• The sorting/listing of the reviews continues to be the old style, while I work on figuring out a better way to accomplish what I want for the unregistered visitors to the site. The main reason it hasn’t been changed back is that the voting mechanism is not working as I had hoped. Some people were using it to disagree with a review, not to rate the competence and clarity of the review. Until this is resolved, things will remain as they are.
• There is a great new feature coming in the next week or so (that won’t change your experience of the site, don’t worry) that I am pretty excited about: Tobacco Reviews data will be available as an API. Developers, start your engines! If you ever wanted to do something with all of the data in Tobacco Reviews, now is your chance to do so. Details on using the API will be available when the whole thing goes public, but if you just can’t wait, email me for details.
• The big feature under development now is the message boards. Yes, I am finally getting around to getting them built! The most important feature to note about them is that they will not be free and open to everyone. Only those who have donated or subscribed will have access to them. This is for two reason: 1) People tend to be better behaved when they have something at stake. 2) I need more subscribers to the site, and this is a great way to reward subscribers without walling off and charging for something I was already giving away for free. Details on pricing, etc. will be forthcoming soon.
• Tobacco Reviews (and I) are moving. My trip to the mountains was not all for pleasure. I am in the process of relocating to North Carolina now, and will be, hopefully, settled in up there in another month or so. Wish me luck.

If you are among those who wish for the reversion to become permanent and for the new sorting not to come back, think of this as your chance to put your money where your mouth is.

As of right now, you can, if you are logged in, choose to sort the reviews by Votes (the new default), Newest first (the old default) or by Rating (high to low). I will probably add a few more in the coming week or so, but those options should address the majority of the complaints I got about the new sorting default.

The following are the things that I really want reviews flagged for:

• Are blank or contain less than 10 or so words.
• Contain website or email addresses.
• Contain contact information ie phone numbers, postcodes etc.
• Appear to impersonate someone else.
• Are considered likely to disrupt, provoke, attack or offend others.
• Are racist, sexist, homophobic, sexually explicit, abusive or otherwise objectionable.
• Contain swear words or other language likely to offend.
• Break the law or condone or encourage unlawful activity. This includes breach of copyright, defamation and contempt of court.
• Are written in any language other than English.
• Contain links to or addresses of other websites.
• Are considered to be ‘spam’, that is posts containing the same. or similar, message posted multiple times.

(all of those, by the way, are taken from the Terms and Conditions of using the website, which I recommend that you review if you haven’t in a while.)

You will notice what is not on that list. There is no item on the list that says “You disagree with the Reviewer, who must obviously be wrong/mean/a shill for a competitor. We all have individual tastes and highly subjective experiences of tobaccos. I really don’t care one bit that Bob Smith has written reviews of every one of your favorite blender’s tobaccos and roundly criticized all of them.

That’s how it goes and you should grow up and stop basing your personal beliefs on whether or not people agree with you. Yes, people disagree, with you, on the internet. That doesn’t make them wrong. Even if it did coincide with them being wrong (and there’s only a 50% chance of that, now isn’t there?) it wouldn’t matter. If collective reviewing and rating is of any use, then the obviously wrong reviews and rating will fall to the bottom of the heap anyway. Geez, I even gave you a way to vote against reviews you think are bad.

Anyway, you can tell that a lot of people are using the Report This Review feature for the wrong reasons and it’s gotten under my skin a bit. Now that I’ve explained exactly what I want, and do not want, this feature used for, I feel comfortable saying that anyone from this point forward who misuses the feature will have their access to it (and perhaps the entire site) removed by me summarily, depending on my mood at the time I have read through all of their reports.

Several people have emailed me to let me know that there is some difficulty reading the reviews in some circumstances, due to the font size being too big. As I have not changed font sizes at all in the move, I am a bit confused. In order to track this down and fix it for those folks having trouble, I need some help. Please reply to this post with the following:

• Your Operating System (Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS 10.5, etc). Just saying “Windows” is of absolutely no help to me.
• Your browser(s), as in Firefox 3.5, Opera 9, Internet Explorer 8, etc. Once again, without a version number, this information is useless to me.
• Your screen resolution. If you don’t know it or how to find it, go here (http://www.whatismyscreenresolution.com) and copy what it tells you.

I need as many people as possible to provide me with the above information, whether or not you are having trouble seeing the reviews. Additionally, if you ARE having trouble seeing the reviews, please send along the following if you are capable:

• A screenshot of your browser when looking at the page you are having trouble with. If you need help doing this, there are instructions for Windows and OSX available.

Thanks, and if everyone pitches in a bit, we will have this thing figured out in no time.

Given the large number of changes to the site, there are likely to be a few bugs here and there, but I am monitoring for errors all day today, and fixing them as they appear, so if you run into an error, assume that it will be fixed almost immediately.

The site is also running a bit slow right now as I hammer out all the moving related settings and tuning, but have no fear that it will be back up to speed as soon as I can get it there.

If you have any comments, complaints, suggestions, etc. Feel free to comment here and let me know.

Here is a quick run-down of what is included in this update:

A new User Detail page where

• you can upload a picture of yourself for others to see.

• Save tobaccos to your “Favorites” and be notified when there are new reviews of them.
• Become a “Fan” of other reviewers and be notified when they post new reviews or other content.
• automatically sign up via email activation instead of waiting for a human to approve your account.
• Delete your account yourself, instead of asking me to do it.

New Tobaccos/Review Features:

• Rate reviews as “Helpful” or “Not Helpful”, with the most helpful reviews being shown first.
• “Report” offensive or off topic reviews for further scrutiny.
• Delete your reviews yourself instead of asking me to do it.

I know that there are a lot more features that have been discussed, and many of them are in the pipeline, but I felt it was important to get the new code base out in the open before going any further with new features.

I plan on updating the live server with the new code tomorrow (Sept 3, 2009) morning, so if anything looks funny in the morning, don’t panic. It’s just me futzing around.

Additionally, the first time you log in, you may be asked for some new/updated information about your account. This is to help eliminate weird/duplicate/just plain wrong information in the database, and will mostly apply to people who wrote nonsensical things like “Upper Slobovia” in the Country field.

I hope you enjoy the new features, and I hope to be able to continue development of the site for many years to come.

Basically, what I need is people who will make new accounts, write bogus reviews, play with the new features and generally pound on things with wild abandon. The downside is that you have to tell me, in detail, what you were doing when something goes wrong. Good bug reports are what we’re after, and I’ll have an email address set up for you to submit reports to. Once we find and squish all the bugs, I’ll let everyone in to play, and move all the data over.

So, if you’d like to be a beta tester, email me and let me know. I hope to start testing tomorrow morning and be done in 72 hours.