I don't know if I'm the only one bothered by this or if others have the same sentiment, but the fact that any review and rating can just be removed by the author greatly annoys me.

I understand that there should maby be measures taken against troll reviews but just letting the author freely choose which review's to keep doesn't sound like a solution at all to me.

If you make the effort to read the majority of a novel that you do not enjoy, since it is for example casually sexist, has characters with the depth and personality of a brick, and is written with the grammar of a middle school english essay. Then you spend time and effort to share a detailed report containing your honest opinion towards about the novel, just to have it all be for naught, since it'll be deleted anyway.

Why even contain a review option anyway if the opinion you share does not mean anything in the first place.
The most painful thing for me to see though is that the most positively reviewed original novel's nowadays are often the most horrifically written pieces of literature since anything that gives you a clear picture of what is wrong with the novel is already gone, making finding a good novel way harder since the rating is already pretty worthless as an indicator.

So maby a report to be reviewed option should be available instead of enabling authors to delete reviews, so that troll reviews can be reported.

    Ilumie There have been other threads on this topic. You're not the first, and certainly won't be the last, unless Webnovel changes its settings. The issues you raised are very valid. I totally feel you! But I 've learned to simply drop a novel that's not worth my time.

    Often a poorly written synopsis is enough to clue you in on the quality and grammar within. This being a Chinese website, with a good mix of authors and translators who are not native English speakers, I have learned to overlook grammatical and idiomatic lapses as long as they don't get in the way of my reading experience. There are many novels, and originals (untranslated work by fellow members) with excellent plots that are totally worth dodging a few grammatical bombs here and there. :)

    So, enjoy your time here. It's not real literature (although there are a few hidden gems that could legitimately be). And don't let that one author spoil your day. Or you could do what the others have done -- post a review and novel discussion here, and let the community know about this book.

      Ilumie so basically, "Ever review (minus troll/spam/exp reviews) is a rightful review"?

      two things...
      1) I think you underestimate how many spam reviews popular authors get in a day. I'm not even that big of an author and on the highest records, I've gotten 13+ per day of just pure emojis. bigger authors who have more promotion probably get 01294810298904810928 reviews of emoji spam. some of them don't delete it to boost their rating when the ratings are high (I personally choose to delete them whenever I get them), but the main problem is that the majority of these spam reviews are like 1-3 stars for some reason. this can seriously bring down the rating of the novel = less readers (since most of these readers don't touch novels less than 4 stars)
      2) the reason why webnovel implements this function is that it's way cheaper for them. they don't need as many resources to let the author delete reviews vs. hiring moderators to manually regulate reported reviews. their report system for "offensive/abusive comments" are already slow as is, so just imagine how slow they're gonna be with removing spam (& the misuse of this button from authors who actually delete negative reviews). I don't want to wait 10 days just to have pages of spam deleted. it's much more convenient to me as an author to have the power to delete reviews.

      in the end, webnovel's probably not going to remove this system (& I'm really grateful for it). there's nothing about it that harms them, since it boosts the ratings of those authors that actually delete bad reviews for their novels.
      so, it would be nice if webnovel actually had a speedy regulation system for reviews (as well as if they removed the exp bonus for reviewing. that's the best solution for exp reviews) but is it likely? nope.

      that's just my two cents on things.

          Unfortunately you're beating a dead horse. The review system has long since become worthless, and is no longer used as was originally intended. First you must understand that Webnovel only cares about 1 thing, and 1 thing only. That is making as much money off of you and its other users here as possible - with minimal effort. So, when review spamming was becoming a problem, what is the 'least amount of effort' change you can make in such an instance? Give authors the ability to remove reviews at will. Thus we have the situation that we have - rather than hire more people and waste money on employees devoted to moderating reviews, they give power to the authors themselves. It is the epitome of laziness and greed, but that is to be expected.

          4 days later

          yaoyueyi I agree. But while it is efficient, it could be abused by dishonest authors, just as it is being abused by trolls and spammers for exp. I still believe that removing the exp reward for reviews (and perhaps giving authors and editors the power to reward reviews they like) might improve the system. I hope Webnovel considers this suggestion.

          Personally I am selective in writing reviews, as it takes time and effort. I "reward" novels with reviews only if they'd been worth it. If it's so bad or mediocre, I don't even bother haha!

              Ilumie I get why they allow the author to just remove reviews(they don't have to hire people to review them) but it's an option that I'm not really comfortable with. The only time I've ever done it was to remove obvious troll reviews from people that admitted to not reading my story and even then I needed to argue with myself whether or not to do it.

                  I have 1 reader gave me 3 reviews. Not that I am complaining, she gave perfect 5 ratings but somehow, I think a it is best for a reader to be allowed only to review once per novel. I have seen some novels wherein the authors themselves add another review to the novel and encouraging their readers to do the same.

                  11 days later

                  I, for one, don't depend on the reviews to decide whether to read a novel or not since I find majority of reviews daft. There are many reviews made by the same readers that it eschews what the novel ranking truly is. In addition, I've noticed some original authors would pin those most favorable reviews in order for them to be noticeable even when the more critical reviews of one star variety got the more 'likes."

                  My friend who called one original author on this practice got her reviews deleted, whereas other 5-star reviews full of emoticons remained.

                    Write a Reply...
                    Web Novel Novel Ask