Download.com site feedback: user reviews

Ferreting out publishers scamming user reviews

by peterbutler  - 9/25/07 4:21 PM

Hi, Fuzzy.

We make it clear to the publishers who list products on our site that they are NOT allowed to write user reviews for their own products, for ANY reason.

Whenever we believe that a publisher is artificially inflating their user reviews or ratings, we investigate the situation to the best of our ability. When we do find reviews that we believe have been written by publishers or developers, we immediately hide them and throw away the rating.

Obviously, identifying the positive reviews as publisher-based is the tricky part. We certainly wouldn't want to trash valid user reviews based on suspicions.

As you might imagine, it's possible for a publisher to create a sock-puppet e-mail account for the purpose of spamming reviews, and represent themselves as joeschmoe11 at hotmail.com. Unless there's a noticeable pattern of abuse, it's hard for us to positively identify a user review as coming from a publisher. (We do have a few tricks that I won't share here.)

However, you should know that we take the issue of spammy user reviews very serious and are working on methods to eliminate them.

Also, you should be aware that we DO allow publishers to RESPOND to other user reviews. For example, if a user review says, "This product was OK, but it didn't convert MP3 files." and the publisher believes that's untrue, he/she can explain it in a REPLY to the original user review. That reply should be demarcated with a special "publisher" tag to let users know that the communication is from the publisher of that product.