Why Aren't Published Reviews Regulated?

Imagine you posted your personal review of a book and it disappeared from the site, with no explanation why. Wouldn't you be angry? Library Thing - quite rightly - avoids this situation by requiring users to flag questionable reviews. If there are a significant number of flags, the review is blocked (though not removed).

But with Published Reviews, anyone anywhere can delete your review with no justification whatsoever. People have evidently been deleting my Published Reviews for quite some time, without notifying me.

On September 23, according to my Newsfeed, I posted an excerpt from Pauline Kael's review of the French movie "Get Out Your Handkerchiefs." It's gone. Also her review of "Last Tango In Paris" and Norman Mailer's review of the same. Gone.

Earlier, I had posted an excerpt of Harold Bloom's review of "Harry Potter". Gone. Edmund Wilson's review of the "The Hobbit". Gone. Tolstoy's review of "Das Rheingold." Gone.

I could go on, but there's no way to prove any of this, since LT doesn't allow you to track your Published Reviews, and doesn't notify you when/if others modify your reviews.

I brought this issue up on this forum a few months ago, when the consensus seemed to be, "Yeah, you're right, but no one cares about Published Reviews, so Yankee go home!!!"

If LT doesn't care about Published Reviews, they should discontinue the feature. If they do care, then they should regulate them exactly like Member Reviews. That would reassure people like me who have spent countless hours researching, reading, and excerpting professional book reviews.

I regularly post Published Reviews as well, but haven't regularly checked to ensure they remain posted. I consider these a valuable resource on LT, and agree it would be more than a little vexing to find my efforts were reversed. Especially if I posted them properly.

I do, however, see the value of allowing users to edit another user's post. These are part of Common Knowledge, and as such are commonly curated.

Is there a means for determining which member(s) are responsible? Perhaps it's an inadvertent mistake, thinking they are only affecting their own library and not Common Knowledge.

You've pinpointed the problem exactly - LT *claims* that Published Reviews are Common Knowledge, but they're not. And there's no way to determine who's responsible for deleting/modifying your reviews.

I also appreciate the value of allowing others to edit your contributions to CK - it's an awesome feature! But you can't track your Published Reviews. You have no idea what happens to them once they're posted.

SnootyBaronet (#1):

I brought this issue up on this forum a few months ago, when the consensus seemed to be, "Yeah, you're right, but no one cares about Published Reviews, so Yankee go home!!!"

Link, please? The only conversation I could find that you started about Published Reviews was this one:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/287075

in which you ask about being able to track your own contributions to the Published Reviews field, but don't raise concerns about others deleting what you contribute. There wasn't really any opposition, and certainly no anti-American sentiment; mostly just "Yeah, this is a fine idea, but there's such limited developer time I don't see this happening." Which, if you've been even remotely active on the site for the past few years, you'd know is the case - new feature development, even for very good ideas, is all-but-nonexistent.

Actually, the phrase "this issue" referred to the previous sentence, where I wrote, "LT doesn't allow you to track your Published Reviews, and doesn't notify you when/if others modify your reviews." Which is the issue I raised in my previous thread.

The tracking issue is the same as the deletion issue. My concern is that you have no idea when, why, or by whom your review was modified or deleted. If Published Reviews were truly part of Common Knowledge (as the Wiki claims), then any edits to your original posting would be recorded. They're tracked.

People dismissed my concerns in the earlier thread, just as you're dismissing them now. If LT's ability or desire to improve the site is "non-existent" then what on earth is the point of these forums?

>6 SnootyBaronet: I think a history of edits would be desirable for this field, especially if it's considered part of Common Knowledge.

Something that comes to mind is we've had some ... unscrupulous characters ... posting spam in the published reviews section. It is possible, from a laziness standpoint, that they are taking the well researched reviews and converting them to spam. Then when the spam killers go through, all that's seen is spam, so the review is removed. Perhaps we need to ask Admin to check for those before deleting them. An extra step, though that means the spam sits around longer on the site.

Another option would be to ask lorannen about your publisher reviews, to see if she can possibly recover improperly removed items. (worth a shot, anyway.)

>9 gilroy: More than once I've also gone into 'Published Reviews' and found Personal Reviews (i.e. not Publisher's Weekly, or NY Times or Wall Street Journal, but, 'I liked this book because I like puppies') and had to delete them. (Nothing recently, too busy).

>6 SnootyBaronet: This does sound like it could have been an overzealous newbie who thought that they would only delete from his/her own library (perhaps they even did it from their library screen).

Also, if you dislike the site so much? I'm not sure why you're on it? It sorta is what it is. And, these forums aren't for complaints, they're to connect to other people who love books/read books/sometimes hoard books (shifty glances). And, yeah, this is the only site I'm on that has a social part that has the mods/LT home office people on it quite a lot.

Heck, I've been on regular sorts of message boards and seen/heard from the mods less than we do here. Those in the LT offices always seem to do as much as they can, and then maybe even a little more. But, because here at LT, we users aren't the product, that means that they have to make, and sell, and fix etc. the product over these free (or with a slight fee) parts of the site.

And, anti-American, really, you do realize that basically most of this site consists of Americans, not to mention, those who are in Europe or other non-American places sometimes get shafted because LT is based in the US??

>9 gilroy:, >10 DanieXJ:

I've also seen people post reviews (not necessarily their own) from Amazon, Goodreads, blogs, and the like, ignoring the guidelines:

Published Reviews are for reviews published in established publishing outlets. Do not add links or excerpts to reviews on personal blogs, customer reviews on Amazon, personal reviews on GoodReads, book descriptions, etc.

Note that LibraryThing does not allow reviews from pay-for-review services, either in "member reviews" or in "published reviews."

Published Reviews are not for member reviews or personal reviews

>10 DanieXJ:

these forums aren't for complaints

To be fair, some of these forums are for the discussion of what users perceive to be problems in using the site. Not necessarily bugs, but certainly ways they think the site could be better. There's nothing wrong with that. While Recommend Site Improvements might be the better forum, it's certainly understandable that someone might consider this forum a reasonable place to suggest a way CK could be improved.