Recently. I have come across several novels with 4+ ratings. Thinking that it was a good novel, I tried reading only to find it was bad. Some had bad characters, lack of consistency, 1 dimensional characters, frustrating protagonist and anything else you can think of. But the main problem is despite having all this inadequacies those novels were rated highly and a majority of those reviews were given 5 rating. On one of the novel's page, I check the profile of few of those 5ratings reviewers and guess what I found, they seem to have created their account on or near the day the review was made. Very few reviews were by those users who had been members of novelupdates for a longtime and there are even some who are just registered for a few months but still have given quite a few reviews. The reviews are often ranging from 1-4 depending on what they felt about the book itself. For a long time now, I have always referred to noveupdates for info about a novel, whether its good or bad, what are its plot or what can I expect from it. All this came from the the genuine reviews given by genuine readers (both positive and negative ones). However, today when I find that its no longer as credible as it was in the past. Its now a lot like webnovel (qidian)'s review system where even badly written book end up with 4+ ratings. What I am trying to say is I hope and request novelupdates to modify their novel review system so novel lovers like me can know what a book is about based on the views of actual readers rather those hired for the sole purpose of increasing the ratings. Please create or update the current review system so only genuine reviews are accepted and not false one. Thank you.
I think this is more complicated than it seems. How are you supposed to tell genuine reviews from fake ones? What if someone liked a novel so much that they created an account just to review it? What if once someone made an account they decided to go an spree of reviewing all of the novels they've read in the past? Both of these seem extremely plausible and would cover both examples you gave. Are NU supposed to stop people from reviewing a novel for a certain amount of time after creating the account? This would alienate new members, but the fake people would just create an account and then wait. Are they supposed to put a gap between the amount of time you can review novels? This would be inconvenient for genuine reviewers, but fake people would just make multiple accounts to get around it...
I wonder if @Tony is going to consider changing the review and rating system. I feel like it's getting to the point where it's by far the most complained about aspect of the site.
Yes it is more complicated and that is why the brain behind this website creation have need to update its function to keep up certain issues as and when they come up, the review system being one of them. You cant and neither can I, that is left up to the developers and the noveupdates think tanks. I best I can do is suggest some of the criteria that might qualify a user to post a review. The two examples that I gave previously maybe turn out to be genuine reviews, as you said, but the likelihood of that is low. Yet at the same time those very same counter example you gave also can end being false reviews. I have never suggested that. What I suggested is to modify the current system to better accommodate genuine and fake. Compared to all the current webnovel websites out there that there, novelupdates is the most popular and well known precisely because of its credibility. Yes fake people would create multiple accounts and thats why novelupdates needs to counter that before it gets serious. Any informative site like that depends on user contribution will sooner or later have to deal with fake accounts issue in order to maintain their site credibility.
It looks like you want a more sensitive system for good reviews. I would prefer a specific system for good reviews, so that innocent reviewers don't lose their account.
@Tony manually checks each and every review before approving them. That's as good of a system as it can be. (btw, about 60% of the reviews are not approved.) If you think a fake review slipped by him, you can report them and the mods will look it over.
No reviews system can possibly be worse than webnovel.com which is currently showing full 5/5 ratings on a plagiarised novel that has 6 reviews; 5 are one-star and the 6th is 3.5 stars.