Fraudulent Ratings & Reviewers

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Can also be seen in the reviews for Pirate's Grog Golden, Pirate's Grog No. 13 and Queen Charlotte's Reserve just to name a few.

At first glance I thought this thread - "Fraudulent Ratings and Reviewers" was about some of the well known faux reviewers and websites on the net. Those who frequent the Rum Project know who they are. Some years back we actually spent a ton of time closely analyzing reviewers in our "Reviewer's Reviews" and found that most had a distinct tendency to favor high scores. . Did the fact that many of these reviewers are dependent on freebies from the distillers or distributors have anything to do with this. Survey sez: you bet! . But this thread covers a new and direct way of fudging the results, in this case by trolls or shills. Should we be surprised? I think not. When polls are open to all comers and can't be screened, you can bet such false ratings will happen and frankly, I'm not sure what can be done about it. It has almost become common practice for paid trolls to push political opinions and the like, so inflated ratings for a rum client? . Of course. This is truly sad. To me the benefit of this site is to find out what the people like and over time, a number of repeat posters may come to have their own followers whose tastes match their own. Yet if enough shills invade the ratings, it simply can't be good. . My guess is that the shill will be quickly outed. Some of the regulars and honest posters will quickly counter them, and in no uncertain terms. Thus it may be expected that their shilling will backfire badly. Too bad, so sad... . A good thread, thanks to the OP...

BTW, here's the link to our Reviewer's Reviews. Some of these go waaay back. I should also add that the Master Sugar List will soon be expanded from 783 rums, as I have received another 200 tests. Reviewer's Reviews: http://rumproject.com/rumforum//viewforum.php?f=17 Master Sugar List: http://rumproject.com/rumforum//viewtopic.php?t=1683

I'll quickly delete any reviews that are fraudulent. Every rating has a small box on the bottom right where any user can report it - please feel free to do so, I absolutely can't stand any kind of 'stacking the deck' by producers. In fact any user with only 1-2 ratings and all '10s' I figure are fraudulent.