Preventing fake/revenge reviews

All review sites run the risk of getting gamed, manipulated or abused. The reasons for this are clear and to be expected: a restaurant’s reputation can make or break its business, and there are people who have vested interests in doing one or the other. Motivations to do so are not limited to restaurant owners. There are also vindictive, unreasonable customers who may have personal crusades against certain establishments.

Luckily so far on Eat.fi these kinds of problems have been quite rare. Here’s what we have in place to keep it that way:

1. One review per person. Anonymous users can only review a restaurant from one IP address once. Registered reviewers are allowed one review each for brunch, lunch and dinner. (Needless to say, if a reviewer uses all three, and the restaurant serves neither brunch nor lunch, that account is deleted.)

2. Review ratings: Our registered reviewers have been an excellent early warning system, so we provided the ability to give reviews a rating, based on how fair/informative or unfair/suspicious they are. Top reviewers, whose names are in blue, having rated the most restaurants and established a certain amount of clout on the site, get to vote +2/-2. If a rating gets voted down beyond -5, it disappears.

3. Calculating weighted averages: We don’t calculate just the raw average of all the reviews. We weight the average towards what the majority of reviewers think. This means that if a place has ten reviews, nine of them 5-5-5 and one of them 1-1-1, the restaurant does not get a 4.6. That would give that one holdout way too much power. Instead, that one very negative vote gets a lot less influence. In some cases, it gets none at all. This means that anyone wanting to skew the reviews in their favor has to fake a LOT of reviews to change the prevailing opinion. At that point, it becomes pretty obvious to us on the admin side that something fishy is going on.

4. Good old-fashioned spot-checks and deep monitoring. We read the site every day. We notice things, especially user suspicion in the form of negative ratings, or a sudden influx of very high or very low reviews for a single restaurant. On the admin side, we have a lot of tools to cross-reference and examine review sources and trends. Patterns tend to become quite clear, and consequences are doled out accordingly.

5. It’s windy at the top. As a restaurant receives increasingly high ratings, it attracts more attention from both users and admins. If reviews seem fake, and the actual experience is not everything it was promised to be, there’s usually an outcry and very low ratings follow very fast, which tends to do worse for a restaurant’s reputation than if it had just had modest reviews to begin with. We watch for restaurants with conflicted ratings, sudden popularity/unpopularity, and those with a lot of mostly anonymous reviews or registered reviewers with just one review. In our experience, users notice these signals too and negative ratings follow quickly.

6. Consequences: Individual reviews and/or accounts may be disabled or deleted. If suspicious activity on a particular restaurant persists, we may disable reviews entirely for that restaurant, along with a message explaining why we had to do this. If it persists after that, we disable reviews permanently.

The worst consequence of all, however, is the fact that even if we do nothing at all, potential customers can usually tell when reviews are fake. This really makes a restaurant look bad, and there have been a few cases where a restaurant that may have gotten decent reviews otherwise suddenly was reviewed a lot more critically because reviewers were angry that someone was trying to cheat the system.

No system is perfect, and we’re sure that there are, even now, fake reviews on our site. Eat has been designed to make their influence almost nonexistent, so that in order to add enough fake ones to actually change things, you have to add so many that you become much easier to catch.

All of this is intended to create an even and fair playing field for all the restaurant owners, and to make sure users can trust that the vast majority of reviews on our site were written by real customers like themselves.

Small fixes you asked for

We’re delighted so many of you have taken the time to send us feedback. Here are a bunch of changes we’ve made recently in response to your requests:

1. Remember me! We agree, it was incredibly annoying to have to re-login all the time. We’ve added the “remember me” checkbox to the login form, so this shouldn’t be happening anymore.
2. Re-order search results. Another tiny yet powerful tool. There’s a drop-down menu at the top right of the search result page now which lets you reorder your search results. So for example, if you can’t remember the name of that new italian place, search for “ital” and reorder by “most recent”. Best japanese restaurant? Search for “japan” and reorder by “food quality”. Ta-dah!
3. Clearer map filters. People used to forget filters “on” and wonder why certain restaurants weren’t appearing on the map. If all filters are showing all possible results, the text on each one is now in brackets and greyed out, like so:
4. See all reviews on Eat.fi. We’ve added an “All of Eat.fi” tab to the “Reviews” section, so you can follow all reviews across the country at once, to help you find restaurants in other cities that you may want to bookmark in case you visit later.

