Suggestion Box

There's a lot of issues with this in terms of why people review and the credit they'd like to receive for reviewing. Obviously, if someone spends an hour on a review for an author only to have it made private by the author within minutes -- well, it makes for very unhappy reviewers. For that reason, it's a bit of a give and take. You CAN hide a review from the public reviewing page, but in doing so, you're also hiding it from yourself.

From a "publishers" perspective, it's pretty important to keep in mind: Public reviews aren't really "public". You have to be logged into an account to see public reviews... So it's not like they're ever picked up by Google or in any place where a publisher could just wander into them. Public reviews also are not attached to an item. One has to "hunt" them down on the public review page -- I honestly don't think any publisher would take the time to do this. It's likely a less than a 1% kind of thing. And access restrictions applied to an item also applies to the reviews of an item. IE, "registered author only" items show reviews only to registered authors+.

From a "private reviews only" stand point, we like to give options, but too many options causes a lot of issues. The most important being how one is notified that an item only accepts private reviews before they spend time reading it. The majority of people who review do so not just for the reviewing, but also for their "team" like public crediting. Those members reviewing for that reason would need a clear indicator before visiting an item, and IMHO, another indicator on an item link only serves to add to the confusion and clutter issues that we already have on the site.

For things you're most concerned about with publication, stick with access restrictions and/or passkeys. Invite individual reviewers to your works and/or make them Group Only. Since those reviewers won't be receiving credits or GPs from the WDC public, you'll want to offer your own incentives directly to reviewers to entice them to help you out. And/or hide your old reviews for an item. It's a nice courtesy to reviewers to leave their reviews in public for at least a few days to two weeks (after 2 weeks, a public review can no longer receive review credits).

Best wishes,
~~SM

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