Webnovel.Forum

One should probably distinguish between two types of reviews:

1. Swap
2. Honest

Swap means confidently getting 4 or 5 stars. Equivalent exchange as in the manga Full Metal Alchemist

Honest. Well, he speaks for himself.

Although there are exceptions in Swap Reviews, it is easy to get 2 or 3 stars.

An honest review, the good thing is that the critic points out weak points to the author, suggests ways of correction, and gives advice. It really helps to fix the job.

At the same time, usually those who have English as their mother tongue, they treat with some prejudice, maybe from the side seeming a little snobbish, in relation to novels written in not very good English. In reviews, the main criticism comes down to grammar, not complex assessment, content, title page, schedule of updates. This aspect is also worth considering.

At the same time, having given someone 5 stars in a swap review, you, as an author, can get 2 or 3 stars, which you did not expect. Since the principle of equal exchange is violated. But we are all human and the rules that exist for swap reviews are based on their word of honor.

Sometimes I receive notifications that about three dozen of my comments and reviews have been removed. These were honest reviews. A bit unpleasant. But on the other hand, this is how the author received advice on how to fix it and reacted to them.

I myself am happy to receive advice from critics on how to improve my novels. But at the same time from adequate critics, arguing their criticism and showing ways to correct mistakes. It only makes the novel better.

It should be noted that there are few real reviews, so to speak classical ones, which would analyze the text, first giving strengths. then they showed the weak, talked about the structure of the work, paid attention to the content without focusing on grammar.

Here it would probably be nice to somehow highlight the "swap" and "honest" reviews, maybe in the background color scheme or put letters.

Or maybe the form of filling out the "review" itself should contain all the points of the evaluation criteria, and only then such a review can be admitted to publication. But this is all difficult to accomplish.

Plus, there will always be biased reviews. For example, few people control whether the same author has multiple accounts. He can write to himself from 2 to 10 reviews. He can call friends and will wind up his rating.

If you are honest and objective as an author, you will fail ... if you don't write a swap review, no one will notice your original work. If you limit yourself to 10 swap reviews, someone will write themselves 100. You will lose again.

Being shameless means doing good PR to your work. But this is not interesting.

Such are my thoughts on this matter.

The thing with negative reviews, although they are annoying they are also a good indication if a book is good or bad.
If i see a 1 star review on a book and the reviewer hasn't read more than 5 chapters I'm going to ignore it because its obvious this person is a troll.
I've started reading books because of bad reviews. These ones were from people that actually read hundreds of chapters and wanted to tell the author something they didn't like.
Sure, they may have left three stars or something but they actually gave valid points.
As a reader i got interested because of those points and I want to see if the author ended up adressing them later, and guess what. Most of those complaints got resolved in later chapters so I feel like if the review wasn't there in the first place the author wouldn't have seen it and fixed the plot holes and the book would remain bad.
Negative reviews are not all bad. Aside from the trolls, there are those giving constructive criticisms. Real fans that actually bothered to read the book and give an opinion rather than just flattering the authors ego.

EternalNightLotus Good critic, I agree it allows the author to grow. I rewrote two novels 5 times, in my opinion they became more interesting. But they can still be rewritten 2 times.

Reading tips and solutions to problems is interesting and informative. But there are trolls, and there are snobs.

But constructive criticism rarely happens.

I think it comes down to WN's issues as a platform. If people are spamming reviews, in more cases than not it is for "experience". I think that if WN changed their experience system to remove reviews and instead replace it with how old said accounts are, it will limit at least 80%+ of the so called "spam/fake reviews".

As for the rest, I have seen authors delete just to keep a particular rating when it is genuine criticism of said novel. If a novel is truly a 4/5 star novel, an author should not be mad and delete 3/5 star reviews that have criticisms about said novel.

This is also a reason that although I have written novels and continue to do so on this platform, why I am unwilling to give ANY original novel a try as far as reading because of the unfair taking away actual genuine reviews just because again, said author does not want to receive fair criticism. How am I supposed to know what novels are actually worth a try versus those that I may not like, if all of the genuine reviews are deleted?

So, in other words, remove leaving reviews as a way to gain experience, and I would say if an author wants to delete a comment, it needs to be approved by the WN staff if and ONLY if it is spam. This community really needs to start being more honest when it comes to reviews. :) -The Sleeping Tadpole

I just think that if there are good critiques on novels and real ratings were left alone, that there would be a much higher meaning to a book that is 4/5 stars as an example. At the moment, it feels like if a book is under 4.7 stars, it might as well be 2 stars. However, if the best books on the platform were at maximum a 4.5/5 stars rating, then all of the sudden I am willing to be more inclined into giving a novel rated 4/5 a chance.

As it currently stands, anything under 4 stars is considered enough to not even read the synopsis and anything between 4.2-4.5 is still somewhat in that category while you have spam 5 star reviews on novels that should be under 3 stars. This is the same reason why some authors who average 4.5/5 star reviews (which are mostly 5 star spam reviews) average less than 3 stars on a different platform like Amazon because 3 stars on Amazon in most cases mean a 4.5+ stars on web novel.

