Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Best Open Product Review Website?
First time accepted submitter MastaBaba writes "I want to move my personal reviews (of books, games, music and films) from my website to an online product review website. However, I would like to be able to bulk upload my existing reviews and I would require my reviews to be downloadable by me in CSV, at any time in the future. Goodreads allows for import/export of book reviews, and IMDB allows you to export your ratings, but what about game and music reviews? What website aggregates consumer reviews of (all) products, while allowing for each individual user to easily import and export his own reviews?"
I would like a site to work exactly to my specifications (I have requirements, you know!), however I am to lazy to find it and/or it doesn't exist. Is this something I should ask the semantic web?
Seriously, you're gunna have to build one. ;)
Parent is a rick-rollin troll :)
I don't know about exporting your reviews, or why you'd want to do so, but....
for games and music I read and write reviews on...
Newegg & amazon... sometimes,
I've found gamefaqs.com to be a highly benevolent source of information on games.
The reviews on torrent websites are pretty helpful when determining music :)
I recommend you link to your reviews using your web browser and then create a report based off a monthly review of your links or something like that, I conceptualize user reviews as something to share w others, and even though feedback is important and can help improve your quality, thank you for posting shit in the first place!
Why do you feel that your opinions are valuable enough to be archived for posterity, but not so valuable that they are worth maintaining a website?
I hate grammar Nazi's.
Amazon.com
Their product reviews are community moderated and highly accurate. Amazon generally doesn't tamper with the product reviews either. It's _open_ for you to read right now.
WTF is this article about? The poster wants to be able to upload and download bulk reviews of random stuff? I don't get it at all. Why would somebody think they're so important that their reviews of the latest Lady Gaga album need to be saved and archived? Why would anybody want to download their reviews after they're already posted? For spamming multiple product review sites?
I don't respond to AC's.
Yep, its all about you. geesh.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
There are a few, like epinions, but I find them fairly annoying.
Perhaps something like Rotten Tomatoes for everything.
The Zebco Combination Flyrod & Waffle Iron has a 37% Fresh score
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
about your dumb fuck opinions, quit thinking your the man and get a life or maybe even a job. hey if your "reviews" are not totally worthless you could get a job writing them and that would include a place to host them right?
This sounds like a bad idea to me.
Any site that allows people to "bulk upload" reviews will be inundated with spam reviews and reviews by shills and sockpuppets. Amazon, which is much more restrictive, nevertheless has this problem to some extent with reviewers like Harriet Klausner, who can't possibly read all the books she reviews. I run a site that catalogs free books and collects users' reviews of them (see my sig), and I find that a decent fraction of user-submitted reviews are obviously authors reviewing their own books. (E.g., the reviewer's name is the same as the author's, or the review is identical to a blurb on the book's web site.) This is against the rules on my site, and I delete these reviews. But on a site that reviewed as many different kinds of things as the OP is asking for, and that allowed people to upload and download them in bulk, it would become extremely difficult and time-consuming to deal with this. Amazon has the advantage here of knowing that their reviewers are individuals with credit cards whose names match the names on the cards, and who have bought something from Amazon using the card. (You can review a book on Amazon without having bought that particular book on Amazon, but you have to have bought something from Amazon at least once.) This helps them to avoid, e.g., sockpuppet reviews.
I sympathize with the OP's desire to have a reviewing site that's not a handmaiden of commerce, but Amazon does have a massive network effect working in their favor. I would never have bothered making my own site if there had been any overlap between my mission and Amazon's -- but there isn't, since Amazon doesn't accept reviews of free books.
Find free books.
oooooooh
Roger Ebert gave it 2 thumbs down saying, "This dumb ass wants it easy. Reviewing movies is no easy job, shithead. You can't just change a few words of your review of a movie and repost it as a review of the soundtrack."
Rotten Tomatoes rates it 0% (from 15 posted reviews). The sites consensus is that the poster is lazy, arrogant and wonders how this even made it past a junior level "Ask Slashdot" editor.
Metacritic reported this Ask Slashdot had an average of 0 based on 15 posts and gave in an F on an A to F scale.
Nobody is going to offer what you want. (And that's a bizarre format to want to use for generic reviews.) Anyone who does, if you find one, is still going to make you unhappy somehow. I promise.
KEEP YOUR WEBSITE. And just mark it up according to microformats and/or RDFa or the new flavor of the month that came out earlier this year.
(Why do you want to get rid of your website? You very likely have some strange motives and you didn't say what they are. Nobody is going to be able to truly advise you until they know what you're really thinking.)
Oh, and you know who aggregates reviews, though (sort of)? Google. Just don't use them for hosting.
For video games, the Backloggery is easily the best site with the best community when it comes to cataloging your collection. That said, it doesn't support importing, and exporting is not possible yet, though it is a planned feature. The focus of the site is on helping you to chip away at your collection, and it does a good job at orienting itself around that idea while having a lot of fun with it.
1) Who cares?
2) Just keep a copy of your reviews in an Excel file, Access DB, MySQL, or in your ass.
3) Building a review download script is not in the best interest of the website/company...since you can typically see all of your reviews when you log into your account (Amazon) and just cut and paste them into the format of your choice
4) Possible copyright issues...if you can read, read the TOS of the site and see if the review belongs to you or to the website/company.
5) Are you and geekoid friends? Fucktards!
haha ha ha ha hahahaha
good luck finding something that does it all...
Product reviews? Seems like just the sort of thing for another wikiwhatever site, if not Wikipedia itself. There is a wikireviews.info, but it doesn't look like much. Don't know about productwiki.com. Maybe a suitable wiki site should be created, becasue there isn't one?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I can see a use for this kind of thing. Let's say I want to start researching my next car purchase. I want to keep track of what cars I've considered, list the attributes that matter to me (price, HP, fuel efficiency) and give an overall rating of the car with notes. It doesn't need to be shared with the world, but it would be nice if others could add to it, make their own suggestions.
What would work well for this situation? It would be nice to sort by rating, filter, that sort of thing.
Why are you so negative about this question? And so gross sometime?
If it isn't of any interest to you, just leave it alone.
I was only mildly interested but though the OP question may lead to some valuable answers, nice unknown site reference, etc. /. ;)
All I see is nasty and useless comments, to an extent we rarely see on
Anyway, thank you, those who kindly tried to answer (it wasn't an easy one
I agree with you. Getting our own data back from sites is often very difficult.
On most sites it can be done with custom spider bots.
The last time I did it, I wrote a greasemonkey script to copy a whole forum to another, with thousands topics and replies.
Some people already use this scheme:
1) Find a popular site for which users can't export their data.
2) Write a exporter tool.
3) Profit!
I realise this doesn't cater to your requirements for bulk export, but reviews like that are ideally placed in something like google sidewiki (obsolete now) or ReframeIT, or at least links to reviews. Personally, I'd like to see more annotation not controlled by site owners, especially with regard to potential product/service purchases
...and let Google sort 'em out.
Reviews are much more trustworthy when they exist in context. If I came to your site and thought, oh, there's someone like me, and s/he really liked that product, that's far more valuable to me than seeing a similar review in the middle of a bunch of other faceless reviews.
Your own site will (ideally) give readers a pretty good idea of your taste and background. Leave them there.
Out of curiosity, why would you need to be able to download your own reviews? Do you use some sort of destructive uploading software that erases your local copy as you upload it? Like something out of a good old fashioned cyberpunk story?
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I prefer to use amazon because it is a pretty popular site and you usually get varied opinions.
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o my gosh! it's so much letters here...
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