[Threshold]

Lasher, are you saying that you are taking away our right to turn off reviews?

I think anything short of professional reviews is effectively spam. I occasionally read a few reviews off the front page here, and the overwhelming majority of them are still fanboy/flame reviews. They are complete garbage. Moderating them MIGHT reduce the most extreme offenders, but the ones that get through will still mostly be junk. After all, the tendency of moderators is to let through as much as they can. They will err on the side of approving rather than denying.

Being able to mail you about libelous or dishonest reviews simply means more workload for the MUD operator. Why should I have to comb your site regularly just to protect myself from defamation? Furthermore, noticing it and reporting it are all after the fact. You will still have given these kinds of misanthropes a forum to spread their lies for however long the review is up.

The MUDs that have reviews turned off tend to be the more popular MUDs. That alone should be a big clue as to their value (or lack thereof). If they had reviews on, you can be sure they would get a lot more positive reviews than negative. But these operators know that it isn't worth the hassle of dealing with the libelous ones, and the truth is the reviews have no actual value anyway.

I sincerely hope you intend to let us still keep reviews off. The people who list their MUDs here are the ones who send the traffic. Let them have the right to just avoid the agony and hassle of having to deal with it.