provide a way to flag obviously fake feedback
I posted a review once for an apartment complex that was an absolute nightmare to live in, so I get emails every time a new review is posted. After months of mostly negative reviews, there are all of a sudden four positive reviews posted this week - five-star reviews without a single complaint! This seems EXTREMELY suspicious to me - pretty flagrant "ballot-stuffing" by the management - but there doesn't appear to be any way of flagging them as likely false. You can flag it as "removeable" but that's the closest you can get. A flag for "sock puppet" would be great.
This feature exists on the site. There is a “report” link next to each review and options are provided to categorize it.
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bryan commented
...Then create a system for users to flag reviews, and perhaps have a team of voluntary moderators to check out the evidence.
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bryan commented
UserVoice already incorporates a good preventative measure for fake feedback. Rather than allowing people to sign up with a new username for your site, FORCE them to use a third party program (facebook/myspace), then provide a LINK to their profile with all reviews posted. It's easy to just sign up, but its more difficult to go through the trouble of creating a fake myspace profile to comment
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Warren commented
Online ballot-stuffing is hard to solve. What has these traits: (a) only one exists per person (b) unique to each person (c) is electronically transmittable over the web, and (d) is verifiable by a commercial entity like AR? Amazon and eBay just hope that sincere reviews will overwhelm fake ones in quantity. AR can't do that until they have similar quantities of reviews.