, the company gets notification every time a comment is left for them. And I think it's safe to say that it's pretty easy to see which companies care when they get a negative comment, and which don't.

There is another reason why a 'bottom feeders' list (love the name) might not be entirely appropiate. There are a number of the more well known companies listed in the GW and at least two have very mixed feedback, it would be unfair on the smaller companies that don't get a good rating to be listed there when some of the large companies get away with it just by being better known or the only companies that offer the choice goods despite poor service for a good number of their customers.

I agree Terry, if they don't know they're giving very poor service there is no hope that they will ever improve. Personally I'm more likely to browse a web site with a positive feeling than one that draws the eye to the negative, I like to make my own choice.

LOL!
While I'd enjoy a 'bottom feeder' list, I agree with Terry. The positives would be outweighed by the negatives.

But it would be fun!

Cheri'

Well, just a suggestion, but I still think making the low rated companies easily available would be beneficial. Maybe take the approach of ZDNet for software ratings where you can click on a button that will list all negative reviews for a piece of software, except this button would list all negatively rated companies.

The main thing is to be able to quickly obtain information about companies that you should think twice about before ordering. The ZDNet site additionally lists the percentage of good versus bad reviews. I find this information VERY helpful when assessing whether or not a piece of software is worth obtaining.

While I'm at it, it would be nice to change the layout of the site so that the comments automatically resize so that you don't have to scroll to the right each time in order to read all of a review. A minor inconvenience, but an inconvenience nonetheless.

Copperbaron, which page is causing the scrolling? The pages all look good to me, but we've had a lot of reports about this. Is there a specific page in which this is occurring?

Dave

All of the pages. It appears that the table on the left that has the FAQ, etc. links is the culprit, as this appears to be the amount that I have to scroll to the right in order to read all of the review.

Interesting. It looks great in my Netscape browser. Well, I'll take a look-see in Internet Explorer. Thanks for the heads-up.

dave

Does the same for me. Even when I change my screen resolution. I'm using IE 6.0.28 ...
It looks great in Netscape ....

It's prolly a CSS thing, don't ya think? I've had this problem before, myself.

Cheri'

Copperbaron: Take a look now and see how it looks.

(It sure is handy now that I can run Internet Explorer on my Linux box - no more booting up the laptop!)

Dave

Back to Copperbaron's original question/suggestion. One thought I had was to perhaps add a fifth field to the advanced search so that you could search by:

1. company name (or partial name); and/or
2. state; and/or
3. country; and/or
4. specialty; and/or
5. rating - either by allowing users to screen out those with a negative rating; or alternatively allow users to select to see the "positively-rated companies" or all "positive, neutral and unrated companies".

I don't know how this would work from a technical standpoint, but if we decide to proceed, IMO it should allow those with no rating to be included somehow/somewhere. Even though the number of unrated companies has shrunk with the merger, there are still 55% of them that haven't yet been rated. Too many to leave out of a search :)

That would be terrific, Terry. You know what else would be useful? If we could sort the list generated by clicking on a category (or choosing a state or whatever) by rating. Really, the arrangement in alphabetical order is kind of unfair.

Being on the first page of any search results guarantees clicks. To grant that to a company based solely on it's choice of name is arbitrary. Especially when you consider how many names some of these shoddy companies use. Conversely, it's unfair to bury a company with a good rating on page 6 of the results.

I think it would be more fair to the companies and useful to the members if we could at least choose to sort by rating. I can't tell you how many times I've wished I could do that!

IMHO an un-rated company would be roughly equivalent to a neutral rating.

Cheri'

It appears that you have somewhat overcompensated now as there is a fairly substantial blank space on the right side of the window, but it's a lot better.

Baron,

You are right about the overcompensation. I realized that there would be a little give no matter what, but it seemed the only solution to make it look good no matter what width you have (I tried widths of 640px and 1600px. There was a lot of blank space at 1600...).

It's now serving different HTML depending on browser. :) So if you use Netscape, you'll see a better page (Hey, should I put one of those silly "Best Viewed Under Netscape Navigator" buttons on there? ;-)

Dave

Interesting.....all of your other windows, such as the threads on this post that I am now viewing, always work out fine with tables on the right that include the Dave's Garden links and the table on the left that has the posts.

I think all you need to do is move the table on the left to the right just like you have at Dave's Garden and duplicate what is normally viewed. I'm probably wrong as I've never developed a web page before, so all the previous is surmising on my part.

It looks like the idea of finding some way to allow people to access the most poorly regarded companies died in this discussion. I think Copperbaron's idea seemed do-able and would avoid bottom-feeders from retaliating.