STEPPING OUTSIDE YOUR ALERTS.

I have just found out what happens when you step outside of your alerts. It's hard work. You do not know the writer's style, you have to make judgement calls sometimes and sometimes rate against the grain because you can't actually believe the seriousness of some of the ratings. When I read my alerts (and incidentally I always made time after them to read new members), you read them presumably because you like the style of that particular writer. Usually in my case, the writer produces consistently good reviews that require little in the way of comment as everything that is supposed to be in the review is there. Stepping outside of those alerts and reading members you have never read is a superb step forward, and I have thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of it this week, and have decided that I shall carry on reading those people whose names I do not recognise before reading my alerts.

It's really weird you saying this as I was the complete opposite on Ciao.

I never put anybody on alert ever and always read reviews from the 7 odd pages of new reviews and from those in my COT. That way I never felt under pressure to have to read anything if I didn't want to.

That said though, because I was so aware every week of all the new reviews and reviewers, i was also aware of the growing number of copied and just plain awful ones being produced- this was partly why i decided to spend my time on DooYoo instead - I just got so bored wading through rubbish to get to the decent stuff.

But actually wading through the new ones has been a real eye opener to me because if everyone rates em VH, they will think that's the way to produce reviews. I don;t know about anyone else but my guestbook has been humming with people not happy with my ratings, or questioning why I rated them in the way I did. It's taking ages.

Yep - it can take ages and, as you probaly know, you have to be prepared for the rare newbie that gets nasty and blinking offensive. I had one that went through every single one of my reviews and rated them as off-topic and left a comment on each which just said "oh purleeeese!". They clearly had too much time on their hands

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Yep - it can take ages and, as you probaly know, you have to be prepared for the rare newbie that gets nasty and blinking offensive. I had one that went through every single one of my reviews and rated them as off-topic and left a comment on each which just said "oh purleeeese!". They clearly had too much time on their hands

Well if they have the energy to do that, good luck to em.

My alerts haven't been working properly for ages, so when I've got some time for Ciao I try to look through my COT reviews, but I don't ever seem to get very far because I spot a name I don't recognise and wander off to read their reviews, then spot more names I don't recognise and so on ...