You may have noticed that your Epinions MPA/MPR rankings for Sports & Outdoors has disappeared. This is a known problem that the site engineers are working on fixing.

There's a thread over on the Sporting Good forum that discusses this problem in more detail...

What's happening in the Sports & Outdoors Category?

Jeff

(2/27/08 Update)

There's also been a thread started on the main Epinions board asking when the Sports and Outdoors Category will be restored into the MPA/MPR rankings.

There are a couple of threads over on the main Epinions message board that deal with the status of the Sports & Outdoors Category (along with the other categories that seem to be 'dead' at the moment).

Is There Enough Communication Between Members & Management?

Is There .... an actual rough guesstimated ETA on when Sports and Outdoors will be resuurrected as a category?

Updated Visits?

The Beauty/Wellness Category(relates to Sports & Outdoors too)

I hate to ask

Some additional threads on the Sports and Outdoors issues...

Why is everyone freaking out?

A thread for commenting on the purported status report on the invisibility of postings

What Almar (from Epinions) said about the current situation...

I'll be as candid as I can in answering these questions with the knowledge I have now:

1) Is this is going to be a permanent problem (aka, are the currently dead categories dead forever);

I'm told no. In fact, when the catalog fixes go out, this should fix a lot of the problems. For the "dead forever" ones, I believe we're looking into ways to at least salvage the review and give you the ability to move it (better than the way it works now) if the product no longer exists.

2) If it's not a permanent problem, when will it be fixed?; and

The engineers are working on this right now (and trying to solve the issue of the greyed out reviews) and a bunch of other stuff including missing hits.

3) If it can be fixed, will the hits that are currently occuring but not registering going to be credited back? Will there be any IS credit and will the future, properly credited hits earn IS?

I hate to say it, but I don't think we'll be able credit back the missing hits (hopefully I'm wrong but I doubt it on this one). But if we're able to fix the missing hits, then yes, I think it's safe to assume you'll be properly credited for hits moving forward from the period it's fixed.


Please keep in mind that the answers might change depending on what they discover to be the root of the issues. As with the greyed out reviews, it turns out there was more than one cause to that but what you saw as a result was the same. Hopefully that isn't the case for everything mentioned but unfortunately it's not that straightforward (from what I'm told).

-Almar


That was said in this thread

I'm trying to be hopeful, but it looks like they are hoping a new catalog roll-out will ''fix'' a lot of the problems. Is anyone is Sports/Outdoors getting outside hits on their reviews (besides a few stray ones here and there.)? -Dave

Jeff- Did you have any IS on your Outdoor reviews for May? I couldn't find any for mine. Hopefully they'll get this fixed very soon. -Dave

Well, since such a discussion is evidently too negative for the general board, maybe I'll commiserate with those obviously feeling the same pain and burden.

No. None of May's in the category show IS. Frankly, my IS has almost degenerated to a point where I'm afraid that next month, I'll be back to getting pennies overall. Half of this month's IS comes from a single Outdoor Gear review. Most of my steadily producing reviews in the category have been switched to the /review/ URL; including those that should be and were producing steady hits and IS right up to their changeover.

This is the really frustrating part. Not only did the category get nailed at Christmas vis a vis the usual bump, now that we're in "the season" for Outdoor Gear (especially flyfishing and camping), the lack of registered hits and the resultant nonexistent IS ends up being a double hit. On top of that, those who aren't suffering, spend time crowing on the general boards (including one who has a review in OG and claims IS from last month on that, single review which is over six times my total IS as a Top Reviewer in the category), evidently without understanding, admitting, or recognizing that this "distributed differently" IS concept is really a case of their benefiting, literally, at our expense - as well as the other categories similarly afflicted.

However, when it is mentioned over on the general boards, the responses are: stop being so negative, diversify - don't be so invested in a single category (like that is a "bad" thing; i.e., focusing on those areas where you have some expertise), it'll be fixed "soon" so stop whining, or take advantage of the 10-4-10 (which we have been repeatedly told is not supposed to be substituting for IS). Now, unlike any number who have openly admitted to spending 4 - 6 hrs. a day on the site, it is difficult for me to envision being able to avail myself sufficiently of the 10-4-10 to compensate for the continuing loss of IS.

Other than continuing patience, the real question is: "What other option is there except not to 'play' anymore (which isn't really an option - yet)?"

At least for the overall MPA list (sitewide), it seems that the invisible reviews for Outdoor Gear & Sporting Goods reviews have been re-incorporated into hit totals (though the reviews themselves aren't counting new hits - it's just counting what you had already gotten pre-/review/ bug). However there's still no tracking for the reviews themselves and if you try to get hit counts for the individual category, it's not there.

I guess it's some sort of improvement.

Jeff

Interesting. My overall standing didn't change too much. I see some people on the main boards mentioned they dropped in the overall standings with the new data added in - LOL. I wish the powers-that-be would tell us something about what's going on. -Dave