Ciao question

Is Ciao any good? I havent heard good things about it.

No, its crap...NEXT!!!

Well at least your honest.

It's not that bad as sites go. The layout is ok. The payments are always made but the payment levels are lower than dooyoo.

So its like dooyoo then?

It's a review site where you can either write independent reviews on all manner of topics, or post over from dooyoo. They have guestbooks so that members can converse, and the diamond system is worse than the crown one as they are awarded once a month and there are only 10 of them. There is a new section which is interesting where members can produce a video review and I shall be watching out on that score.

Right. Goose quit it actually, and to be honest I think i wont join either. need to ask him

It would be super if they brought back the monthly comps. They were great fun.

Seriously...monetary reward, about a quarter of dooyoo's, incentive to write? Even less, especially as Rachel says, now the competitions have stopped.

You forgot to mention the dots Rachel and Dave..! Where would we be without dots.

Dots?

Yes, you get something called community points. The more active you are on site, the more you get and this leads to changing of coloured dots.

Can they bes stars?

Id rather a sheriff badge or something/

The new member guide actually asked ciao if they could be glittering ones instead of boring colours.

Goddamn it Phil! When you gonna grow up? You aint a Southern Baptist preacher. Give it up already!

I said it once, I'll say it again: Community points rulzzzzz!!!

I want glittery dots and I want them now.

What were the monthly competitions on Ciao I cannot remember :s Were they like writting comps like we have on this site? Or challenges? Because didn't a member start something like that up and then someone complained so they were stopped by Ciao??

That was the adoptions, another thing altogether. They were stopped because they had run their course. The comps were like here, on a given theme every month. Fiona would gather up all the details and send them off once a month to Ciao and one person would win a diamond and a payment. It didn't cost ciao anything but spread such good will and produced loads of reviews. All they had to do was give one less diamond from the premium fund. Now they have decided only to give ten diamonds so it would be harder !

Yeah I knew about the diamonds, but what I meant was, some members have tried in the past to start challenges themselves and they seem to have been stopped. Pitty as some of them were really good ideas.

I don't think anyone has stopped the challenges (speaking as the world cup challenge winner - the best bit of an otherwise not-great year).

I suspect it's just a case that nobody has been inspired to start any recently.

The last I can remember was the 'write about three of your ciao friends' and the 'how do you use ciao' but after a while they both just fizzled out.

The technical issues a while back and the diamond-debacle meant a lot of the more active members just slowed down and/or drifted off to Dooyooland.

As far as I can work out, anyone can start a challenge any time they want to. If they want to raise a ciao cafe category to do so (as spacemonkey did for the world cup), Ciao seem amenable or if they won't give you a category, do an 'everything that starts with....'.

But are challenges really that ? How mnay people put that much effort into their replies these days ? I tend to be a bit sceptical these days about challenges especially the ones with one word answers. I mean, really, how challenging is that ?

Some of the challenges attract a lot of effort for all involved - the World Cup was a good example of that.

Others which are just lists of 'cat or dog' 'McD's or Burger King' or the monster 100 Q one by the French lady that makes very little sense, are pretty silly. But nobody's making a penny out of any of them so where's the harm in it? Nobody has to read?

No I dont mean challenges like that. I mean there was a write off one which was a good idea but that was stopped and another one by the same member has been set up too.