I've seen that before too, I've also seen people who have high ranks from sheer volume but write not so good reviews. The way I see it, part of the problem is that if you write a ton of reviews, your rank is going to go up no matter what, even if they aren't very good. So eventually, you write enough somewhat useful reviews and you'll have the rank to become a mentor. The downside is that you don't write very good reviews, so you can't teach someone else to write very good reviews.

It's just how the system is set up. Instead of basing rank on review quality, it's based (at least partially) on review quantity. I don't think it's a huge problem overall, or one that really hurts Eden. Let's face it, even a "somewhat useful" review here is better than the tiny blurb from the manufacturer that gets posted on other sites. (Though knowing that doesn't mean it doesn't irk me too sometimes!) less

Sometimes the mentor will send suggestions to their students and the student does not want to add or follow the suggestions. I have had this happen, they were happy with the review and did not want it changed. I did publish it awhile back and sure enough--SU and U votes. The student did listen to my suggestions on the following reviews and graduated with honors!! Sometimes there is not much a mentor can do, other than show them why we are asking them to better their review. I get frustrated as well, but do understand now that I went through this.

Mentoring tips are a great idea!! And you might go ahead and NICELY message the mentor, it might create a problem if the mentor is frustrated by a stubborn student, though. That I will leave up to you, lol. I hope I helped clear up a bit of confusion as to why this may happen. less

I was recently browsing through some reviews and stumbled across a review that I consider to be "somewhat useful". It was pretty vague. My initial reaction to the review was to comment and suggest the mentor program to the new user.

Then I realized, this review was actually published by a mentor that this student already has.

I'll be honest, this sort of irked me. The review had the very bare minimum of information required for myself to consider it "somewhat useful". Maybe I'm just easily irked today, I don't know... but I feel as though mentors should not publish student's reviews that are somewhat useful or lower. Instead, they should be sending it back to the student, asking them to add additional information and explaining why certain pieces of information are important to a potential buyer. I always had this impression that the mentor program was to encourage better quality reviews that would be useful for other people. Maybe I've got it wrong though.

Maybe you're thinking that "well, you may only find it SU but others may find it useful".. This review has only SU votes on it right now (I didn't vote yet). The only person who voted EU was the mentor and that was obviously a bias vote.

It makes me wonder if there are mentors who are only in it for the gift card and will publish anything, regardless of its quality. I guess it just bugs me because I'm constantly suggesting the mentor program to new users who could use some guidance with their reviews, and then I see a review published like that. I'm not trying to offend anyone (the reason I haven't posted links or names) I just wanted to post this to see what other mentors thought about things like this.

So for discussion, have you ever seen anything like this before? Does it bother you at all? Do you say something to the mentor? Should the mentoring rank requirement become higher? Maybe we could share some mentoring tips or ideas? less

I did that once, but I feel like it's a bit spiteful to give them 10 paragraphs of suggestions, they add one sentence, you tell them that you don't want to publish it because it will drop their ranking even more... And then letting them publish it and saying "See?"

I personally think that there should be more selection of who becomes a mentor, like that advanced reviewers have to vote them in or something. On the other hand, we may end up with a problem like the community page where everyone gets voted up... less