Category: Reviews

Trustpilot Content Integrity Team doesn’t know what a “reach around” is.

Business, Rants, Reviews

We received the following obviously fake review:

I will warn you – this paragraph will describe an obscene sexual act – for those that may not know. I am sure some people do not know what a “reach around” is. If you don’t want to read the description skip to the next paragraph. A “reach around”, in the context of this “review”, is when one man masturbates another man while performing anal intercourse with him. This is inherently obscene, no?

You would imagine that someone responsible for reviewing reports of obscene reviews at Trustpilot would be aware or at least spend the 10 seconds it would take to research the term.

It seems that Trustpilot’s Content Integrity Team doesn’t understand this and has informed me, after flagging this review, that it is in fact not obscene. I wonder how over-worked and under-paid Trustpilot Content Integrity Team members are.

It is absolutely terrifying that the people employed to review flagged content, particularly content flagged as obscene, do not understand what they are reviewing well enough to make an appropriate decision in this situation.

Come on Trustpilot, you can do better. Your failure to handle this properly is, in and of itself, obscene.

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A word of warning about Trustpilot Automatic Invitations

Business, Hosting, Rants, Reviews

If you are allowing Trustpilot to invite your users to submit reviews you need to be very careful about who and how Trustpilot sends those invitations. The company that I work for uses Trustpilot to collect reviews from customers and recently an individual that wasn’t a customer and had no experience using our services mistakenly received an invite from Trustpilot. Technically speaking this invitation being sent was due to a minor mistake on our end and that’s one of the main reasons I want to provide this warning – so that you do not make the same mistake.

Trustpilot for a time allowed you to simply send a link to an form to invite customers to write reviews. For a few years this worked fine until they decided that they wanted to handle the review invitations themselves. Somehow they believe that by them sending the invitation instead of you – that it adds legitimacy to the reviews. We actually had a warning on our Trustpilot page for a bit after this change warning that our reviews may not be legitimate due to using manual invitations [i.e. links in our email signatures, new order confirmation emails, etc].

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Gravely Pro-Turn Z 52"

Don’t trust Gravely with your money.

Business, Equipment, Miscellaneous, Mowing, Rants, Reviews

You might have read my post about the issue I had with my Gravely Pro-Turn Z 52″ Mower. In the end they offered to send me a hat as compensation for the matter. I asked for a small bottle of touch-up-paint and to my surprise they sent the paint but not the hat.

Well to be honest I wasn’t entirely happy with my experience so I left an honest review of the machine as well as my experience on their site. Here’s an image of the review:

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The Small Business Administration – The Disaster during The Covid-19 Disaster

Business, News, Rants, Reviews
U.S. Small Business Administration Logo

I’ll start by saying that the company I own and operate has been in business since late 2007. In nearly 13 years of being in business we have never applied for funding through the SBA or anywhere else as we didn’t need it. Personally I absolutely hate owing money be it to a person or to an organization.

I have heard from other business owners that working with the Small Business Administration, or the SBA for short, isn’t easy and that even if you qualify you’ve got a 50% chance of approval. I do know a few small businesses that have SBA loans for business property.

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1-800-Flowers.com

If you want to show somebody you love them – avoid 1-800-Flowers.com

Rants, Reviews

Depending on how well you know me you may be aware of my aversion to talking on the phone.  It’s not so much that I hate talking on the phone as much as I hate how it totally destroys my ability to multi-task.  When I am working I will be handling a dozen or two different tasks at once on my computer without issue but the second I’m on the phone that all goes out the window.

Generally if I want to look into something or accomplish something I’ll find a way to do it via my computer which I can do without putting everything else I’m working on on complete hold.  Realistically I should have taken the time to find a local florist and called them up to arrange for the delivery of some flowers for my wife.  I instead went to “1-800-Flowers.com” to see if they could deliver today – and they could!

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National Hotel in Miami – Elevator fell 7+ floors, One guest injured.

