Thread: Review section

Well, the reviews have been dead for quite some time. Officially dead for about 3 months now and for the year before there were less than a handful new ones. They need to be redone completely, and dwessell is working on getting that done. If there is a real interest may be somebody would want to help if he needs help.

It's good to have things like these, but unless the community is interested as a whole and keep a particular feature active, sooner or later it's going to get abandoned and defunct.
If the reviews were a more vibrant section I'd have fixed them last year, but the way they were, I saw no point of spending my time on something that appeared not appreciated.

FWIW, I came looking for the reviews (the FAQ still links to them) and was disappointed to find they don't work :-/. Not sure how many others tried to access and just didn't speak up.

Originally Posted by toms

FWIW, I came looking for the reviews (the FAQ still links to them) and was disappointed to find they don't work :-/. Not sure how many others tried to access and just didn't speak up.

Good. May be you can stick around as a member of the community until you can be a contributor instead of a consumer and then you may be interested in writing some quality reviews.
With enough such people may be we'll have a Review section again.


It does not matter at all how many people want something. The only thing that matters is how many, if any, are willing to provide it.

I have more than enough time to help out; I have a password & went into the library section, a few times. Each time I felt like I just stepped on a different planet, as I don't know anything about computers & I felt basically helpless.

I would gladly try to help if someone was able to direct me through one, but I realize that it might not be feasible/practical to try & educate a beginner like me on the task at hand.

Well as of now (even though I don't even have my first straight razor yet :-)!) I plan on sticking around as a memeber :-).

I'm a little confused though. What exactly is the problem with the reviews section that we can't read the old ones? Is it a technical issue with the site? It seems to me that it's worth it and valuable to everyone to keep the reviews that were already written (I'm assuming there are a bunch?) so people can go back to the old ones regardless of whether people contribute new reviews? They're just as valuable as old forum posts which everyone can see.

It is partially a technical problem - the software was abandoned by the developers and doesn't work with the newer versions of the forum software we're using. For a year I kept it running in a very hackish way, but given the very few new reviews from that period as well as the extremely low traffic to that section, it was not worth at all my time and effort to continue maintaining it.

However, even if the technical issue was not there, I am not convinced that a dead section of the site is worth keeping. I know that a popular view is 'it doesn't drink or eat, just leave it alone', but my view of this site is 'community' not 'infomercial', and from that point of view anything that the community does not care for should go away.

Yeah, I don't hold that view. I'd like to see the reviews forum back and I was okay with the reviews the way they were before beberlin put all the bells and whistles in that no longer work. Anyway, I'd like to see the old review section back, but I'm not capable of doing the legwork to make it happen, so I'll shut up now.

Originally Posted by gugi

It is partially a technical problem - the software was abandoned by the developers and doesn't work with the newer versions of the forum software we're using. For a year I kept it running in a very hackish way, but given the very few new reviews from that period as well as the extremely low traffic to that section, it was not worth at all my time and effort to continue maintaining it.

If I had some clue as to what was involved I might try to offer my help in migrating to the new system or at a minimum recovering what was there in some read-only format... but I don't want to make any promises :-).

Originally Posted by gugi

However, even if the technical issue was not there, I am not convinced that a dead section of the site is worth keeping. I know that a popular view is 'it doesn't drink or eat, just leave it alone', but my view of this site is 'community' not 'infomercial', and from that point of view anything that the community does not care for should go away.

Of course I have my own self-serving desire for the information to appear. But that aside, I don't agree. Members of this community took the time to write those reviews so I think it's fair to preserve their work/effort (regardless of whether we provide a mechanism for people to contribute new reviews). I'm not under the impression that anyone goes and deletes old forum posts because they're dead/no one uses them. To me, killing the already-written reviews is like going and deleting old posts.

But I'm the new guy around here :-). I'll obviously defer to everyone that actively maintains the site. And of course, if it's too much work to resurrect at least a read-only version, I understand it might not be a priority now. I can certainly appreciate from my own work that people not directly involved with something assume it's easy when they have no idea how hard it actually is :-).

Well, you know the golden rule, the man with the gold makes the rules. Obviously my free work only goes to things that I want to do for free, and anybody else can contribute their free work as they see fit and cover anything that they like to see happen.

I've explained many times that I am not willing to put free work into stuff that the community does not appreciate. If anybody wants to pay me to get the reviews back the hackish way they were, I would consider it. Here's the rough cost for me doing it:
- software license $250
- setting it up ~$500
- maintenance ~$200/month.

So, at the end of the day it's how much it's really worth to you. I know that everybody has many great ideas and suggestions as long as they don't have to put anything towards seeing them happen. But this is not the case here - my free work is only for stuff that the community cares about.