Rate My Ski Area

Greg,
Have you ever considered adding a "User Reviews" section to your area directory?
We have "rate my professor", we have "user reviews" from Trip Advisor, from Amazon, from Expedia and so on. Why not user reviews indexed in an organized fashion.

Right now, we have to do a random, good-luck to you free text search in the forums, a rather haphazard way to collect information.

I was just thinking about this as I saw the information about Saddleback pile up today. would be great to centralize that. In some ways it's a behind-the-scenes FAQ, in other ways it's a "user review."

You think??

Neat idea. Reviews are pretty subjective though. I think trip reports tell a better story based on actual experiences and recent conditions. Each ski area profile has a "Search for Forum Member Skiing Trip Reports" which links to appropriately titled TRs.

I've been thinking the same for a while. Trip report is informative and useful but it is usually focused on particular day and condition.

One small cost option I thought of is to allow people to post "Resort Review" in the trip report forum with different template. Those reviews will be automatically gets picked up by the search from the resort link so all we need to come up with is a ground rule and template for such posting.

Greg said:

Neat idea. Reviews are pretty subjective though. I think trip reports tell a better story based on actual experiences and recent conditions. Each ski area profile has a "Search for Forum Member Skiing Trip Reports" which links to appropriately titled TRs.

Click to expand...

It's absolutely subjective. That's precisely the point. We all have brains and can sort out the garbage posts from the quality (hey, the forum does that every day, every hour! :blink
If you structure the "review" requirement, most people see it as burdensome and don't comment. Stroll through the comments on Amazon.com or any quality vendor; there is garbage, there is quality - that's why they let people rate the posts.
We have so much information overload that trying to control it (save for abuse) isn't worth the effort.

A User Review might be a comment or information people want to pass along without feeling the need to do a comprehensive run down.