Brooke's comments
(member since Nov 11, 2007)
Brooke's comments from the Goodreads Feedback group.
(showing 1-20 of 314)
Otis, I think we've gone over this before, but the people I've gotten the "Let's compare books" emails from are people I've never encountered before in my life, I'm not sure how they would have me in their address book.
I think it's a combination of those two, length + votes. I'm not sure if anything else goes into it.
Nancy, everyone uses this site differently. Some people keep track of personal book collections, some people add reviews for others to read, some people use it to find recommendations but aren't interested in updating their shelves and profiles. I'm sure that your friends are using the site in the way that's most useful to them, just as you are.
You should also flag the message that you received (the 'flag' link is on the righthand side of the message screen).
The author guidelines page mentions that authors can be banned for engaging in rude behavior with readers, and while the paragraph refers to attacking readers for their reviews/ratings, I'm sure the GR team would consider this in a similar way.
Lisa, the issue is receiving each email multiple times. Someone in one of the groups I'm in reported that this morning, they had 4 emails stating that we're reading The War of the Worlds in October.
Carolyn, I disagree - for me, "It's OK" isn't a negative statement. It means the book was pretty solid, I enjoyed my time with it, but it didn't go above and beyond to stick with me too far into the future.
Which just goes to show that these ratings that get debated here so often are so damn subjective that no rating system could truly capture what everyone wants it to. So if someone really wants to convey to everyone how they felt about a book, they should write a review instead of worrying about people understanding their star ratings. I think people overestimate how much GR users rely on the number of stars and the average rating compared to actual written reviews.
Writing a summary is only a spoiler if you give away the ending.
Unless the surprises are in the middle of the book... :)
As for the main topic, if you're worried about the quality of reviews, and you think that non-summary reviews are of higher quality, make sure you vote for the ones you DO like so that they're pushed towards the top and everyone can enjoy them.
Lisa, from reading the comments here, it sounds like this is different from a situation involving forwarded GR emails - it sounds like people are clicking on others' profiles while on the website and somehow ending up in their accounts?
Regarding Otis & Co liking the soft log-in bug/feature with forwarded emails, is there a reason why? I can't really see any benefit to that.
Well, GR's policy specifically says, "Subject to the terms and conditions of this agreement, Goodreads grants you permission to use the Service for your personal, non-commercial purposes only." It then lists a bunch of forbidden actions that would breach that term. If this account is violating any of them, then it shouldn't be allowed.
I don't think you have to clear it out for this apparent bug to show up. I had 6 books in my 'currently reading' list. After I moved one over to 'read' there were 5 remaining, but the last update for that 6th one stayed there until I selected another book from the drop-down menu and entered the first update for it. And the same happened when I went from 5 on 'currently reading' to 4.
Cait wrote: "It will stop showing when you move the book from currently-reading to read, I believe."
Not anymore...it used to, but now it stays there until I put in an update for the next book I'm reading.
It would be really neat if there was some more information, like the people whose reviews you have voted for the most.
Back in my day, we only had five stars to pick from! Uphill, both ways! In the snow!
Otis has said he plans on keeping his focus on books, but hopefully someone could design something for movies! I've gone searching for movie sites myself, and the closest thing I've found that works like GR is IMDB. My only complaint, and the reason I abandoned it pretty quickly, is that there's nothing on each movie's page that tells you if you already have it added to your lists. Furthermore, if you add something to your list that you already have, it just adds it a 2nd time rather than blocking it or warning you that it's already there.
I've found other sites that try to do this that are just lacking for one reason or another.
It might be related, but I haven't had GR updates show up on Facebook in at least a few days.
Me too, or replace it with instructions to use the 'add book/author' link intead.
Doing it that way is sort of like a surprise grab bag, you never know what you're going to get.
The more dependable way of doing it is by clicking on the "add book/author" link (it's sitting right on top of the comment window that you type in) and searching for the book/author you want.
In a group with lots of members, making sure to only select all but one (or however many request not to receive them) could be problematic.
Jul 29, 2009 05:46AM
I don't necessarily think that a bookstore only writing positive reviews is a bad or suspect thing. My favorite indie store papers its shelves with yellow notecards that its staff handwrites reviews on. They're all positive, because they're all books that the staff loved that they want to share. And of course, encourage you to buy. But I spent many afternoons wandering around reading all the notecards just to find out what they liked and pick out something they recommended to buy. They never did mislead me.
FicusFan, I believe someone has said before that the GR team only has 2 full-time people on it. Out of all the websites I've used, GR is the most responsive and the quickest when it comes to user concerns, bugs, and improvements. I've never, ever used a website that implemented changes and then didn't have a bunch of bugs pop up that needed to be reported. Last.fm, even after running a huge beta before making changes permanently, will still have things that need to be ironed out.
Besides, as long as it's a free website, I'm not sure anyone's in a position to yell at them for not moving fast enough.
