So yeah! I'm new here, almost a month and a half of writing and what I want to talk about is the review system. Yes system of the reviews...
So, looking and skimming through reviews, every review is either 4.5 stars or more.
That's the case in my book but a couple of them are very helpful to me to grow as an author,, then comes a lot of other books with the same 4.8,4.5's.......
The medium of writing in WN is a league of it's own, but review should be reviews, tell me if I'm wrong????
You shouldn't be able to delete reviews because the author of the book you left a review in doesn't like it,,, am i wring here?
A guy requested a brutally honest review,,, gave him 2.8 stars and in a beat he deleted it... And I'm not hating the guy, I'm not hating his work, I was being true to his request.
Back to topic, reviews shouldn't be all good, there's a plethora of people with different tastes, you need reviews to better yourselves more...
I made a mistake of leaving a joke review on a good author here.... and I double made a mistake of misunderstanding his reply so sorry to the guy if he reads this.....
Which brings me to the conclusion, reviews should be honest and un-deletable... What's your take on it????
Thoughts on reviews in WN
Anyway, you can give five stars and be brutally honest with your words. 
Checkmate. But it won't really help anyone.
Some people just like to sound cool when they ask for honest reviews (and even when they don't include 'brutal' in the bundle) when they are expecting to be praised because they think they don't have much to improve.
Once I offered my honest reviews and out of 9 reviews, 7 were deleted.
If someone really wants a true review, they'll ask for reviews to be published here in this forum, not counting as rating. It was done here before often, but people just lose their courage...
Don't the rules forbid it though? I don't exactly know but...
Asking about giving a 5-star review but writing what you want to convey?
I assume you'd be polite enough, so if you aren't harassing anyone, you're not breaking any rules.
Or are you asking about coming to the forum and asking people to make an honest critique of your novel inside the thread (and not asking for swapping reviews or stars)?
It wasn't forbidden in the past, but to be fair there aren't many good souls wanting to make detailed critiques here these days...
You'd need to ask a mod if it's forbidden now.
'Reviews' on this site are basically adverts. They aren't really reviews and potential readers probably shouldn't bother checking them to see if they want to read the story as anything vaguely negative will have been deleted. As SrtaA mentioned, a more honest review could probably be found on the forum, though it might be hard to dig them up.
On the plus side, while I don't think it will stop truly toxic people from writing hateful things to authors, authors can at least delete any 'reviews' they don't like as soon as they see them. Just, as a reader, don't bother checking them for actually useful information. It might exist, but there is really no way to tell what part of the advert is real and what is imaginary and what important information is just censored. Because once readers know that most authors on this site just delete anything vaguely negative, it discourages any honest and/or constructive feedback.
Thanks guys
Happy to be of help. And glad to see you reaching out to sammielane448's offer for detailed reviews on the forum. Seems like a good and helpful person.
I think you get some kind of exp if you write reviews.
So you see people spamming either full 5 star or 1 star reviews as well just for that exp.
Also, the review swaps here are mostly garbage. I review swapped with 3 different people. I actually read their novel's first 5-10 chapters (depending on the average length of a chapter) before writing a review that actually pertained to their work. They didn't even bother to read mine and just straight up gave it a 5 or a 4.5. I mean it's all well and good, but it feels a little patronising. It's like when you tell a little kid that their drawing is good without looking at it.
You aren't encouraging writers by blindingly writing a glowing review without even reading the work.
Yeah! We need to know what kind of improvements we need to make... And I want to know what I'm doing wrong, really, really, really badly