Ratings vs. Reviews - Cast Your Vote

I don’t want to lose either!! I LOVE reading the reviews, but am generally quided there by the ratings. In fact, rather than do away with them, I like the idea of expanding the ways they are used as you mentioned above. My vote is to definately keep the ratings!!

Thanks,
Russell in Atlanta

Absolutely you should keep both. I often reorder the list of blends from a given brand by rating in order to read only the reviews of their best blends. But, the ratings without the reviews would be fairly useless.

And like Russell, I think expanding the ratings are a great way to go. I would love to have a referral to reviews for similar blends with the same or better ratings. That could save me a lot of time-

I vote for keeping the ratings but with a slight change - make it 1-5 stars instead of 4. Allowing another star would make the ratings more precise in my opinion. Another feature I personally would like to see is a private message function for the board members to use to chat while logged in. No one would see or use personal email addresses of course because the message function would only work through this message board. Having a mailbox to check messages and share stories with other members would be a lot of fun and is a common feature on many message boards similar to this one.
Just a thought.

Sincerely,
Ethan “Glrofindel” Dickey

I concur with Ethan’s 5 star ratings. Having the option of a definite middle could help. I also don’t see the need for more than that- no 10pt systems, or plus or minus stars.

Keep the ratings.

A review without ratings might be less focused. Ratings without a review is certainly less useful for what I look for. An overall rating by itself is practically useless.

My main focus is the review, but I’d keep the ratings, especially if you can expand on how they can be used.

Regarding the 5-point scale. I’m not against that per se, but I don’t see how you could easily do it. There are thousands of reviews already on a 4-point scale. How would you shift these to a 5-point scale and still have them mean anything? If you’re going to actually use the points for calculating anything, you can’t change scales without invalidating the data.

– Doug Pearson

I’m also with Ethan on this one.

I am with Ethan as well, though I like the idea of a 5 star rating system with half star increments. I also like the idea of a private message system.

+JMJ+

Though a five star system would be preferable, it is probably not necessary especially if it would be convoluted to efficiently retrofit the function. This is about tobacco. It’s supposed to be fun, not torturous. We’re not exactly curing cancer, here.

Ethan’s chat idea is a good one.

Totally agree with the 5 stars suggestion!
I love both Ratings and reviews and would miss either going.

I vote to keep the ratings and reviews. I have frequently used a tobacco I know I like to find others that I might like by using the details in the reviews as well as searching for simular blends.

I also find a reviewer whose comments are close to my own thoughts about a blend I like then I go to the reviewers other reviews to find blends to try based on the fact that we have at least one blend in common.

Keep ‘em both. Rating for quick searches; reviews for in-depth information (as it relates to the reviewer’s taste). While 5 stars would be preferred, I fully understand that with 4 stars in current use, change would mean severely compromised/invalidated data.

Chat sounds a loverly idea, as do mail boxes. However, it’s your time and not ours to spend. In any case, the site is great and you are to be commended for the time/effort you have put in so far. Thank you.

I vote for both, I agree with all of you folks!!!

I am also infavor of keeping both Reviews & Ratings. Like many others I use the ratings to select which blends to investigate, and the reviews of course are indispensible. I have come to recognize several of the regular reviewers, and so by comparing my tastes to their ratings on blends I have a fairly good idea whether I would like a blend I haven’t tried by how those reviewers liked them.

This has been a very useful Web Site for me, and I hope, with all the perspective changes afoot, you will safe guard the features already in place.

I vote to scrap the ratings. Saying whether you like a blend or not is not important. I want to see a description of the blend. I don’t care whether anyone else like anchovies on a pizza if I do. Look at the Professor’s method: http://pipes.priss.org/

I vote to keep the ratings but add another star. I also enjoy reading the reviews . This site is a wonderful place to share our love of the evil weed.

I say keep the ratings, but with Ethan’s suggestion of 5 stars. I also agree with Lou that you don’t want to make too many changes. The original idea is great and I do alot of research of the many blends listed here.

