Are Avsim REVIEWS totally DOA?

[raymar 972]

Avsim does not have a Review Editor or anyone providing that function AFAIK.

No new aircraft reviews have been published since April 2019.

No new hardware reviews have been published since April 2018.

No new scenery reviews have been published since August 2021.

Edited April 15 by raymar

[raymar 972]

Maybe one of our outstanding Moderators would step in and carry the ball to get a few 2024 reviews published.  I personally have two hardware reviews almost completed, but, no one to send them to for review and publishing.

[Ray Proudfoot 9,217]

@Bob Scott and @charliearon. Thoughts?

[charliearon 3,172]

None!

[spearmint_flyer 581]

Maybe something management can discuss to fill the position. It’s wasted real estate space on the webpage that if used would bring additional traffic. I have some ideas. 

[Bob Scott 7,848]

Well, if someone wants to step up and volunteer to be the review editor, I'll consider it.  As it is. our current staff is stretched pretty thin.

Reviews are always welcome to be posted in the relevant forum.

[edpatino 2,029]

18 hours ago, raymar said:

Avsim does not have a Review Editor or anyone providing that function AFAIK.

No new aircraft reviews have been published since April 2019.

No new hardware reviews have been published since April 2018.

No new scenery reviews have been published since August 2021.

I'm afraid there are other new sites that make all those reviews in a very good and efficient way.

Edited April 16 by edpatino

[Bob Scott 7,848]

My biggest reservation about reviving an "official" review department here is that when we publish reviews, they are considered to come from "AVSIM".  So reviews published under our banner would have to meet fairly high standards, enforced by an engaged staff review editor or editors.  There are few things that give me a giant case of the beak like being led down the primrose path into buying what turns out to be a real turkey, only to discover that the reviewer had some kind of conflict of interest.  One example: having a sale link posted alongside a glowing review--that's a big red flag that immediately calls the reviewer's and/or publisher's motives into serious question.  Less obvious conflicts include folks that publish reviews but fail to disclose that they were gifted free review copies (and thus expected to sing praise), and even a few fraudsters operating under a fake identity while doing a sock puppet song and dance on behalf of the developer or publisher.  Incomplete reviews that miss (intentionally or otherwise) important aspects (like frame rate performance, missing/incorrect navaids, poor flight dynamics etc), or fail to put the experience into perspective with a thorough description of the testing environment (e.g. system specs, other add-ons, etc), can be equally misleading.

So for a very long time I have generally taken the combined picture constructed from the opinions of known personalities in the sim universe over reviews posted on web sites and video streaming services.  And reading the opinions and experiences of a variety of users, particularly those with credible flying and simulation backgrounds, often paints a more complete picture than even a good thorough, and (relatively) unbiased review.  That said, when contemplating a purchase, a good thorough review with representative screenies and/or video is still potentially illuminating--but only as one of many inputs.

 

[raymar 972]

2 hours ago, Bob Scott said:

Well, if someone wants to step up and volunteer to be the review editor, I'll consider it.  As it is. our current staff is stretched pretty thin.

Reviews are always welcome to be posted in the relevant forum.

That sounds easy enough, but, it is impossible to post there without rights to post.  I tried last week and was not able to add content to the REVIEWS section.  Closest second choice would be wasted in Hangar Chat.

Bob, I personally do not know a single Reviewer that buys a copy of a product and then decides to spend upwards of 100 hours writing a review.  I would venture a guess that practically all Reviewers are provided evaluation copies and that source can usually be found in the Credits section of the review along with others that may have contributed input and/or screenshots.

Times may be changing along with management, but, some facts remain.  The last 5 Avsim hardware reviews that I contributed that are still listed on the first page have a total of something North of 100,000 views.

Someone once said "You may have thrown out the Baby along with the bathwater" of something similar.

Best Regards,

Ray Marshall

[Bob Scott 7,848]

Well, in the present state of affairs without an active dedicated reviews forum, a hardware review would certainly be both appropriate and visible in one of the...hardware forums.  A review of an MSFS add-on would go in the MSFS forum, etc etc.  We could certainly tag it as a review as well.  Given that the major search engines all crawl our forums, a simple web search on DuckDuckGo, Bing, Google etc would certainly find it there just as easily as in the previous dedicated forum.

