Interesting. I've had more than one manufacturer tell me they'd much rather have the reviews not go anonymous, but then other non mfgs would rather have it go anonymous.
Again, the goal of this website is to help people out.. Not to argue about it. I'd love to see it take off, and I'm sure I'm not the only one that sees the potential of how useful it can be. Over 1,000 views, and very few people have spent a minute writing a review. Is that what I should expect? IMO I thought this would be a hit.
You are asking people to put some personal time and effort into something. It shouldn't be surprising that you are not getting a lot of reviews written. The people (in this thread) that like the idea of a review web site want to primarily read reviews, not write them.
Take a step back and figure out what motivates people to write a review. I'd say that a lot of times, it's a negative experience that gets people to put out the effort to write a review. This hobby is very niche with a very small community of riders and vendors. You sort of know everyone, even on an international basis. At any bigger ride, you can expect to run into, talk to, be familiar with a majority of the vendors and "celeb" riders. That's pretty unique - I cannot think of too many other hobbies where you get that close to every level of market participant. So what does that mean for product reviews?
Because the community is so small, you may sort of automatically feel somewhat connected to the vendor you just had a bad experience with. Maybe it's someone that you've ridden with before or had a beer with. Maybe it's someone you've gotten a free t-shirt from before. Maybe it's someone that is pretty well universally liked. Now if you have to leave your real name (or established X-H2O screen name), you're probably going to think twice about writing anything negative.
Because of how small the market is, a lot of times when a bad review is posted the vendor actually comes on here to defend themselves and/or to call into question whatever the customer is saying/writing/doing. That's also pretty unique. Or perhaps the vendor even contacts people who run the site to step in, one way or another.
Just my opinion. The hobby is too small for honest reviews with recognizable names and it is too small to get a meaningful number of active review writers.
That gives you some time to play with the website, keep it up!
