Volunteer Site Reviewers Have Lost Access To SiteAdvisor.com

[NotBuyingIt]

user.siteadvisor.com currently redirects to www.siteadvisor.com, so even my SiteAdvisor user profile (http://user.siteadvisor.com/forums/member.php?u=***** ) is inaccessible to me.

All reviewer comments have disappeared from SiteAdvisor, including the ones for siteadvisor.com itself at

https://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/siteadvisor.com

I don't know if a server or database problem has occurred or if this is McAfee's way of saying farewell to its volunteer reviewers.

[NotBuyingIt]

Make this discussion thread's title: Volunteer site reviewers have lost access ...

(sorry)

[exbrit]

Done, good luck.

I know very little about it but do know that the websites are all changing.

I'll email my contact there and see what he says on the subject and let you know the outcome.

[exbrit]

Response as follows:

I sent this on to the SA/WA team, including the new Product Manager, provided a brief rundown on these reviewers and asked for a decision - unfortunately, he out until Thursday; we’ll need to wait.

So I guess, more to come.

[Hayton]

I think this may be intentional. There used to be, even very recently, a set of pages that (among other things) explained to webmasters how they could best prepare and maintain their websites to work with SiteAdvisor. Those pages have now gone except for one - http://www.siteadvisor.com/howitworks/index.html - or at least are now very difficult to find. Even that one survives only as a link from a Not Found page. One of the vanished pages had links to Reviewer Central, so I think that whole area is now unavailable. Perhaps it will be revamped and will return, but don't count on it.

As for the site reviews, I see no link to user reviews on any site rating page. This may be unintended, perhaps a temporary glitch resulting from testing changes during a version update, and if so it can be easily re-instated. On the other hand there have been indications in the recent past that the site review system might not continue in its present form. We'll just have to wait for word from someone at SiteAdvisor/WebAdvisor.

[Hayton]

Ex_Brit wrote:

Response as follows:

I sent this on to the SA/WA team, including the new Product Manager, provided a brief rundown on these reviewers and asked for a decision - unfortunately, he out until Thursday; we’ll need to wait.
So I guess, more to come.

Did you hear anything more? If nothing comes through by Wednesday then this will probably get shoved to the bottom of the pile until the end of January.

[exbrit]

Nothing, so it'll be at least the New Year before anything comes in I would imagine.  I think DK is off until then, but not sure.  Will ask on the call on Monday.

[Nodus]

NotBuyingIt wrote:

All reviewer comments have disappeared from SiteAdvisor, including the ones for siteadvisor.com itself at
https://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/siteadvisor.com

If you change that link to https://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/msgpage/siteadvisor.com by hand you will get to see the reviewer comments. The same applies to any site (or at least the ones I tried out). So, the comments are still there, it's only that every trace of them has disappeared from the main page, which of course makes them useless.

Whether that's intentional or not, I don't know or even care much about anymore, as there has been this downward trend in reviewer facilities for at least the first part of this decade already. The obvious lack of interest in fixing this problem in decent time tells something as well. As I have said previously, I would much more appreciate if SiteAdvisor/WebAdvisor professedly removed the whole reviewing thing at one go instead of gradually making it more and more useless and at the same time pretending it means something to them. Well, it's practically gone now, and I actually hope they'll leave it that way. They have made this originally useful facility a farce anyway.

[Hayton]

The "changed" link has an underlying URL of "hxxps://www.siteadvisor.com/sites/siteadvisor.com" (obfuscated so as to prevent Jive messing with it).

If I manually enter the URL that you intended it does indeed go to the review page for siteadvisor.com - last entry 11 Oct or 10 Nov (I wish it made clear what the date-display conventions are). I see a lot of what look like spam comments hitting this page, I wonder if they took it all down because of some general spam attack?

[exbrit]

But clicking on anything there leads back to the home page, so I suspect it's a page that simply is waiting to be deleted.

I wont know for sure until I hear back from McAfee/Intel but I suspect the days of reviewing sites are over.

It was a flawed system anyway, that could easily be exploited and/or otherwise misused.