And yes. We are working on the mobile site. There’s a functioning beta already, but it’s still missing a bunch of features that we’d like to add before you all start using it and wondering where those features are. If you really really want to start using the beta already, while being fully aware that it is very much still under construction, send us an email and we’ll send you the link.

Other cities, wiki-like editing tools

You may have noticed that we now list Tampere and Porvoo in addition to Helsinki in our “choose city” list, and may be wondering, “Why Porvoo? Why not some other big city?” There is a method to our madness. Since we introduced our wiki-like editing tools, any registered user is able to add/edit restaurant information.

This means that if you live in an area that doesn’t have much information on Eat.fi yet, but wish it would get more visibility, you can do something about it. If we notice a lot of activity in a certain city, with most of the information (opening times, categories, and contact information for restaurants) filled in, we’ll display that city on the front page. Since Porvoo now has a lot of information on it, we gave Porvoo some of that front-page love.

What wiki-like editing tools?

On every restaurant page, at the top right, there is now a link that says “Update information.”

If you’re logged in as a registered user, you’ll find all the tools you need to change opening times, contact info, etc. in this menu. In order to prevent vandalism, we log all user changes in a public “history” log, which can also be found at the bottom of this menu.

If a restaurant owner has “claimed” their restaurant, ie has logged in and indicated that he or she is in charge of this restaurant’s information from now on, you won’t see these tools, but rather a message field which will allow you to report wrong information directly to the restaurant owner.

We believe that by giving users and owners direct and free access to restaurant information, the site will stay far more accurate than if we tried to centralize upkeep. No one knows better(or sooner) than the restaurant owners or local customers themselves when a restaurant is undergoing renovations, or has changed its opening times. Try it out and let us know what you think!

Ladies and Gentlemen! It’s a…Beta!

Yes, the beta version of eat.fi is finally public.

I developed the original Eat.fi in 2005 because I really like good food, but was usually too busy or too lazy to cook, and tended to forget to eat until most restaurants had already closed. I couldn’t find a site that could tell me what was good, still open, and not too far away. Over time, as Eat.fi grew more popular, it became increasingly obvious that I had a choice to make; keep it as a little Helsinki-only site, or give it a chance to grow into something more robust and mature. So after a year of development, we finally came up with this, the original Eat.fi’s shiny new big brother, built entirely from the ground up to look better, work better, and be far more expandable in the future.

But please note: THIS IS A BETA SITE. Not beta in the endless Web 2.0 sense. We mean beta in the “testing phase sandbox not live yet” sense. This means:

• Do not add any real content to this site, and do not count on the information on it to be accurate or up to date. Any reviews, accounts, profile data, or other content that you put on this beta site will disappear in a month. It will be deleted. Gone. Not retrievable. Therefore, feel free to play around as much as you like, push the site to its limits, but if you have a real review to write, write it in the old Eat.fi site. Once beta testing is over, we will port everything from the old Eat.fi to the final new site.
• The beta site is not yet optimized for Internet Explorer. It will be, but we’re doing initial testing in Firefox and Safari first.
• The beta site is only in English. The final site will also be in Finnish and Swedish, but we want to hone all the texts in English first before we hand the files over to a real translator.
• Please tell us about any bugs or problems you find. Be critical, be honest. This is what the beta site is for–to run the site through its paces, kick the tires and beat it up before we let it go live to thousands of impatient people.

With all of the above in mind, here it is: http://beta.eat.fi (username “eat” and password “better”)

Thank you in advance.

–Tina Aspiala and the rest of the Eat.fi development team

Move is done!

The site is happily running on the new server, though the url took forever to redirect. Argh. The good news is that now we have total access on a happy Linux platform, and can go ahead with a lot of plans that weren’t possible before. You should be seeing the results of this around the end of February/beginning of March.

Saitti pyörii jo uudella serverillä, vaikka url:in muutto kesti ärsyttävän kauan. Muuten hyviä uutisia: nyt kun se on siinä, pystymme toteuttamaan suunnitelmia jokta eivät ennen olleet mahdollisia. Työn tulokset näkyvät varmaan jo helmikuun lopussa/maaliskuun alussa.

