I know The review system on Grams has been horrible lately and I apologize. We constantly update Reddit reviews but never market reviews.
There is 3 problems I ran in to with the current system.
1. The ddos protection on markets makes it near impossible to do the scraping I would need to do.
2. The database is becoming very large with all the reviews for every vendor for every market.
3. The markets all have different criteria for reviews/rating systems.
Proposed new system.
The new system I want to create would require the markets to work with me, but I think it would benefit the community greatly.
Here is how it would work.
Standardized system for only vendors
A new standardize rating system based on the Grams current star ratings would need to be agreed upon between markets that wish to participate. It would utilize these rules.
- 1 to 5 stars rating about vendors only (not products or listings)
- The reviewer would have to have their pgp key lined to the review. ( all markets should require users to have pgp keys anyways)
- A limited about of comment space (ex: 250 characters) .
- 1 rating per user (reviewer) per Vendor.
With these rules it would help deter fraud and wouldn't bump down a vendors score if one user decided to post a lot of negative reviews. The markets could still allow multiple reviews per user to a single vendor, but my system would only pick up the most recent and replace the old rating from said user to said vendor in the system.
Making it work with the markets.
This is going be beneficial to the markets as well.
- The markets would have to setup and api system I would create which would allow Grams to scrape the reviews with an API key , as such I could bypass their ddos protection.
- In return I would set up an api system for the markets that would allow the them to get the systems total score from Grams and last 5 or so review comments for Vendors.
This would make it so users could go view a vendor's page on any participating market and see an overall score from all markets for that vendor. They could also see 5 or so of the most recent comments left from other markets.
brain storm thoughts
Some other ideas that could be implemented
- The grams central hub would only save the most recent 5 or so comments for each vendor which would save on disk space
- We could have a exit scam alert system, so if one Vendor get 5 or more bad reviews in a row on any market , the other markets would see a exit scam warning int he api and could warn their users.
- I could upload the db of all the review ratings once a month , in case Grams goes down the latest back ups can be gotten by anyone and started all over again
- The system could also include a total sales count per vendor for all markets
Conclusion
This is just idea I have been working on. I would like to know the community's thoughts on it. Also it will never work with out market participation. So if you run a market please contact me through the normal channels so we can get to work on this.
As always stay safe,
-GramsAdmin
I really like this idea!