Just another day in the office – Part #2

Well it seems that yesterday caused up quite a stir in the review community and quite rightly so, but our opinions had to be shared and there is certainly no harm in that, though others may disagree, and when we say may, we actually mean, they WILL.

Now Part #1 is done and dusted, we can move onto another area of running a review site, which comes down to other review sites and the way they act or are perceived to act towards you.

The first thing that I will say is that the review world is a bitchy place, and if you run one yourself or have had any experience in the past, you will see that too. It’s all about the golden crown that everyone is chasing and whilst we get on with a lot of other sites, there are the few that seem to have a chip on their shoulder.

Now certain aspects of a review site rely on each other and this is mainly the case when publishing each others content which provides for healthy backlinks which search engines can love and adore, but whilst a lot of sites insist that you publish theirs and when you don’t they throw a fit, but when the tables are turned it’s a completely different story.

One of the major gripes is gossip. We all thrive on gossip and drama but there has to be some truth behind it or at least stated that your opinion is of that nature. Now this all comes down to dealing with the sample providers and clients. Now over the years, ourselves and others that we are aware of have been faced with a situation of hearing lies from clients that they have been told by other review sites, which mainly are more established. Maybe they are feeling threatened into the speed and growth you are developing and are using black-hat type tactics to tarnish your name.

Whatever the reason, it’s wrong and shouldn’t be tolerated. Yes we all have our opinions, much like we did yesterday and clearly showed that these were our feelings and invited the companies to reply to shoot down our expressed opinion. This is where over the years we have proved to clients and sample providers that what they heard is wrong and in the long run they have respected us for that.

Now another area that we have to touch on is the reviews themselves and more importantly the testing procedures that are set in place. Now we will even hold our hands up here and admit that we made some mistakes in the past, but that’s more than some people will do who carry on skipping past doing as little work as possible, expecting things to be handed to them on a plate.

Power supply testing for instance; involves some of the most extreme testing which is why we invested our own money into the relevant test equipment to do things properly and in the near future will see us testing all areas of power supplies. Now we do know that many sites can’t afford such equipment as it doesn’t come cheap but if that is the case, you need to tell the sponsor that you don’t have the equipment as a digital multimeter testing the voltage rails just don’t cut it any more. This is why you have seen a severe lack of power supply reviews as of late but expect that to change.

It’s the same scenario with cooling based products. All of our cooling reviews will now see us testing the products by not just measuring temperature but also testing the acoustic volume. Much like our general hardware reviews, where we measure power draw at the wall. It’s little things like this that we have learnt from some of our partners and have invested the time and money in to provide you with accurate, reliable information and to learn from our mistakes. Buying a cost effective and reliable plug in electricty meter that can cost you less than a night out seems excessive to some though. Go figure!

Not as lengthy of an article today, but still packed with information to give you guidance on how things are run in this world, that some put their heart and soul into. As we are aware of a lot of sites who shed blood, sweat and tears to make things work and we’d like to think we belong in that category, whereas the rest who are solely in it for the money and don’t want to put the work in will eventually crumble.

It is worth noting that all views expressed within this article are solely that of eTeknix and not of the review community in general. Therefore all views are, as our product reviews; an opinion by the author and are freely expressed in the same way.