product reviews?

[Troy]

The volunteers that run the WKC have several product reviews planned, but its a slow and tedious process. Plus we're all busy with real jobs and families and such.

What if we created a section of the forum dedicated to product reviews that ANYONE can contribute.
All of you are buying and using products. You have favorites, you have least favorites.
A Product Review section allows us to build a network of knowledge within the community.

Would you review your favorite gear?
Would you utilize the other content?

[1buckie]

THIS is a good idea !!!!


Anyone can join in & if you get a real good one or two on a certain item, with descriptive pics, maybe that (or those) could go n the front page......

I see people take a lot of well-thought out time to write in about things & this way it wouldn't get buried so easily.....

[addicted-to-smoke]

As Troy knows, I'm working on one at the moment. But my gut tells me to characterize it as an overview, not a review per se for the following reasons:

1) Most accessories (or grill models, even) are "worth" getting for anyone interested in this hobby. That is, darn near everything can be made to do good cookups somehow. Don't have that accessory? No problem, you can still do the cook another way most likely, right?

2) If you paid money for it, you're invested. You do have some confirmation bias for rationalizing the purchase. It'll more likely be positively reviewed, which reduces the review's value IMO.

3) Reviews work best (again, IMO) with the reviewer's recent experience of competing products and if I had one suggestion it would be to write something in that vein and not treat the review subject as an isolated product, because they never are. Give an opinion, it's OK.

So long as the reader understands the writer's priorities and values, they should be able to read a "negative" review and still come away with an interest or desire to purchase it if they know what's important to them differs.

[jcnaz]

Great idea.

[SixZeroFour]

Great idea.

^x2

[Sramsey]

Sounds like a good idea. I just don't think reviews in a forum thread style would be clean. You speak of PHP but I believe you have some kind of World Press integration here. I know you can get a review plug in for WP but I believe that has a cost.

[Troy]

Technically speaking, the forum and wordpress aren't integrated. I dabbled with it, but in the end it just wasn't solid enough to make it worth it.

There are free WP review plugins, but i want the individuals reputation to stay associated with community member.

[Craig]

Yes to reviews!

[Troy]

its live, so go write some shtuff