I would like to see the 5 star conversion as well. Also maybe set it up so different aspects of each tobacco gets a star rating, then these are all averaged to create the total rating.

While I voted keep the ratings, they have very little use for me. I only compare them “horizontally”- how a given reviewer has rated other, similar blends.

People who “review” blends with no description at all and leave only a star rating, contribute nothing. Personally I’d like to see this being prevented by making the “your notes”-field obligatory.

Many thanks for building and running the TR!

Oops, I see that you have already adressed the “no review”-review sillines on your previous post. Sorry.

I ditto Irishlefty’s post. It’s exactly the same method that I utilize the site. Your website has great format, easily navigable and informative.
Thanks

I say keep them both…yet a 5 star rating would be great as well.

The ratings are only useful (IMHO) to see how a particular reviewer rated a blend. It’s much more helpful to read some of the comments about how a tobacco smells and tastes and burns. As for the five star system, how do you plan to convert earlier reviews to the new system? The reviewers are probably not going to go back and modify them, therefor it only creates confusion to have a dual rating system in place. A possible solution would be to change the existing reviews, so that they clearly state for example “3 out of 4 stars”.

Ratings and reviews. I like the idea of being able to rate with stars if I’m in a hurry; I also like knowing WHY someone gave a low or high rating — since they might rate something low for the very reason I would rate it high.

Both.

I read what folks have to say…therefore, I don’t pay attention to the ratings. I only read the review to get a jest of the reviewer’s mindset. I disagree more often than not anyway.

I do pay more attention to those reviews for new tobaccos than for tobaccos that have been around for some time. Frankly, I don’t care what someone thinks of Prince Albert or many of the other “drugstore” types.

To be brief while chiming in, Yes to reviews, yes to ratings, up it to 5 stars.

I, too, agree with the five star rating system. Otherwise keep it relatively the same.

I rely heavily on the rating and reviews when selecting my tobacco purchases. I do agree that a 5 star rating systen is appropiate. Other than that I would not change a thing.

I started pipe smoking in earnest after a long break this month, and find the ratings and reviews very helpful. Please keep both, and if someone has a bunch of free time please do consider adding a cross-tab function that indicated other blends similar to the one being viewed.

Also, KEEP the four stars. It is a well-known marketing principle of which this sites designers may have been aware initially that when doing surveys having an even number of classifications forces people to make a choice. You get more meaningful data. With an odd number the middle becomes over-represented.

+JMJ+

Since a five star system would be so problematic, how about this: a five star, “hall of fame” designation? Anyone could nominate a blend. Then the blend would have to get a certain number (maybe 100 or more) seconding votes to give it a special, group assigned, five star award. Of course, if the blend is bought by another blender, only the older incarnation might still retain the award if the newer one is only a pale shadow of the original.

This would avoid a problematic change of the base rating system, and would offset issues of over-zealous (or under-zealous) reviewers throwing off ratings for certain blends.

Keep both. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Keep both. Adding an additional star would have a disastrous effect on trying to understand prior ratings though.

Ratings are good, a quick “bottom line” but the reviews allow readers to gauge whether the reviewer has similar tastes, just tried a tobacco once, or hates some component (e.g., latakia or perique) so gave it a bad mark. Converting from 4 to 5 (or 10 or 100) would require translation of all previous reviews, which is a pain. For a higher resolution display of this large and valuable database, an easy thing to implement would be a small graph of results, which would be much more informative than listing just the mean (average) rating. For example, a tobacco that has 50 4-star ratings and 10 1-star ratings would be 3-star on average, but a graph would tell you that this is a love-it-or-hate-it tobacco, and the reviews would help you decide which group you might belong to. This is very different from a tobacco that gets mostly 3 stars, where most people like it pretty well and no one hates it. An example of each of these would be Hal-O-the-Wynde, which can bite and thus turn people off, but offers splendid rewards for the careful puffer, vs. MacB Navy Flake, which everyone likes, offends no one, but doesn’t excite people to lofty heights the way Hal-O-the-Wynde does. A graph would tell you a lot.

