I think with great leadership, Soapbox should be a success!

Ahh haa! That’s the hint I needed! Thanks. I had an obsolete link. All fixed now.

>> “but I’m looking forward to when someone has 50 or 100 reviews how difficult it would be to rank sort them. ”

Man… You’ve definitely got me thinking about it. I was originally feeling pretty confident about the decision to go thumbs up/down. My confidence is waning.

>> “It doesn’t necessarily mean the review isn’t useful or worthwhile just because it’s neutral/average though.”

I’m mulling on this more. You make some good points about it.

>> “This way you don’t end up with your family review pool contaminated.

It’ll be interesting to see how the whole “adult content” stuff works out. Personally, I don’t want Soapbox to be all things to all people. I’d rather leave the adult content reviews to another site.

I didn’t take a screenshot of the error when I registered sorry. Normally I do that with error messages but looking through my screencaps here for some reason I didn’t in this case. I know when it happened though and it was right when I registered and tried to click the link to see what I was agreeing to by checking the box. I thought it was odd timing.

If you are looking for a straight up + (thumbs up) or - (down) vote, then I agree a neutral review is of little use, but I’m looking forward to when someone has 50 or 100 reviews how difficult it would be to rank sort them. If it’s agreed that 5 stars is the best and 0 or 1 star is the worst, that doesn’t make things more complicated. Here I’ve used grades (a,b,c,d, f) because those translate well. A starred system allows ranking and it would be helpful for those who are wondering what Duff’s most favorite and least favorite reviews are. It’s not important for a few reviews but dozens it becomes an organizational tool more than anything. And if the reviewer is already inserting a tag, it’s not that much more work to put in a number (0-5). You could make this an additional/optional field so that the thumbs up/down is still the basic requirement for inclusion and the starred review is optional for those who want to make organization easier.

It’s a reality that we all feel so-so about something and reviews can still be interesting and useful with an overall neutral review score. I’ll give you an example of review here where there was lots of information on both sides and ultimately ended in a grade of C (average) which would equate to a neutral vote, if I could make one on Soapbox: http://www.makeyougohmm.com/20060823/3696/

I understand your point about wanting passionate reviews, but sometimes the scores are added up in reviews and that’s the way the numbers shake out: up the middle. It doesn’t necessarily mean the review isn’t useful or worthwhile just because it’s neutral/average though. Like any review, it’s the text of the review that’s more important than the actual score — except in the case of ranking and organization.

As for keeping it a family thing, understood, but you might want to go on the early offensive on that one. While you might feel keeping it family friendly is important, others may not agree. Flickr launched with 18+ area. Consider creating adult.soapboxit.com and context filter reviews submitted with adult-related keywords to that and lock it behind some member-only gateway as a means of protection for keeping it family friendly. This way you don’t end up with your family review pool contaminated. We receive some pretty graphic adult comment spam here and if there was no moderation in place, it would be here in minutes. You don’t want that on a family friendly service.

>> “- full export functionality. I would like the ability at any time to be able to export all reviews imported into Soapbox.”

This is definitely on the to do list and will most certainly be implemented.

>> “- support for starred reviews (1-5) rather than just thumbs up or down, this way we could sort reviews from trusted reviewers as opposed to only positive or negative.”

Well… I’ve thought about this one a whole bunch. I’m curious what you might think of my reasoning behind the thumbs up / thumbs down approach:
http://soapboxit.com/info/differences
I know a number of people have asked for the stars. I’m wondering whether it’s just something they’re used to or whether it provides value. I have mixed feelings about it.

>> “And shouldn’t there at least be a neutral for reviews that are neither positive or negative?”
I’ve thought about that one as well. I’m wondering how much value neutral reviews provide to people. Some have asked for thumbs middle. My original thinking was that I’m interested in hearing about the things you’re a fan of and the things you don’t like. I’m not as interested in the things that you’re not sure if you like or the things that you kind of like. I guess I was looking for a summary of some kind. Would you recommend the thing or not? I’m still mulling on it some.

>> “I wasn’t able to see if Duff thought through the whole adult reviews section of the web and this could prove to be offensive to other Soapboxers if adult reviews start showing up mixed with mainstream.”

I’d like Soapbox to be family friendly.

>> “TOS (is this fixed yet, Duff?)”

Do you mean the Terms of Service? I haven’t seen any errors with that. I’d love to know what server error you saw. It’s just a static page. I would normally get notification if the site has an issue and I haven’t gotten one of those notifications in quite awhile. Is this the url you’re looking for?
http://soapboxit.com/info/terms_and_privacy

>> “haven’t thought of this already is spam”
I haven’t solved that yet. Although now that I think about it, the people that would be spamming would be Soapbox users and I’d be able to talk to them about it. So hopefully it won’t turn into a big issue.

Thanks again TDavid for the feedback! Thank you for taking the time. If there’s anything else, I’d love to talk further.

I agree with you. I was sick of clicking into preferences to get to the blog subscription details.

I just implemented and deployed this.

Best of luck with your new venture.

Yes, that should be on the outer page without requiring an extra click to “blog preferences.” The size of the button is fine. As mentioned above, I think once a day is fine for the vast majority of sites with reviews and I was kind of being unfair by checking out this functionality with the test above. I’m glad to see you thought this part through. Smart.

There are days this site has more than one review per day, but it’s more like an average of 1-2 reviews per week, so hitting the feed more than once daily wouldn’t make much sense. With the refresh option you’ve covered that and it seems to work pretty well. I just updated with the new information above.

I would be grateful for any feedback you might have on Soapbox. My hope is that it provides a ton of value to bloggers. Any feedback I get (especially negative feedback) makes the site better.

My original thinking was that refreshing all of the blogs on a daily basis would be enough. Do you think it should automatically happen more often? The site currently offers a way to manually refresh your blog (there’s a link on the preferences page). Perhaps I should make that link more prominent?

As far as picking up changes later, the mechanism Soapbox uses is pretty simple. When a blog post is imported into Soapbox, the blog “owns” the review. When in this state, any changes to the blog post will overwrite the existing Soapbox review. If you decide to modify the review on Soapbox then Soapbox “owns” the review and future adjustments to the blog post will be ignored. Once Soapbox “owns” the review, you can refresh from the blog post by deleting the Soapbox review.

Hope this helps!