Shared Reviews - Ranking and ShareScore

Shared Reviews is a product review site which focuses on very personal interactions of people with products.

There are several different kinds of ranking systems in play for participants in the community.

Individually, there is a Quantity called ShareScore (SS). SS is supposed to be something of a measure of community responsibility. Everyone who joins enters the community with a 50% SS. Actions one takes will cause that to go up or down. The actual quantities associated with the following actions are not known to members. But from experience, and postings in the forum by the administrators, we know the following:

Ways to increase your ShareScore:

• Post a new review- about 1%
• Vote for reviews- not always clear- about 20 votes for 1%. Be sure to let the page fully load before you vote.
• No one is sure if leaving comments improves SS, but it is clear that poor commenting technique will reduce it (see below)
• If you report a review for serious offenses such as plagiarism, and that is subsequently supported by an admin review you will gain SS. Reporting minor problems such as incorrect formatting may not be worth SS.
• Being accepted as a friend under certain circumstances.

Things that decrease your ShareScore:

• Leaving useless comments. Short comments, or ANY comment with the word "voted" or "review" (eg. "nice review, I voted for you") in it will have a negative impact. This is because the comments become part of the body of the review which may be marketed- comments need to be relevant.
• When you send someone a friend request your SS will drop by a point. When they accept you will get that point back. The reasoning here is that you should make contact with someone first, through a message, ask them if they want to be friends, and then completing the transaction with no net loss for anyone.
• Having a review pulled for various offenses: putting things in the wrong category, incorrect formatting, exceptionally poor English, reviewing a service rather than a product, reviewing items that don't fit within the SR categories. If you plagiarize a review your SS won't matter because you will be banned forever.
• If you reported a review and the administrators deem that your reason was invalid.
• If you vote for a review that is pulled for any of these offenses, your vote will be returned, but you will lose SS. The one exception is that you will not lose SS for plagiarized reviews because it is not expected that voters check every review to see if it appears somewhere else on the web. Nevertheless, one can usually sense whether a review is an honest expression of someone's experiences. When in doubt, don't vote.
• It was just announced that not logging in to SR for 60 days will result in a temporary decrease of SS, to reward regular participants. When an inactive member logs in their SS will return to the level it was before their hiatus.
• Members who are banned for violations of the TOS will have their SS set to 0%

What difference does ShareScore make?

• If you have 91-100% SS you will have the most votes to give. The actual amount may vary from month to month.
• If you have a SS of 75-89% you will have more votes to give.
• If you have a SS of 50-74% you will have fewer votes to give.
• If you have a SS of 25-49% you will have even fewer votes to give.
• If you have a SS of 0-24% you will only have one vote allowed in each category.
• Your SS will directly affect the ranking of your reviews within a category (see below). This is quite new, and may be tweaked.
• How the top review ("popularity")in each subcategory is determined has just changed. It used to be based solely on votes in a month. Now, the number of pageviews by people outside of SR is figured into the equation. How much those pageviews are worth is directly tied to your SS. If your SS is 100% the popularity is the number of votes plus the number of pageviews. As the SS of the author decreases the value of their pageviews also decreases.

Rank
When you go to the home page at Shared Reviews there is a parade of people who are the top 40 members on any given day will appear. How this rank is determined has just undergone some changes. It is a combination of the following factors, calculated by a formula unknown to the members: total reviews written, reviews written in the current month, votes given this month, votes received this month, friends, referrals, sharescore and total review pageviews.

Although Shared Reviews is still undergoing many changes, it is possible to rise to a good ranking position. This is the first month of the return of shared revenue. I'll report later on what kinds of amounts of income people were able to make.

Shared Reviews

web ad income July 18 (4 blogs, 2 web sites): Adsense $.31 Adgitize $.58 Project Wonderful $.03 Shareapic $.01 ______________________ Total: $.93