Keep the ratings and the four stars. I agree that trying to make sense of old ratings with a five star system would be quite impossible. I also like the above idea of a graph. Just something simple that shows a distribution of ratings like Amazon.com does for its product ratings.

I like the idea of a 5 star system but perhaps it would be easier to incorporate the old ratings by keeping the 4 star system but allow 1/2 star increments.

I like the old style of rating/review. I usually check to see what other smokers think of the various blends and their perception of the various attributes they possess. Short of actually tasting the tobacco, it is the closest thing that I can see to determine if purchasing/smoking it is warranted.

Current format is great. Paragraphs flesh out the numbers. Things aren’t overly numerical, since there’s a wide enough range for variance, but they also aren’t overly vague, as is.

Keep both!

And, keep the four stars! karlub is exactly right: an even number of stars sharpens the responses considerably, but forcing people to take a pro- or con- direction.

My work involves developing rubrics for evaluating the effectiveness of various aspects of an educational program… The four-point rubrics work much better.

Plus… what would happen to the thousands of existing four-star reviews?

Four star rating!
1 star — bottom
2 stars - top of the bottom
3 stars - bottom of the top
4 stars - top
A fifth star would be a “nothing”. It is not bad enough to be in the bottom and not good enough to be in the top.
Keep the reviews. I get to increase my vocabulary by reading them. I haven’t seen the words “ammonia” in referring to the after taste of burley, nor the word “sterno” to refer to the bite of virginias.

Keep the ratings.

The four star system is just fine. And it does assist folks in making a definite choice. Of course one can always change it.

The typed reviews are excellent and should be kept. I also like the fact that the two are tied together just having a star system would not be very helpful.

Lastly, it would be nice if one could search other folks reviews so that after reading four or five by the same person and I may find myself in agreement, I could then be introduced to some new blends or brands. Some folks do this already in the typed section. Akin to when one finds a film or a dining critic and takes heed.

Okay, I’ve read most of the suggestions here, and I hope I can add something to the discussion.

I agree with most of the other comments: keep both reviews and ratings. Reviews are more important, but ratings do help in sorting through the myriad blends.

On the matter of how many stars for ratings: I do think there should be more than 4 stars. Given the amount of detail some people perceive in the tobacco and put in their reviews, it seems that 4 stars is a bit lacking in information. At the same time, it is true as Doug Pearson and others noted, that 4 star ratings cannot easily be translated to 5 star, or 10 star systems.

100 point resolution seems to be more detail than most think is necessary, so here is my suggestion: just make it an 8 point scale. 4 stars, allowing for half star ratings. This way the old ratings are easily translated, and we get a bit more detail, but not too much. So you can rate from half a star to 4 stars, at half star increments.

I have one further suggestion I haven’t seen anyone else make, and I think it would be an easy feature to implement. I noticed that many people don’t recall the original date of review when they come back and make edits on their previous reviews. I have only reviewed 2 tobaccos, but I’ve dated them from the start, so that it isn’t an issue. As I am a new smoker, I’m sure my tastes will change over time, and I like the ability to add later thoughts to a review. So, I think it would be great to set the reviews up so that the system tracks the dates of each individual edit that’s made. That way, no one needs to remember to date their review, and it helps keep track of the way our taste progresses over time.

I hope I’m not too late in submitting these suggestions, as I see that the most recent comment was added in February.

Sorry, I forgot to mention in my previous post that in addition to converting to 8 point ratings, it would probably be useful to keep track of the ratings that were done on the 4 point scale, as opposed to new reviews done on the 8 point scale. Someone who gave a tobacco 1 star may really hate it enough to have given it only half a star on the 8 point system.

So, perhaps there should be a little icon to the side of the old ratings, to denote they were done with only whole stars as options. Also, if the reviewer edits that review, maybe some sort of notice could pop up and bring to their attention that they need to make sure it’s rated appropriately considering the half star options now in place. This way, the icon showing that it’s a whole star only rating will go away, and it will be made current on the 8 point scale.