Doug of Montreal

I've been away for a month but our editor forwarded me your emails when I came back to work yesterday. I actually drafted a response last night to your email but wanted to send it this morning when I could see straight. Jet lag's a fun party. ;)

Before I get into it, let me start by saying that our scoring system as should not be looked at like a mark you get on a test, where a 70 may be considered unacceptable with the amount and quality of work a webmaster puts into their site. We are having issues with a number of webmasters who are seeing their scores drop and I can appreciate how they may feel without understanding why it’s happening. I can’t emphasize this enough: you need to look at our current criteria as a ranking system, not a grading system.

We changed our criteria back in the fall to account for changes in the industry. We took out scores like design (10 points) and navigation (10 points) which were incredibly hard to explain how they were calculated and replaced them with the usability score. If you read our criteria you can now basically figure out your score in all categories save for the “other” score. It’s about the most transparent scoring system of any of the major review sites. I can see us moving to a less conventional scoring system in the future, one that is not out of 100 and allows for the growth of sites that continues. It was our mistake to not do that this time around, I think, but it’s not easy to make big changes.

As for the other score, I can understand your issue with it. We could go completely to a system that just rates features and leaves out certain things that are just hard to explain when it comes to comparing reviews but so far it’s our experience that there is a need for a reviewer’s personal input. However, we reduced this score from 20 to 10 points to lessen the impact on reviews when we change our criteria. It may not be perfect, but it was certainly a step in the right direction.

Scoring your sites with the same system we use to score megasites with may seem a little strange but I) I would guess the largest segment of the the public is interested in spending the least amount of money for the most, which is where megasites come in, and II) those experienced enough to know what they want (ie. solo babe content) will be able to find their way to that category and have the common sense to buy whatever babe they think will get them off.

And one other thing to consider: we have about 6,000 sites listed so it will take quite some time to get the new rankings properly figured out. As an example, in the solo model cat, only one site that's ranked higher than LilCandy has been updated with the new criteria. There are no promises, but it would be my guess you'll see a gain in position within the category as more and more are updated.

We get that. However, it's a good general indication of video quality and at least it's (usually) easily measurable. There is some value there.

You clearly haven't read many of our reviews, but thanks for the input ;)

Yes, it's a great site. We say as much in the review. Readers just want to know that they aren't going to get screwed over. That's why good review sites have value and continue to push good traffic to (non-shitty) sites.

That's not the case with all programs/sites. Just some. But this much you know ;)

No offence Mike, but you have no idea who we are and what we do. You've never been to our offices, we've never spoken and you are clearly out of your depth. It's helpful to contribute when you know what you're on about ;)

Exactly ;) Just make sure the numbers don't lie. Every reviewer makes mistakes. We are happy to fix any errors we have.

Since our reviewers are all in-house, we try and have them specialize in certain niches to help with this. If anyone has an issue and doesn't think they are getting a fair shake, we are happy to discuss it and reassign the review if need be.

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SKYPE: dougrabbit ICQ (only if you don't have SKYPE!): 267359201 Twitter: @DougOfRabbits