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Melissa & Dave - Adventures at Sea

Trip Adviser denies going berzerk

Yeah, this is another one of those, "Melissa should be a tester" posts.  This time it was Trip Adviser that went berserk on her.  Melissa has now posted 157 reviews to Trip Adviser.  You would think this would be worth something, wouldn't you?  For anyone not familiar, the way the system works is that reviews go into a "pending" status for a few days before being published publicly.  Presumably during the pending status, Trip Adviser does a review for problematic content - any porn, nasty language, and things like someone "stuffing the ballot box" so to speak.  It all started when Melissa posted three reviews to the system.  And Trip Adviser ate them.  Poof.  Gone.  No email telling her that there was a problem, they just disappeared.  So Melissa emails Trip Adviser and asks what happened.  Here was their response:

It appears that your review has been caught up in our automatic filters and editorial processes, which will remove a post from our site if it is deemed suspicious for any reason. Unfortunately, I cannot go into detail about what triggered the removal, nor can I re-publish your post.  However, we do want your opinion for other travelers to see. I highly encourage you to re-send your post for publication on our site. You may wish to review our guidelines for traveler reviews in case your original review needs editing.

So the problem of course, is that the system ate three reviews in a row.  Clearly they have a software bug that's eating reviews.  Or somehow they have tagged Melissa as a "bad person" in the system and won't let any of her reviews through.  Its possible (unlikely but possible) that any one single review might cause a problem, but no way was that true of all three reviews - two of which were largely positive.  Melissa emails them back and says that they need to report the issue to their engineering team because they obviously have an issue.  Their response:

As per our previous correspondence, I unfortunately, cannot go into detail about what triggered the removal, nor can I publish your posts.  TripAdvisor invests a great deal of energy and resources into ensuring the integrity of our content. In addition to using automatic filters to scan our entire database of reviews, we also respond to every piece of support correspondence that we receive from both hoteliers and our members. We are constantly refining our fraud detection architecture and editorial training based on feedback like yours, so we very much appreciate hearing from you.

Yeah, ok, now Melissa is annoyed.  Rolls her eyes, and emails them back to say that their refusal to admit there is a problem is not impressive.  Ah, but the story doesn't end here.  Melissa re-posts the three reviews as requested.  Anyone want to guess what happened?  Yup.  Gone again in a puff of smoke.  So Melissa emails them back again - this time having saved the content of the reviews because it was obvious they were just going to get eaten again.  So she emailed them back - able to include the content and ask what exactly is problematic about the content?  This time rather than admit an issue, they just publish the reviews and pretend like nothing was ever wrong.

We would like to confirm that your reviews for the following properties (Hotel Vista Lago, Blarney Stone Irish Pub, La Vespa and Piacere) have already been published.

Those of you who know her, know there is no way she is going to let this go.  Melissa emails them back to say that there was clearly an issue as the reviews had disappeared and weren't even showing up as pending in the system.  Their response:

Rest assured that all information forwarded to our support team remains confidential and is handled with the same commitment to privacy as our user reviews. We hope that you'll understand that while we will swiftly and directly address attempts to influence the unbiased nature of our reviews, we are not able to disclose the outcome of these investigations. Our methods of identifying and blocking fraudulent material are proprietary, so I unfortunately cannot speak in any detail about them.

Melissa's response and with any luck at all the final round of this silliness: 

I’m not asking you to reveal your patented secret algorithms.  I’m suggesting you say, “we had a problem and we fixed it for you” instead of pretending that no problem existed.  You sound foolish when you pretend nothing was wrong when it obviously was.

Sigh.

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