Yelp is the worst when it comes to bogus reviews. Ebay even does it too. When I had “Powerseller” status they would “clean up” any less than perfect reviews I had as a benefit of reaching the higher seller level.
I can well understand why Eric would not enjoy seeing the word shill on the subject line next to his company’s name. I know he does a great job in a thankless environment called the Internet .
People tend to do bad things in every good thing we have, so why should wine be different. If you read notes for any length of years you realize when something seems fishy and move on. Oh yeah, contact the site administrator whoever they are.
Agreed - gives a ‘negative connotation’ even if that’s not what was meant . . .
Cheers.
… Perhaps change the thread title to “Shills on Wine Rating Sites”?
The problem with CT is not CT itself, it is that most of the rest of you insist on using screen names. When a review says Keith Levenberg, or Salil, or King Cab, or a few others I know, I might take it seriously, but why should I care what OldJoe, JBB007, Papies or Quaglia think about 1994 Sassicaia, which I happened to be looking at on the train this morning. BurgundyAl, who I think I have met and who has at least a moderate reputation for competence, gave a short cautionary note, which was worth more than the others combined (except who is MDefreitas? - I know that guy - who was also not ecstatic). Looking up handles in the WB CT handles thread is too much of a PITA.
PS - I’m J @ y H @ c k, which is really hard to figure out, but no one wants to read my notes anyway.
Have you reported it on CT?
In a discussion thread about how review sites clean up feedback for high-level contributors, someone suggests cleaning up a thread title to make it more favorable to a high-level forum contributor? That’s massacree-level irony.
And still no one has reported a shill note or any note in the past few hours. I guess it is more fun to just rail on rather that taking 2 seconds to click a link and point something out to my team to investigate.
That behavior is totally Kosher. Wineries entering their own tasting notes are not.
I have alot of notes on CT and I can’t say I’ve ever seen “shills”. I’ve seen those random 99 scored wines from people with no notes, but I generally ignore scores without notes.
Frankly, I could see retailers having issues with CT scores because I find they tend to be lower and less exuberant than the professional tasters.
Eric, to be clear, I was expressly told by someone that worked (in the past, I presume) for an importer that they created shill accounts to post shill notes for wines on CT. I assume they do it with a modicum of care so that the notes aren’t obviously reportable - it would take a minimum of effort to conceal the shill (by, for example, mixing in some notes for other wines).
Why don’t you tell Eric what the wines were?
I knew you would take that the wrong way. I didn’t call you naive - I said don’t be naive about this kind of stuff happening. No need to be defensive.
How would I know?
Maybe I misunderstood – I thought the sales person saw what you were looking up.
No - he was saying generally, don’t trust vivino and CT because smart importers are placing shill reviews on the sites. It wasn’t with respect to any particular wine.
I have reported shill reviews; the CT team fixed them immediately.
I can definitely see David’s point that some importers or producers could take advantage with very little effort.
The problem is, remembering what looked suspicious 2-3 months ago or more is rather hard to report because the mind forgets things. But I have seen over-enthusiastic reviews on what seemed to be mediocre wines. Perhaps that was the person’s honest opinion, or perhaps it was somebody trying to flog a few more cases of a dog wine they received. No need to get defensive about it. When there is money on the line, people seem to do anything to try to get more…simple human nature.
I’ve contacted Eric on three different occasions when I’d found obviously bogus notes, all three times Eric removed the notes. I recommend doing that.
[quote=“Scott Brunson”]I have reported shill reviews; the CT team fixed them immediately.
I can definitely see David’s point that some importers or producers could take advantage with very little effort.[/quote
My basic question here is how do you know it’s a shill review? The wording, the description, what is a giveaway. I write real reviews on both with my real name in them.