As an author, I would not mind receiving genuine reviews even if it dropped my novel's rating because it would push me to do better. Alas, I hope one day web novel will change in that direction but the first step would be not allowing authors to remove reviews that are real and not spam like majority do. We authors deserve to at least give our readers that right since they are giving our novels a chance to read. :)

Dan_Ryder Doing a great job at giving me additional reasons to never read any original novels. Translated novels can remove reviews just as much as original novels so calling my comments on yours void is rather toxic.

Towel Actually they can't. The translator of a novel has no moderation powers, and webnovel doesn't regulate them.

Veronica8 I hope that a bot-moderator from WebNovell will appear in the review thread. If the moderation is effective and efficient, then there will be no trolling or bullying on the site. This is one of the solutions to the problem.

Second, if the site administration for some reason cannot conduct moderation, then a community should be created within the forum. Which will make a list of those short stories that use dubious methods to promote themselves. They will mark the readers of the trolls, inform the site administration about them.

It will also develop a form for a real, objective review. Or maybe two of its swap options (marked in a different color) and an honest, objective review. And the reader himself will choose the review that he wants to read.
Since freedom of choice is also part of freedom of speech. Moreover, it will not violate the rights of another person, author or reader.

Since direct contact with the author may not always have a positive result. All people are different, so one author will agree with the opinion of the community, while the other will swear and swear. At the same time, all community actions must comply with the internal rules of WebNovell.

I see such opportunities.

Veronica8 Yes, if the review is not suitable for keywords or forms, then it is not passed until publication.

The review must meet the selection (evaluation) criteria.
As a first approximation:

For example,

1.reasoned analysis of a text block
2.How much does the text block emotionally affect the reader?
3.the text block corresponds to reality, as far as the author has studied the topic, he understands what he writes or not, the depth of the topic disclosure by the author
4.the novel is the original work of the author or is it a cliché
5.What impressions does the text block make for the reader?
6.evaluation of the form, content, grammar, features of the composition, the style of presentation of the material, the skill of the author
7.Advantages of the novel and its disadvantages
8.Completeness of plot disclosure
9.Conformity of the title page to the plot of the novel
10. What the book is about
11. Characters who are they? What actions happen to them?
12. What images do you remember?
13. Do you recommend reading this novel and why?

The form of the review should be:
- calm, in compliance with network ethics, rude statements and the transition to the identity of the author are unacceptable. you need to discuss the work itself.

• the inadmissibility of unreasonable reproaches as well as praises
• bringing an adequate assessment of the work, showing by examples, the successful use of new approaches by the author

NightGale35 The last he came online on the Forum was in 2018, so I doubt.

To deal with spams, the first option should be a limit on the number of reviews an account can make on the single work. It makes no sense to have more than a review on the same work.

Uncle_Sheogorath I don't agree. I am a contracted author, I have been on here for almost a year(I am one month away from a year) my book is completed and sitting at 1.7mill views. I have never had to delete a single review for my novel till this week. And I only deleted it for one reason and one reason alone. This person sent a review that said.

"This book isn't good at all, go read something else, don't know what people are raving about." and gave one star.

I honestly didn't care at all about it and would have left it until I saw that the person hadn't even got past chapter zero. That freaking irked me. I felt really annoyed and even went and asked my editor if they thought they would ever implement making reviews only open to people who got past you know the first paragraph.

Like, let me explain this. You move onto reading chapter one the moment you scroll the bar or flip a page. That means for someone to be at chapter zero, it means they opened up the book, never scrolled/flipped the page, never moved the screen at all. That means they read less than three paragraphs before going and telling people not to read my novel.

There is NO WAY, you can get a sense of a story, or someone's writing, in less than 15-30% of any book, let alone the first page. What they did was essentially like walking into a book store, picking up a book, and reading the back of it, then saying nope not interested.

Now that's fine, and all, but lets put it this way. If that same person went out of their way to leave a note to tell everyone else not to read it because the book is just trash. But then they never give anyone any valid reasons why they are saying it was. Then other people start to stop reading it, or picking it up at all and reading that book. This domino effect then causes harm to the author, who possibly spent months, or even years working super hard on that novel only to get paid less than .01 cent a word for their effort. An effort which is not easy might I add since basically birthing and creating a whole new world for someone elses entertainment is incredibly hard to do. Also, webnovel books are obscenely long with stories stretched out over a huge amount of chapters to give depth and background to the stories like they are some epic tv production. Yet someone stopped after a paragraph and went nope this is simply trash. That effect is essentially what would have happened here. And that is why authors here despise any star 0 chapter reviews and will delete them.

And it is why I deleted that review. My first lower than 4 stars review on my book in 11 months and the person didn't even read the book. And that book has 1.7million reads.

So, yes dear, it is possible to have that many views and only good reviews without ever deleting real people's genuine reviews. Because in an entire year and with that many reads I still never get people reviewing with less than 4 stars. And I have multiple books out too. With hundreds of thousands of views. And that was the only bad review I ever got. And it wasn't even from a real reader.

