Shilling - how much can you trust online reviews

[Pistachio]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8118577.stm

Interesting article. Explains how you can't always trust online reviews.

Does this site do anything to stop these practices?

[curleyted]

Interesting indeed.... maybe this answers it? http://www.freelancesupermarket.com/...ty-policy.aspx

[Beefy198]

One would presume they haven't designed the site without considering this, but obviously without knowing what procedures they have in place I couldn't say for sure.

But one thing IS for sure... whenever you have a review system, some people will try and take the ****.

[UKFF Mod]

Thanks all for your concern!

We do indeed have a robust policy on our feedback. As we're sure you can imagine, as the site centres around this it is of great importance to us.

As Beefy198 hints, whenever you have a site like this people will try to use it to their advantage. However, a lot of the time they will do simple things such as using the same IP address (or in the case of some companies, the same range of IP addresses) . This can be easily be tracked by our software.

However, it also does more than that and can highlight suspicious feedback patterns, which for obvious reasons (as the companies in that news article chose not to do) I won't go into in great detail. Needless to say though, if something suspicious occurs like one member getting terrible feedback and a few seconds later someone near to them gets fantastic feedback this would be highlighted, much the same way that someone logging in once to give someone great feedback and another person atrocious feedback would.

We're reviewing this all the time and tweaking it, so hopefully we will stay on top of it.

Any concerns over feedback can always be emailed to the team at profiles@freelancesupermarket.com, who will initiate a manual investigation just in case the software has missed something.

The only thing I will close with saying though is that if lots of people in our sector give open and honest feedback to people and companies that they have had actually dealt with then the odd piece of malicious feedback won't actually affect the overall score much.

[curleyted]

Thanks for that FLSM Mod