Server move again

In order to make it possible for us to implement some of the new developments we’re planning, we’re moving to a new server again, hopefully for the last time for a long time. After the move, we’ll get cracking on allowing restaurant customers (not just restaurants) to log in and have access to some useful personalized features. And we’re not talking giving you yet another blog or discussion forum or what have you–as usual, we will be focusing on helping you find the restaurants you’re looking for. We’ll keep you posted.

Olemme muuttamassa uuteen kotimaiseen serveriin(toivottavasti tämä on viimeinen kerta) jotta pääsemme rakentamaan pari uutta toimintoa. Heti muuton jälkeen alamme kehittää ravintolaasiakkaiden kirjautumis-toimintoja. Luvassa on hyödyllisiä henk.koht. työkaluja, jotka tekevät ravintolahaun vielä helpommaksi. Kerromme lisää kun olemme pidemmällä!

No more dirty urls

From now on, each restaurant has its own “clean” url. What does this mean? It means that this:

http://www.eat.fi/?str=2&restaurant=476

is now this:

http://www.eat.fi/espresso_edge

Easier to read, no? Also easier to remember, to use in marketing, and easier for Google to find. Restaurant owners, this is for you!

Meidän vanhat “likaiset” URLit (kuten http://www.eat.fi/?str=2&restaurant=476) ovat nyt selkeämpiä: http://www.eat.fi/espresso_edge
Eli jos olet ravintolanomistaja joka on käyttänyt eat.fi sivuja omana nettisivuna, voit nyt antaa asiakkailesi selkeän osoitteen.

Jos haluat muuttaa sitä jollain tavalla, ota meihin yhteyttä, info@eatforum.com

We are Opera compatible

The Fat Lady sings! (Thanks to Pazi for the tip) We have finally gotten around to fixing the map code so the main map now works in Opera browsers as well. Enjoy. Incidentally, the eat mobile site (http://www.eat.fi/mini) works pretty well on the free Opera Mini software, too.

Eat.fi:n pääkartta toimii nyt myös Opera selaimella. (Kiitos Pazi!) Eat.fi/mini toimii myös aika hyvin ilmaisella Opera Mini mobiili selaimella.

Server move done.

We’re up and running on the new server, so everything should be sunshine, roses and sweet sweet speed from here on out.

Saitti toimii nyt uudella serverilla, eli nyt sivjen lataus nopeus pitäisi olla huomattavasti parempi kuin ennen.

New server

We’re doing it, we’re moving to a faster and better server, so you’ll get faster and better service. This means potential weird behavior on the site for a few days, but if all goes well, everything will behave normally all through the moving process anyway. Thanks for your patience!

Ajattelimme myös yrittää kirjoittaa samalla suomeksi–siis: Muutamme uuteen serveriin, jonka pitäisi tarjota parempaa ja nopeampaa palvelua. Tästä johtuen saitti saattaa käyttäytyä pari päivää hieman oudosti, vaikka jos kaikki menee hyvin, käyttäjän ei pitäisi huomata mitään erikoista. Kiitämme etukäteen kärsivällisyydestänne!

Bad server. No cookie.

Our server has suddenly been having problems, causing the site to sometimes load slower than it should. We’re still figuring out what’s wrong–it’s not a simple or obvious fix (until we fix it, of course). We may even eventually move the site to another server entirely. If you know of a good, reliable web host in Finland, we’re interested in hearing your recommendations.

Testing the mobile site–want to help?

The mobile site, http://www.eat.fi/mini is up and running, and we’ve tried to test it on as many phones as possible, but now we need your help.

We’d like to know:

1. Does it work on your phone? Let us know the brand and model number. Here’s where you can check your Nokia model number, your Sony Ericsson, your Siemens, and your Samsung.

You may also want to try downloading the Opera Mobile browser. It comes in a Mobile and a Mini version, depending on how fancy your phone is. (No, we have no affiliation with them)

2. How fast does it run?

1. Too slow to be used
2. Barely useable (if you’re patient)
3. Useable speed

3. How wide is it on your screen?

1. Too wide
2. Ok
3. Too narrow

The more information you can give us, the better chance we have of improving the service.