But anyway, people saying authors are not supposed to remove the trolls from their books, but instead just let them get attacked seems ludicrous to me. Seriously, for real, if you want to leave reviews that are constructive about how bad something is after reading over 30% of any book. I say have at it. Fly be free.

Honestly, though this whole thing could be sorted if they just locked reviewing novels. If webnovel made it mandatory to read at least 30-50% of the novel before reviewing a book was unlocked for a reader. That would really solve everyone's problem. Because all opinions stated would be valid. Because they really, for real; gave that book a shot for the author before making up their mind that it was well and truly awful. I think people walking away from books before that point is fine. But they shouldn't be able to review before then. If they want to read like half a chapter or like 3 chapters and tell people the grammar is bad, they can simply, just comment on the chapters.

Veronica8 Hi there, as a contracted author I just want to chime in on one little part. Veronica dear. It would never ever be possible to have an author and an editor sit down and look at each flagged comment together. Ever.

Because our editors actually recently revealed on a phone call with the authors a few weeks ago that each editor is in charge of roughly 500 to 1000 contracted novels themselves. Each person has to take care of that many novels! Isn't that insane! They are all keeping track of that many and still helping the authors with their issues. So authors don't get much time with their editors at all.

There would be no time with everything else they have to work on for them to take that onto their workload too. But the suggestion was a lovely idea. Just wanted to chime in and let you guys know for that suggestion to ever even be a glimmer of a possibility they would first have to hire about 100+ more people to be editors.

To be honest im fine with authors deleting reviews that are just dumb or don't go into detail of WHY they gave that opinion...
Authors should be able to 'defend' themselves from that kind of stuff, ive seen 1-2.5 star novels that i have absolutely loved....the reviews are all subjective after all :D

I guess you can start with removing the Write a Review on mission list.

A good way to remove those who do review just for the exp.

Then limit the user to only 1 review per novel and allow review editing. Some readers will sometimes have a change of heart about the novel.

@yaoyueyi please check for spam content

"I will delete fake positive reviews!!!"
"You delete fake positive reviews? I only delete abusive hateful reviews!"

Me: "you guys recieve so much reviews that you DELETE some of them?"

Uncle_Sheogorath I actually do think this is fair.

If you looked at 2000 episodes and thought hey that's fine. Imma read it anyway, then you should be okay with reading 600 chapters.

Like think about it this way. People used to have to go and pay to read a novel. (Yeah! I know! pay to read a novel... crazy, right.) and when they did they bought the whole book not just part of it, didn't they.

The author didn't ever walk up to them and say, hey, here you go, here are the first 40 pages of this novel for you to sample, How about this, I'm going to tear them out and you can have them before you make up your mind and then I will give you the rest so that way I don't inconvenience you with all the rest of my hard work.

No, you took a risk and you bought a 300, or a 600, or even a 800 page book, and you took it home to read it. If you didn't like it after the first bit of it, And they left a review after reading that book and they read more than one paragraph or a page, because otherwise it was a waste of their money, and effort to go out and buy it.

Now did you waste your time and money on it if you don't like it. Yes.

But is that the authors problem.

Nope. Because likes and dislikes are subjective.

So I do not think that asking someone to invest 600 chapters worth of their time is too much if you already looked at 2000 chapters and thought I'm going to read that long ass story even though, JEEZ THAT'S REALLY LONG. Because you can't complain about the length you had to invest in the story to see if you liked where it was going. You knew it would be long and drawn out process to get through the story line in the first place. Any book with that many chapters has filler episodes and if you didn't want to invest the time then don't click on a 2000 chapter book.

But yeah your point would be valid, If I had said I wish webnovel would require readers to read 90% or the whole 100% of the book before reviewing. Then yeah, that seems unfair to me and you would have a valid point.

For the readers do they think its okay to delete this.
https://gyazo.com/f635134e483ee8ebbacd3896571e2f50

This is what i get on a daily basis, i honestly think deleting reviews like this are fine.

JKSManga Delete and report as far as I am concerned lol

For sure a delete, that kinda language is unwarranted.

Besides @trolls how much us authors whore is none of your business grabs her lolli and hooker boots and pulls up her spanks. Thank you VERY much.

KitKatxKK If I buy in a physical store I can read the first few pages. If I buy an Ebook I can download a free sample before buying the whole thing. Your argument is simply incorrect.

JKSManga Yeah deleting something like that is fine.

KitKatxKK BTW, do you realize that most novels that have 2000 chapters or more are usually split into books? Some have 10 books over that span while others have each 25 chapters be a book and have up to 40+ books.
Being able to critique a novel series after reading the first book and saying that you don't enjoy the book is perfectly acceptable, regardless if the series has 7-50 books. Expecting someone to read 15 out of 50 books of a series before they're allowed to critique it is asking for a lot. The reviews clearly state what chapter the person had read to as well. So if they read the first book and comment about the series, it should be obvious that they are talking from a perspective of reading only the first book (or in this case of the first 20, 40, 60, 80, or however many chapters.)

JKSManga Yeah. That's not a review at all.

So the option of manual/human moderation seems unlikely due to capacity limitations. We don't know if Webnovel will invest in any automated content and community moderation tools.

What else is there that can address the need?