Rating Without Reviewing

Thanks for all your hard work on the site, and for answering my question so swiftly. This site’s been an invaluable resource: I’ve found a couple really amazing blends – the highly-rated Affordable Pipes being among them – based on the great reviews members offer (both written and star-only). I look forward to seeing this site expand and succeed in the future.

On a related matter, the most helpful change you could make (IMO) would be to give the Overall Rating (Recommendation) in numerical form, as, say, 3.3 stars. As it stands now, a “recommended” rating can mean an average of 3.49 or 2.51, with no way to tell without calculating it yourself, and that is difficult with many tobaccos having 50 or more ratings. Yet there is a big difference between 3.49 and 2.51, and it would be nice to have that information presented explicitly.

@Edgar,

Thanks for the suggestion. I am looking hard at better ways to represent the overall rating for tobacco blends. As you know, a 5 star system with half-star increments is a 10 point system. What you are asking for is a 100 point system, at least in the way ratings are displayed.

I am not sure of the utility of that, and certainly want to avoid asking users to rate tobaccos on a 100-point scale, but it is probably trivial to, in addition to the 5 stars, display the raw numerical rating of the tobacco. I will look into doing so as soon as possible.

I think a 5 star, incremented system is a great idea. There are many tobaccos I’ve given 4 stars to because I think they’re great, but they aren’t all my favorites. Many of them would stay at 4 stars, with just a few going up to 5, were the system to change. My question is this: Are we going to have to edit all our reviews to fit the 5 star system? If so, Pipestud’s in a mess o’ trouble!

About rating without reviewing…I think the best part of the site is the diversity of opinions in the reviews and the pure fun of reading them, even if (or maybe especially when) I don’t agree with them. I’m always disappointed to to click on a new review to find it empty or just a one sentence note. I don’t mean to put anyone off here, but the site is called tobaccoreviews, not tobaccoratings ;-}
-loose

“I’m always disappointed to to click on a new review to find it empty or just a one sentence note. I don’t mean to put anyone off here, but the site is called tobaccoreviews, not tobaccoratings ;-}”

I agree with Chris on this point. Without narrative, the star rating has little value for me; it’s of no value in selecting tobaccos to sample.

I agree with Steve. A review without words, for me, would be useless.

John - Thanks so much for this wonderful Site and the expanded version with News and Blog. This is indeed a very valuable resource and very thoughtful of you to provide it in a non-commerical Web 2.0 Community environment.

I’m with the few reviewers preceding me; inasmuch as the review is the key to the rating. I’ve been able to learn about reviewers with similar tastes to mine, or learn to invalidate a review because someone wrote it after smoking one bowl of tobacco; or, a poor review of Balkan blend by someone that usually only appreciates highly flavored aromatics (or vice versa) This is very personal so you start to get a feeling from some of the reviewers that they generally review tobacco they bought, not samples of things they wouldn’t have even considered buying.

It seems to me that reviews help us provide the subtle difference in a opinion because we reveal our knowledge, lack thereof, or our tastes which provides a key to our rating.

I’ll throw in my $.02 worth: Numerical scores only provide me with little information or help when choosing a new blend. It’s the written reviews that tell me what I’m looking for when I trying to decide what I want to spend my money on.

I just blow on by the ratings where they’ve given a number and no review.

As far as an average rating, I don’t see that you’d have to revamp your rating scale at all. The people above weren’t asking you to allow them to rate on a 100 point scale, they were just wanting you to post the calculated average to two decimal points. Should be easy to do.

– Doug Pearson

Okay, I obviously didn’t explain my plan well enough, or perhaps I did and no one likes it

The plan for the future is to remove all of the content-less reviews that exist to only rate the tobacco by providing a separate way to allow users to simply give each blend a star rating without cluttering up the reviews section.

Being able to rate blends without reviewing them has several distinct advantages from the current system:

1) I can require minimum lengths for reviews, leading to (potentially) better quality reviews for everyone.
2) People who do not now review tobaccos will rate them, giving us a wider sample to calculate average ratings from.
3) Ratings can be used to suggest other tobaccos to try out (e.g. NetFlix) without requiring a full blown review for each blend to use the recommender.

Most places that have reviews (Amazon, imdb, etc) do this - ratings and reviews are separate to allow for both types of reactions to be used differently. I am just moving in this direction.

So the upshot of the new system is that if you come here for the reviews, you will see more good reviews and NO empty ones. If you come here looking for new tobaccos to try, you will get good quality reviews, and by rating the tobaccos you have smoked, can get some new things to try.

Jon,
I’ve used the site for years and appreicate your hard work and the upgrades to the site. However, in my view and based on my prior use, ratings without any text review is ~ to an MT pipe bowl.

I too would find a rating without review worthless. In fact, I would like to see the rating system dropped. The star system means different things to different reviewers. Say a blend with perique is given a one star because the reviewer doesn’t like perique. What sense does that make? I like perique so, I give it four stars? Come on. Have you looked at the Professor’s review format? It’s much more precise. Don’t get me wrong I love this site and use it constantly. Jon, thanks for all you’ve done and continue to do!

reviews—a star doesn’t tell me much. a mixture that maybe given no stars may have the stuff i like. thanks

I totally agree with newman!!!!! a five system rating is great only followed by a personal review.

Jon,
I like having both the ratings and the reviews, so I don’t think you should consider getting rid of the ratings. The ratings are useful two ways: 1) I like to have a list of the Top 40 Most Popular Tobaccos when I am looking for something new to try and 2) I like to have the ratings next to each review, so I can quickly scroll through the reveiws to read a few favorable ones, then find some negative ones for a rebuttal.
Thanks for doing this for us. We, the pipesmokers of the world, love your site and appreciate your effort.

Please do not do away with the reviews. This is the whole key to finding new tobacco based on peoples opinions.
One of the smartest things about reviews is linking the person to other blends who agrees with yourself on the blend that you like. In other words, if you like a particular blend, and another person likes that blend as well, it is interesting to see what other blends he likes in addition - usually you will like it also, thus helping you find a path of other blends you like without costing a fortune in wasted purchases.