How can we make the PotW more attractive to enter for all members and ensure the best review wins regardless of the popularity of the author?

Because a certain member has been getting on the POW rostrum pretty much every week here there have been grumbles on ciaochatter that the POW is less about the best review winning the prize and purely about how many Excellent rates you can accrue. Well hey, guess what: you’re right! Tell us something we didn’t know! Surely the whole point of the POW is exactly that and exactly what ciao want to encourage us to do on this website – rate back! It’s pretty obvious most reviews on the newest review list are not what people want to read and rate but we grin and bare it – so why would the comps be ... more

Ciao is a site for consumer reviews, but it also is a site which embraces its community of members. We are rewarded for what we write, and Ciao hold competitions to reward those of us who write particularly good consumer reviews. Right? Well - right and wrong. The problem with some of the competitions is that Ciao use member rates as a way of judging which review is “best”. Sometimes this works, and exceptional reviews win competitions or diamonds. Other times it doesn’t - with strangely ordinary reviews cleaning up. The competition where this is most obvious is Product of the Week. This ... more

When I first joined ciao, for a while I lived in blissful ignorance of many of the site's features, I'd vaguely heard tell of the premium fund but have to admit that the product of the week competition passed me by along with a fair few other members' features I failed to investigate. As time went on, and having probably rated a fair few POtW (as I shall hereby refer to it) reviews without realising it, I started to wonder why I was coming across 5000 word reviews of everyday food items, complete with the history of the company and blow by blow wrapper description in excruciating detail and ... more