What is on Your Mind?

I don't think this is a concern at all.

First, posts in our forums are dated. Most people know that subjective information changes over time and that a product or service that was great or bad at one time or another, can change at any time.

Because we have some many very intelligent, real hands-on users, our reviews and mini-reviews on products and services are more meaningful that reviews on other sites where people review just for the sake of reviews and driving traffic to their site.

This is especially true if the review is by a senior person here. I think many people value the opinions of "real" people who actually work on solutions.

In fact, my recent mini-review on Slicehost v. Linode has been our most popular post of recent. Here are one comment on this post from the net:

Of course, that comment could have been from a Slicehost marketing person, you never know.

That is why the human mind is so important when processing information. We need reviews and we need credible sites reviewing. For example, Tripadvisor is so full of "reviews" from owners and managers of properties, that it is not credible. On the other hand, at least with Agoda, the person must actually book a room to review.

I agree that reviews can be irrelevant. That is up to the reader to have the intelligence to know about credibility and timeliness. Since we have so many great moderators, we have a chance and being credible and relevant, just like my mini-review on my customer service experience is relevant, at least a number of people already seem to think so.

Senior people here are relevant and credible, much more credible than fly-by-night posters who login and dump some marketing information. If you or any of our senior members have an experience with a technical product or service, I want to hear about it. I am sure others feel the same way!

And in the interest of keeping it relevant, I'm still opting for some guidelines on reviews. At best, it helps new users, who have had an experience similar to yours, to write their own review. At worst it would help the mods by giving them a sieve to separate the wheat from the chaff without seeming to be subjective.

I agree on guidelines.

The first one we need to decide on is the minimum number of posts to post a review of a product or service.

I think we must have a minimum number rule. We don't want people to register just to post reviews or market their product or service. We want to know who the reviewer is and to know them by what they do in this community.

We can simply deny any review that does not meet the minimum number of posts criteria and ban users immediately if they try to break the rule.

What do you think that number should be?

100? 500? 1000?

After we agree on a number of posts. Then we can discuss what types of products and services are acceptable and other guidelines.

I'm not really that keen on going by the number of postings. There are enough people who have a lot of posts, virtually all questions, sometimes about pretty basic stuff. Similarly, there are many who have only a few posts to their name, but almost all of them are answers, sometimes at a very high level.

My alternative (if technically feasible) would be to have a dedicated sub-forum for reviews whereBoth approaches can potentially be used to create an editing step, to weed out marketing stuff or gross inaccuracies. My personal favorite would be 'c', since it allows users to change their reviews should they or a mod see any problems with it (spelling/grammar/accuracy/...).

But if the majority decides that it's best to separate by the number of posts, I'd say no lower than 500, and no higher than 750, as I think most non-regulars fall out far below that anyway, and it's a pretty good number to see how technically oriented someone really is.

This is quite an old site(since 1992)

at one time I remember there many many products like 3rd party servers, storage boxes all kinds of stuff to run on solaris server now there are only a few.

SPARC Product Directory (since 1992) - the SPARC market bible

Maybe a better idea will be to review the latest consumer gadgets, fun things like cameras, cellphones, or even motherboards, graphic cards etc ...

a few sites come to mind.

http://reviews.cnet.com/
http://hardwarezone.com

I wrote a quick review of RegexBuddy (on the blog), which I just purchased here.

Using RegexBuddy to Help With Google Webmaster Suggestions