Garden Watchdog question

Hey all --

I just placed an order with Gorge Top Gardens and then went to Gardenwatchdog :( They have a 36% approval rating, which is very bad. Besides the fact that I ordered from a company that will no doubt rip me off, the trouble is a lot of the positive feedback for this company is from people who left the feedback the same day they signup up with Dave's. I'm thinking they were scamming us. If their feedback were taken out, then I believe the approval rating would be 10% or less.

I guess I was just wondering if there were any safeguards in place to prevent companies from making their own positive ratings or one-day members leaving feedback, or whatever. Or if there were any way to even do this.

The scoop on 'Gorge Top Gardens (also dba perennial-gardening.com)'
http://davesgarden.com/gwd/c/3297/

Suzy

Suzy, this came up recently... http://davesgarden.com/forums/t/702293/ Does that help?

I'm not sure there's any good way to identify and remove reviews from "shills," as you might end up removing some perfectly legitimate reviews also, and that would really annoy people. If you take a quick glance down the posted reviews, you can generally get a pretty good idea of what's going on with a company.

Oh, no, I didn't know. And I had no idea people like Onalee asked people to leave ratings, and I also didn't know non-DGers could leave ratings, so I am well behind on what is what!

Thanks, Critter!

Suzy

Here's what I found:

There are 25 positive comments - 11 (less than half) of them were entered by "one-and-done" people. (Many of whom had joined prior to leaving feedback.) I've done a cursory review of IP addresses and found only two that appear suspicious thus far, and they'll get a closer review. Many of the other positives were written by people who also wrote many other reviews, and/or are longtime subscribing members to DG.

There are 37 negative comments - of those, 22 (about 2/3) were written by one-and-done posters, most of whom signed up on the same day they entered the review.

So if we discounted all the one-time feedback submissions for this company, their rating would actually increase quite a bit.

All of which proves....not much ;o) The Watchdog is designed to encourage and allow customers to sign up and submit a review - there's nothing inherently wrong about that. If that's all they want to do, that's okay, but a lot of them look around and find other companies to review, or areas of the site that pique their interests. We display the number of reviews beside their name to let other readers know at a glance a little something about the reviewer.



Yes, there are safeguards, but they require vigilence. We keep an eye on the ebb and flow of feedback, and unless the vendor is being very patient and clever (most of them aren't), we'll soon pick up on a change in the pattern of activity and launch an investigation. We also have sharp-eyed members who alert us when a feedback pattern appears suspect to them. (And we're very grateful for their observations.)

We have tools to analyze the source of the feedback, and if we determine it has been falsified (positive or negative) we change the rating to neutral and put a very prominent footnote disclosing that it was fraudulent. The threat of public and permanent disclosure is a pretty big deterrent to any company who might be tempted to try to sandbag their own rating.

Oh, Terry, I'm so sorry to cause you so much work -- and it's my fault anyway since I didn't check it before ordering! Dumb!

Thanks for your efforts -- much appreciated

Suzy

No, it's actually good to take look now and then. In busy months, we see thousands of reviews pouring into the GWD. We don't read or analyze every one of them, so sometimes our best "eyes and ears" are the members who see something out of whack, and give us a heads-up ;o)

I should've known admin was on top of this issue too! :-)

Any time anything seems out of whack with a post, a review, a PF entry, whatever... a quick note to admin is generally a good idea. Thanks, Terry!