HelpHound

Matt Zimmerman, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation

recently told the SF Weekly. "Litigants have this pre-Internet mentality where they think they can control messages about themselves in public,"

Weighted Rating^TM

A fundamental feature of HelpHound

Ordinary 'review' sites are vulnerable to misuse and abuse...

Self-reviewing - the Business (and staff/friends) giving itself good reviews without identifying themselves as 'connected' (HelpHound welcomes reviews from those connected with the business, all we ask is that they identify themselves as such)
Ranters - members with an axe to grind giving multiple bad reviews
Out of date reviews

Weighted Rating^TM identifies such behaviour and either excludes such ratings altogether or by the 'individual member rating' - see below - gives such ratings a low weighting, giving them minimal influence.

We rate businesses AND members

HelpHound rates our individual members - simply put this means that...

A member who is very active, balanced in their reviewing (some positive, some negative) will receive an above average weighting and their reviews will carry above average weight
A member who rarely writes reviews, and is, for example, always negative will receive a below average weighting and their reviews will carry below average weight
A long-term member will have more say ('weight') than someone who has just joined. This prevents new users having undue influence, and also gives credit to those who have invested time in the community

Reporting reviews

In addition we have a reporting system where any registered user can report any review for attention by our moderators. We then decide whether to...

Delete the review (the reviewer and reporter will be notified)
Suspend the review pending enquiry (the reviewer will be notified)
To allow the review (the reporter will be notified)

Taken together all this forms Weighted Rating^TM - a system unique to HelpHound