The problem is that Trustpilot claims to remove false reviews, but they don't. There are other claims that people are paid to write false reviews here http://www.theguardian.com/money/2013/jan/26/fake-re...

I quite believe it. there are deliberate negative reviews on all sites. But if you look at the negative Plusnet reviews elsewhere, on sites such as Ispreview, all the awards don't make sense, as reviews good or bad should even out much more than they do. As for removing negative reviews, I don't actually see any evidence of it at Trustpilot, with PN averaging just one star over hundreds of reviews as they do elsehere. If they knocked out what could be false negatives, the Plusnet area would be empty - Stick to the bushel of salt we all use.

I don't agree that reviews should even out, the Plusnet forums here were almost brought to a standstill during the "bad boy pipe" saga. Small numbers of disgruntled customers tend to make as much noise as possible - I'd suggest it is actually quite hard to get content customers to write supportive reviews since they probably take their service for granted.

Care to explain what you mean by 'TBB are charging for glowing reviews'?

Care to explain what you mean by 'TBB are charging for glowing reviews'?

I don't think professor973 was suggesting any misconduct by TBB. The statement was very much wrapped in an IF, and an IF we mostly agree to be false.

I think:
1 - It more likely that people are being paid to put false reviews on Trustpilot than that they are being paid to put false reviews on TBB.
2 - It more much likely that Trustpilot is accepting payment to permit some dubious practices than that TBB is accepting payment to permit some dubious practices.
3 - Most TBB users will agree with my thoughts on 1 and 2.

However, strongly as we may believe in the integrity of TBB, we cannot 100% prove it.

I still think it odd that even with the possible bias of false reviews and given the different samples of reviewers that there is such a huge difference between Trustpilot and TBB results.

Edited by StephenTodd (Mon 03-Aug-15 10:01:12)

If someone does believe an ISP is gaming the rating system then we can spend an extra couple of days looking for the evidence of this on top of our usual checks, just in case someone has come up with a system that is slipping through every month.

In reply to a post by StephenTodd:

1 - It more likely that people are being paid to put false reviews on Trustpilot than that they are being paid to put false reviews on TBB.

Payment isn't really necessary.

1) Post a review

2) Every few days, delete cookies, get another IP address and post another review in a slightly different writing style.

The website has no way to distinguish people this way.

Edited by Oliver341 (Mon 03-Aug-15 14:32:23)

I'm not sure who is supposed to be paying whom to post false reviews.

There was a lot of stink recently about TripAdviser and such being flooded with false reviews of hotels, the criticising reviewers being paid by the hotels' competitors who also had the same reviewers post good ones about their hotel.

I agree payment isn't necessary to post false reviews.
However, somebody has got to have a reason to bother, and the most likely reasons for that are either that the reviewer is an interested party (owner, competitor), or a third party paid by an interested party. I was assuming the paid third party reason; I should have included direct false reviews as well.

False reviews for whatever reason may well be a red herring. I'd still like to know any other views on why the big difference between TTB reviews and Trustpilot ones.

tbb ratings - email sent out to registered users so will target a much wider mixture of users perhaps, hence also the large volume of ratings which looks to be a lot larger than trust pilot have