Just a few additional bits from me...
they also have the undesirable side-effect of greatly reducing the fun/entertainment of both reading and writing reviews
I'm not really sure why this would be the case. We aren't in any way restricting what you write or how you write it. Whatever you've written in the past can go in the 'Details' section. We're just asking you to list a few additional things above that so that readers can quickly identify whether it's a provider that meets their geographical and financial requirements, and also might tickle their fancy.
I don`t need to know that the guy did DATY and every detail down to what colour her toenails were. But some like that I know. But I think the beauty of this site is the freedom we have here and the free exchange of information.
As I pointed out in the 'Submitting Reviews' post, you can put as much detail as you want in there. We don't require explicit details -- and has been pointed out above and elsewhere, such things are probably not a great idea to post openly.
We currently aren't
requiring anything. The template I've written up is a guideline that I think is a happy medium between no format at all and, as some other very successful review sites have, a series of checkboxes that provide very fine detail on the appearance and their 'menu'. We aren't going to grade you on if it's an acceptable review or not, and we aren't going to delete reviews that don't include the template.
Really what we are seeking here with a template and additional organization of reviews is
clarity.
The template puts the following information front and center-
- Who the girl is and the agency (if any) she works for, and how to get a hold of her.
- What the language requirements are for her and her agency
- What the cost was for the session
- What she looks like.
I've written dozens of reviews boards including this one, and I personally don't think spending the extra 5 minutes to list out this information is a big deal. Yes, writing reviews is a lot of fun, and at least for me, it comes from getting to recount in my mind all the fun I just had, but I would argue of equal importance is reviews are there to inform other hobbyists. This is the Tokyo Adult
Guide, after all.
The problem is, without a format to follow, people will post totally unhelpful reviews as TAG Manager pointed out, or someone will post a fantastic review but will leave out a fairly salient detail, like whether Japanese is required, or how to get in contact with her. And then the thread devolves into a high noise-to-signal ratio discussion of the points that were missed, instead of getting comments on the actual experience.
I think that we as a community can grow quite a bit more, and get a lot more reviews, by having a little more organizational clarity. I for one find it really really difficult to wade through a review thread that consists of 6 different women from 2 or more different organizations, like some of the pink salon threads have become. I find it tough to have people continually add on to old reviews or post new questions like 'how can I see a provider if I don't speak Japanese'? In all of these cases, a slightly better ordered review forum will make the barrier to entry a lot lower for new people. They can look at a review and say okay, I can call this one but not that one. The whole point of a 'free exchange of information' is that you are actually
exchanging information. And it's really tough for people to do that if that information isn't ordered in some way that makes it easy to process.
Thanks a lot for your feedback -- I did my best to streamline the template as much as I could to minimize the 'non-fun' part of the process. If you have any other feedback or questions, I'd love to talk further about this.
