Reviews section has some problems
 

I notice that there are very few entries in the review section. It seems that we should have more, but after submitting my first I think I can understand why there aren't.

First of all, can we please get UBB code enabled? It's tough to make a comprehensive review when you can't do lists, formatting, etc.

The process itself is counter-intuitive; I had to go back and look a couple of times to figure out how to write a review. Clicking that I want to write my own takes me to a list of other people's reviews with some very tiny text above it telling me to clck there if I want to make my own.

In the case of restaurants, the list of cuisine types is pretty long but doesn't come close to including all options (I wanted "Catalan"). I think it would be better to have a very short list of less than eight or ten big categories and then let people categorize it on their own. I can see people getting to this step, not knowing what to choose, and then bailing.

High-bit characters in names and addresses are getting eaten. The restaurant I reviewed, Mastroqué, came out as Mastroqu. There was no way to go back and change this - once it was entered, it was stuck. So I had to go back and create another entry. I noticed on the initial list that I'm not the first person this has happened to; there are multiple entries, some missing letters, for other places as well.

The link field for a map is mangling the URL as well. I pasted the following link:
http://www.bcn.es/cgi-guia/guiamap4/...ero=29&calle2=
and this is what came out of the other end:
http://www.bcn.es/cgiguia/guiamap4/c...ero=29&calle2=

it ate the dashes from the URL, leading to a broken link. There is no way to go back and fix it, so it will have to stay broken.

Is anyone going to respond to this?

alanw, thanks for the feedback and sorry about the delayed response. Allowing BB code within the posts is a good idea and one that we will look into doing, it is something that we have planned on adding actually, but have not had the chance to get into place. I can see where you are coming from when it comes to the categories of restaurants, but be we would like to be as precise as possible with these to make it easy for people to find the reviews that they are looking for. I have added Catalan as a selectable type.

I will have to look into the issue with the filtering of characters as well as you have mentioned. I will use this post to keep you informed of changes and updates regarding this. (It may be a while as we have alot going on with the Freddies currently) Thanks again for you feedback,

-Tim

EDIT:
I have made some changes that will allow the use of accented characters in the reviews area as well as fixes the bug in the map link field that was causing you problems. I also went into the record for the restaurant that you submitted and updated it to be as you intended it to be. I will be looking into BB code in the future and will update here about it...

Thanks, Tim! You rock!

Thanks alanw... :) You will now find that you can use bbcode/vbcode in the reviews section now. Please let me know if you have any problems with this.

--Tim

It's quite disappointing that entries for reviews don't count towards your post count as well. Of course it's really about providing feedbacks that could be used by other flyertalkers, but it would be nice if they could count towards your posts count.

jef7, having reviews count as posts on the board is an interesting idea, though in my opinion posts should be a count of how many times one has posted to the bulletin board and the reviews is separate from the bulletin board. Thank you for the feedback though, I will keep this in mind as we go forward with and make changes with the Reviews area in the future.

--Tim