The "baby" didn't get "thrown out" with anything--the near-crippling loss of some of our long-time volunteer staffers as the result of serious illnesses and death was the biggest factor in the reviews section going dormant, and it was indeed dormant for years--long before I took the helm here.  As I said above, I'd consider reincarnating it...but at present I'm inclined to wait until I see enough activity and quality review content materializing to make it worth going back to maintaining a separate reviews section as we once did.

Of course there are reviewers that put in a major effort and do a great job.  There are also some that try very hard, but really don't know what they don't know.  And there are a few that publish with a marketing agenda--selling a product, directly or indirectly, trying to elicit clicks and views for profit, even a few on crusades to malign a disfavored developer in order to fuel an ongoing feud.  In the past I've been led on to buy some real losers (or to not buy some decent add-ons) by virtue of reading reviews that were completely off the reservation (not necessarily here)...and more than just a few times.  So if we're going to do it under the AVSIM flag, we've got to do it right, and that's a non-trivial proposition for both the reviewers and for AVSIM.

Regards

[raymar 972]

Well, I've been writing reviews with the Avsim tag as a Contributing Reviewer, which was attached to my Avsim membership until someone seemed fit to remove it.  I was also listed as a Contributing Reviewer along with the Avsim Staff for many years.  (12 years or so)

A simple search using your engine of choice (DuckDuckgo, Bing, Google) seeking "Ray Marshall, Avsim Reviews" should give you a few pages with a short description for each including recommendations and comments should give one a feel for what the cyber community has as records.

Regards,

Ray Marshall

[raymar 972]

10 hours ago, edpatino said:

I'm afraid there are other new sites that make all those reviews in a very good and efficient way.

Hello Ed,

Can you recommend some of these new sites that you are speaking of?  Links would be great.

Regards,

Ray

[Bob Scott 7,848]

31 minutes ago, raymar said:

Well, I've been writing reviews with the Avsim tag as a Contributing Reviewer, which was attached to my Avsim membership until someone seemed fit to remove it.  I was also listed as a Contributing Reviewer along with the Avsim Staff for many years.  (12 years or so)

A simple search using your engine of choice (DuckDuckgo, Bing, Google) seeking "Ray Marshall, Avsim Reviews" should give you a few pages with a short description for each including recommendations and comments should give one a feel for what the cyber community has as records.

It wasn't a tag, it was a forum user group that existed back when we had people actively doing reviews...as you yourself pointed out in the OP, that activity has largely been ceased for 5+ years, so that vestigial user group was removed during an admin update a few months ago, which reverted any remaining former members of that group to "Member."  It's nothing personal...the activity clearly stopped, the volunteer editors that were managing it are gone, and the user group became superfluous.  It could be recreated given sufficient interest, as I have mentioned several times now, but again, that would require a volunteer or volunteers to step up to manage it, and enough activity to justify it.

 

[raymar 972]

Whatta you know.  I found a neat little tidbit in the history books.  I was personally invited to become an Avsim Reviewer by none other than Tom Allensworth himself.  Interesting reading. . .July 14, 2010

Quality standards near rock bottom on this review - AVSIM Reviews Feedback - The AVSIM Community Top of Page 2.

Regards,

Ray

[Matt Sdeel 48]

21 hours ago, raymar said:

Whatta you know.  I found a neat little tidbit in the history books.  I was personally invited to become an Avsim Reviewer by none other than Tom Allensworth himself.  Interesting reading. . .July 14, 2010

Quality standards near rock bottom on this review - AVSIM Reviews Feedback - The AVSIM Community Top of Page 2.

Regards,

Ray

I hope you volunteer and get to review the Turbine Duke again and soon:

https://www.avsim.com/home/reviews/aircraft/review-turbine-duke-2-by-realair-r3030/

https://www.avsim.com/home/reviews/review-training-majestic-dash-8-q400-by-airline2sim-r2380/