I can see the thought-process behind Victoria's suggestion to make voting public, even though I disagree with it. The anonymity and the opportunity to criticize people unfairly just proves what some call the 'John Gabriel's Great Internet Fuckwad Theory.'

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I think this is a pretty bad idea. I only vote down reviews that I feel are poorly written or when the review itself turns me off (ex, some people give way more details about their personal life than they should, I want to hear about the toy, not you fending off your mom/curious two year olds/whatever else). I think that having everything I vote down public would just make me stop voting and stop encouraging friends to read reviews here. Some reviews are just really really bad- but if the person is very immature (as one would get the impression, from some reviews) then its likely it would create a situation of harassment.

On the other hand, i think that people who want to vote things down should be required to offer a "what could this reviewer have done better" or "what made you not like this review" snippet so that way the person doing the review knows WHAT they are doing wrong. I mean really I have seen some reviews that don't even mention the toy beyond "It came in a pretty box and it has some attachments" and then the person goes off about what they did with it. Thats what the experience section is for, and erotica != review, for me.

I get people voting me down all the time and I have no idea what I am actually doing wrong. But, it just made me look at top rated reviewers and try to see what exactly people find useful so I could incorporate it. It drives me to improve. At the same time knowing why they were voting me down would be useful, and downvotes with no reason would be made invalid. d

It would be helpful if people who voted below helpful would have to explain the nature of their dissatisfaction with the review.

I think voting on someone else's review should carry some responsibility, so you should have to be signed in and visible, plus you should have to offer some justification for your rating.

I've never found the categories used here terribly meaningful, eg I've never been able to figure out what "somewhat helpful" means. In practice, it seems to mean "not very helpful" but in principle, it sounds like it should mean "quite helpful".

I think a simple one to five numerical usefulness scale might work, but from the point of view of users reading the reviews and trying to draw practical conclusions from the ratings, explanatory comments are essential.

Hello Everyone! It seems as though there are varying degrees of mild confusion here so hopefully I can help to clear some of this up

First of all, this initial thread was posted over 2 months ago, and public voting went live last week. So please keep that in mind as you read through the whole thread.

Absolutely nothing has changed in the way that voting & commenting works! What has changed is that now instead of the voting being anonymous, you can see who voted. That's it.

It is not mandatory to comment, or to explain why you voted a certain way, however… by taking the time to explain why you voted a certain way, and offer helpful feedback to the reviewers whom you have commented on, it gives them something to think about and may help them to improve their reviewing abilities.

And as for the scale of voting options… it is basically the same as voting 1-5, but instead of using numbers there are varying degrees of how useful you found this particular review to be.