Censoring bad reviews?
 

Just curious. Has anyone found that if you write a bad review of a participating restaurant, it does not get posted? I had a terrible experience at a restaurant in New Jersey and wrote a level but honest review, and it never got posted. All other reviews I've written, both before and after, have posted.

Anyone else experience this? I'll have to post a review on yelp instead if this is the case.

Their reviews are worthless

"What a wonderful find!" at places I thought mediocre at best

But, yes, I think they do hide bad ones - go to Yelp for honesty

Yes, I wrote a review where I rated 5 for one restaurant and a review where I rated 2 for another restaurant, and the first review posted and the second never did.

I wonder if it has to do with the rating or the actual review. Maybe someone can do a test by rating a restaurant a 5 but then saying some bad things about them in the review text? :)

Frequently. I think they say explicitly somewhere that they are selective about what they publish. :td:

I discovered the worthlessness of the reviews a while ago and now will only write one if there are some bonus miles in it for me.

I always try to find at least one positive thing to say even after an overall negative experience. And I see all my reviews posted -- of course they've been edited for brevity, many quoting just the one positive sentence in the whole review. :D

Yes, this has been discussed on other threads. Some time back (couple years ago) I posted a bad review and it never got published on the site. I also wonder about the numerical ratings -- they mostly seem to cluster around 4 stars out of 5. Hmmmm....

Most of my idine/RN dining experiences have been pretty positive, but every once in a while.... :eek:

We had a 2.8 here once

But that's not all...
 

I've only written one truly negative review ever for this program (I've had mostly good experiences and usually just don't bother at all if a restaurant is a little "off") and just checked to discover that it's never been posted. I did receive a pretty nasty email from the restaurant manager in response, however. That was nice.

That's the exception that proves the rule. It's very rare for ratings to be that low, so you remember them when they are! ;)

One problem with the ratings is that they're per visit, not per person.

So, of course, even if only a small minority of people actually like the restaurant, they'll account for the majority of visits (and thus raise the votes, compared to if it had been one vote per member rather than one vote per member visit).

To make a rating go down, the members who hated it and rated it badly would have to keep going back and rating it badly again and again. The average diner cannot be convinced to do suffer this much just in the hopes of getting a rating down! :)

I've been known to give varying ratings during those periods of multiple promo visits. I think the most negative comments I can recall reading were references to disappointment in portion sizes, better for dinner (or lunch), or something along the lines of "go early as service gets much slower when it's crowded." I've never left a written comment, figuring it'd be useless.

Morerainplease -- did the manager address your concerns, even if defensively?

I guess that I'm not the average diner; been there, tried that, didn't work. I peevishly attempted to drive down the rating of a restaurant I disliked by dropping by for a cup of coffee (about the only thing that wasn't likely to result in food poisoning) and then dinging them with ones and twos. It became obvious that low-balling had no impact, so my immaturity went unrewarded.

She wrote something like, "I'm sorry you had a bad experience for such a trivial reason." And she insisted that they focus on "food, fun, and libation." So if I didn't have fun, then apparently it was my fault. Because they focus on it, after all.

I was back in the city with the restaurant referenced above a couple of weeks ago. I thought long and hard about going back just for a beer so I could write another review. I got the better of my impulses and now I'm glad I didn't waste my time. But it was hard to pass up the opportunity!

You're in SEA - was it Jillians???? I've never been there.

Our RN joints seem a lot different than other cities, but I'm glad to see the Ethiopian buffet I sometimes go to (Habesha) is on the plan.

It was actually in Madison, WI. A place called Jac's. It used to be called Monroe Street something or other. They're trying to do a french-style restaurant and I've had some good meals there. And some lackluster. But they mainly come across as really uptight to me. Why did I keep going back? Well, at first it was because I wanted to think my earlier experience was an anomaly (it wasn't). Then I noticed the name change and thought the new management would be better (it wasn't). So after 3 bad experiences, I finally wrote a negative review. And subsequently received the nasty email from the manager.