is there a chance that we might have a feature in the future that doesn't allow people to review unless they are signed in? I know they have that on FF.net and it saves people the trouble of having to deal with potential flamers or those who want to be downright annoying and post BS, because they cannot be tracked. I believe that you should be able to post your thoughts and opinions as well as reviews....but stand by them and use your handle...don't hide behind not signing in.

But there are also many people who do not have accounts and leave lovely reviews. I personally have never received a flame from people not signed in, and if I did I would most likely determine if there is anything valid in their review. If not, it would be ignored. Its not hard to delete the alert for the review if you feel it doesn't deserve a reply - and flames most assuredly don't deserve one. And after that, you'll never be reminded of it again, unless you go through the reviews and re-read them frequently.

I don't think a person should have to feel obligated to have an account to review. You automatically alienate a lot of good people by doing that, and rather than encouraging them to perhaps make an account to review, they likely would just cease reviewing altogether.

Sesshoumaru'sPriestess wrote:
is there a chance that we might have a feature in the future that doesn't allow people to review unless they are signed in? I know they have that on FF.net and it saves people the trouble of having to deal with potential flamers or those who want to be downright annoying and post BS, because they cannot be tracked. I believe that you should be able to post your thoughts and opinions as well as reviews....but stand by them and use your handle...don't hide behind not signing in.

You probably will not see this feature happening here anytime soon. We do not currently have the expertise to implement individual author controls on things like reviews, nor do I see us having that capability in the near future. Let's face it, ff.net we aren't!

We do, though, remove the flames as soon as we are aware of them. In addition, we track flamers' IP addresses. If anyone is found flaming anonymously more than once, we submit their IP address to be blocked from the site as a whole.

Making it impossible to review unless signed in, like see03 said, makes it impossible for non-members to leave comments of a positive nature. I don't think we want to close ourselves off to that extent. Also, if we had the option, like ff.net, to allow the authors to delete reviews themselves, we would not have that key piece of information (the IP address) to block people who make a habit out of ignoring our site rules/Terms of Service.

At present, all I can say is that you need to alert the Admins when you receive flames and let us handle it from there. Also, I would STRONGLY caution ALL authors to avoid addressing flamers in author's notes in your stories... that will get you a warning for review responses. Let the Admins handle that part and keep the drama in your stories!!!

~~Wiccan~~

I get what everyone's saying, but of late I've been confronted with several critical reviews on one of my stories.

Let me make it clear that I do not consider ANY of them a flame. The gripes mentioned in the reviews are to do with things my characters are doing, nothing whatsoever about my writing. I admit that I hadn't anticipated people not liking the latest plot twist, but in hindsight, I can see that it might be a polarising issue. If anything, these reviews have given me lots of food for thought - in fact, I feel pretty proud about them! Something like that feeling you get when you think "If I am managing to make people so much that they're getting pissed off, I have finally arrived! w00t!"

However, I'm the kind of author who is obsessive about the feedback she gets. If a reader has taken the time to leave me a review, I get back to them and thank them for it. If they've been critical or pointed out negatives, then I want to know their reasoning and opinions in even greater clarity and depth! So it rankles, when I find myself with two rather interesting critiques on my story, and no way to contact the authors to ask them why they perceived a character's actions as blah-blah or to clarify that yes, I mentioned the very point they're raising an issue on, and perhaps they missed it or forgot about it?

I'm not saying that everyone should have an account here. But could we at least have an optional feature on the review page, where people can leave their email address/profile on whichever site they're usually active at? It really would make interaction between confuzzled writer and disgruntled - or equally confuzzled - reader a lot easier to manage!

Please do not forget that you also have the option to include, in your author's notes, a plea to your non-member reviewers to provide you with a way to contact them, such as:

"I would love to be able to communicate my ideas with the non-member reviewers on this site. If you'd be interested in a response from me, could you provide an email in your review?"

Then, if your non-member reviewers are interested in interaction, they would indicate that via leaving an email in a review, hopefully. As stated before, I don't really see many nifty new options coming to fruition in the near future due to our lack of funds and Mitharus' time. If it ever becomes a possibility, you can bet that we WILL consider all the ideas that have been presented in this forum, for sure!

~~Wiccan~~

I see, yes, that might work. ^_^