Reviews

Elevator Injury at the National Hotel in MiamiMy wife and I are here in Miami for a good friend’s wedding and we are staying at their chosen hotel – the National Hotel in Miami.  Needless to say we’ve been having a wonderful time sharing this event with our friends and their family.  Overall the hotel is very nice and looks to be well maintained.  Our room is a tad small but ultimately we’re not spending much time in the room.

Last night the whole wedding party was meeting at Mango’s Tropical Cafe and identification was required.  My wife, the groom’s brother, and myself got in the elevator and went up to the 10th floor so my wife could grab her ID.  After grabbing her identification we left the room and proceeded to hail an elevator to our floor.

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IVEC – Indianapolis Veterinary Emergency Center – Verbal abuse and terrible treatment.

Reviews

IVEC - Indianapolis Veterinary Emergency Center

On Christmas Day my two and a half year old Corgi dog “Titan” got into the trash and we were not sure what exactly he had eaten.  He’s gotten into the trash before, however, it has been over a year and a half and he has done very well for a long time about being unsupervised.  He’s good to the point that we can set down a plate of food on the floor and leave the room and he knows not to touch it, so we’re unsure what was so alluring in the trash can that he had to get into it, but he did.

We didn’t think too much of it at the time, as we’ve had dogs get in the trash before and usually they may get a little bit of an upset stomach but that’s about it.  When we woke up this morning we found out that he had gotten sick, which wasn’t unexpected.  We let him outside to go to the bathroom and he walked around like he had to poop but he didn’t; he urinated and then came back inside.  He’s the type of Corgi that he will eat all of his dog food, however much you put in the bowl, so we have to only give him how much he should have at any given time, usually a cup in the morning and a cup in the evening.  This morning he didn’t touch his food at all, when normally he would gobble it down as quickly as he could and he also wasn’t drinking any water.

We let him go back outside again and he got sick and then he finally went poop and when we looked, it was red which had us extremely concerned so we tried contacting our normal veterinary office, which is closed due to the 14+ inches of snow we’ve received since 3 AM last night.  The only veterinary office that was open and within a driving distance was the Indianapolis Veterinary Emergency Center or IVEC.  We called and discussed it with them and they said we should bring him in to have him checked out, so we made the drive out to them. Continue reading

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Apple Retina MacBook Pro 15″ – Manufacturing Defects, Popping, and Creaking – Resolved October 31, 2012

Miscellaneous, Reviews, Technology

As of October 31st, 2012 I officially consider this issue resolved positively. Apple replaced the MacBook Pro on the spot after identifying the issue as the adhesive between the battery and the upper case. Do please read the updates at the bottom of this post for full details. Thanks!

I use Apple hardware for almost everything these days for a few reasons including but not limited to: build quality, operating system and features, ease of use, fit and finish, and support.  When you buy a $2,200 laptop from Apple, a $800 iPad, or anything else – you generally expect it to be the utmost of quality and to ‘just work.’  This has been my experience with every Apple product I’ve owned so far until now.

I purchased a base-model Apple Retina MacBook Pro 15″ from the Keystone Apple Store on the north side of Indianapolis on October 6th, 2012.  I was very happy with the machine, that is, until I was sitting in my quiet hotel room during the cPanel Conference in Houston, Texas on October 8th, 2012.  I found that the space bar was making such an unbearably loud ‘screech’ when pressed that there was no way I could possibly continue using the machine.  I called AppleCare and they directed me to take the machine to the Apple Store in the Houston Galleria Mall, which I did.

I walked up to the Genius Bar for my appointment and explained the issue to the technician.  He said that he could not hear it in the store, as Apple stores are almost always loud, and wanted to take it into the back to see if he could hear it, which I said was fine.  After a minute or two in the back the tech re-appeared and agreed that the noise was unbearably loud and he said that he could understand why I was unhappy.  He actually removed the key to see what was wrong, and found that when removed the key was nearly translucent.  He explained that the key was simply a manufacturing defect.  In trying to put the key back on, it even chipped. Continue reading

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