pay to get review published?

I enjoy reading reviews and blogs on perfume sites, and also enjoy reviewing my favorite fragrances as well, that is, except for one site. This site tells you that if you 'upgrade' (pay)" your reviews will be published instantly" but if you don't 'upgrade' you will have to wait for an administrator to review your review. I wrote a review without upgrading to see what would happen. It's been over 3 months, and the review is still "on hold", and I seriously doubt it will ever be published. I don't have a problem donating to free sites I use and enjoy to help them keep going, but I have a problem with the aforementioned site. It's always been my understanding that reviews are helpful to other community members in deciding whether to buy a certain fragrance, or to simply learn more about one. I think not having a review published because you haven't shelled out money to the site sets a bad precedent, not to mention being unhelpful to the community. What do you think?

As soon as a site on the net starts growing and gets more traffic, the costs increase as well. More traffic, less speed, and so you need a better server. At this point, webmasters have to decide if they want to make a profession out of their hobby. If so, they need a business model that includes an income for the webmaster. You will need lots of ads, and / or make the users pay for what the site offers.

Parfumo is run by volunteers, including the webmaster. For me, this is the main difference to Fragrantica and Basenotes. It allows Parfumo to have a focus on the user, not on the income in the first place. The costs of Parfumo are covered by the user's donations plus a few Google ads that are only displayed to the not-logged-in users.

Parfumo ows its existence to a happy coincidence: a gifted web developer who took interest in perfume, and in running a perfume community site. If you look at areas of interest other then perfume you find that the possibilities to build a good site are very much limited by the technical capabilities of the respective enthusiasts. The opportunities to say something substancial and get noticed are very much limited. You can drop a few words in a Facebook group - that will be out of sight for the public within hours. Or you can go to Wordpress and Blogspot and create your own page. But then you may find that your page will be listed as no. 7,234,234 at Google statistics.

Some people manage to successfully set up a forum with a standard software. But once their forum is running for a few years they don't have the capabilities to migrate its content to a new and better solution. Many forums on the net look ugly and outdated nevertheless the contributions deserve a better presentation.

What I appreciate here is that my contributions will not be valid only for a few hours or days. Even my oldest reviews are read, and I still do get answers to perfume reviews that I wrote some years ago. It makes sense to me to put some effort into a review if I know that the result will be permanent, like a good book.

People congregate for different reasons. Facebook is for family and "friends" and generally a photo vanity fair.

Perfume sites are informative and a gathering place. Apicius said it well for the commercial reasons to simply run a successful website.

We as consumers, fellow enthusiasts for perfumes and general internet users have the freedom and the pleasure to avail ourselves of all opportunities to post and participate in the exchange of thoughts and impressions.

If I find that have to pay to get my two and a half cents of worthwhile wordings about a perfume published, well, then I don't write reviews there and pick another site, like PARFUMO, but I don't abandon Basenotes because that community has lived through many transformations and has recently been overhauled magnificently.

This is new to me and since I really don't use any other perfume sites except this one (after being annoyed and horrified by the going-ons on some of them), I feel privileged and pampered. Since our community here is smaller, I feel like a lot more attention goes to each review and comment. On other sites, since there is so much information crammed into every millisecond, as soon as you hit the submit button, your review or your scent of the day is gone. No one sees it.

I also feel that the quality of the reviews here as compared to Fragrantica (don't know about Basenotes as much) is way higher. Also, I don't see any censorship here while Fragrantica definitely has a lot of that.

I guess my long answer to your question is that yes, I would have a problem being asked to pay for my review. I would say that maybe they should pay ME for my review as I pretend to be a writer haha.

I don't "pretend" to be a writer ... I am just practicing. Reviews are one thing, a longer blog is another. To be heard is fun.

That's weird, it's usually a matter of days or a couple of weeks in the worst scenario. I've published dozens of reviews without being a paying member, before deciding to become a supporting paying member. Bear in mind that the staff is very limited there and they've all their daily jobs to manage, too, so maybe your review just slipped out of their sight... It's unfair to state that you "pay to have your reviews published" though, as it's not true - you can post any review you want, if you are a paying member they're just posted instantly, otherwise you've to wait a bit. It seems to me a fair innocent way to "lure" you to pay something - which is totally legitimate and fine for me. This particular situation of yours (I mean the 3 months wait) is surely an exception, have you contacted the staff?

What Apicus said is right. Basenotes has quite a bit of costs to cover. It's not the fun side of the internet, to be sure, but server space costs; bandwidth costs. How Basenotes has chosen to cover their expenses is not something I find appealing, myself, but then again, I saw that and instantly voted with my feet. If I had to wait months for my review to be published, I would put that site in my rear view mirror and drive on.

My great grandmother used to caution: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. Therefore I won't comment on Basenotes, except to say I just love the members there. I do prefer Parfumo's non-interference admin approach (i.e., no moderators)

That is exactly what my grandmother taught us too plus this as well. If you can't be nice, be quiet instead.

Any voluntarily created perfume site can operate exactly as they please because we are all free to roam in and out. The enthusiasm to do it at all is admirable and must be hard work i'm sure. Most appreciated too, so a big thank you. If I won a 60m lottery then I would pay lots too.

My limited experience with Basenotes has been positive. At the same time, I see no problem in debating their administrative policies. If discussion and criticism are silenced, improvement seldom occurs.

Regardless of how you feel about the requirement to upgrade for instant review publication, I think it's reasonable to say that non-upgraded reviews shouldn't languish for months in the queue. If I were in charge over there I would certainly want to know if that was happening on my watch.

It goes without saying that they have the right to handle matters in any way they deem fit. It should also be a given that their decisions can be questioned in a constructive manner, which was exactly the point of this thread, if I'm not mistaken.

Yes, of course Basenotes--all of us--have the right to proceed exactly as we wish, but that doesn't preclude coming to conclusions about what we each prefer. On hindsight, I wish I hadn't said anything because even that contradicted my great grandmother's advice, but we live in the age of the Internet's constant communication and without forethought I succumbed.

I've held this opinion in a long time, so now I'll express it. Personally, I prefer the rowdiest site in which people may freely speak, to any forum, however well-meaning, which constantly censors or circumscribes free and open expression as Basenotes does via its moderators--some wonderful and others, well, less so. Especially given the relatively higher intelligence (IMO) of perfume enthusiasts, it seems the least likely group to need censoring. Any kerfuffles that arise can be far better resolved by the participants themselves than by someone with a police mentality--which was my experience and that of others. Some didn't mind. I did.

Don't know about the Basenotes review posting delay because I became a paying member as soon as I joined.

Bottom line, since my focus is the perfumes themselves, learning about them and obtaining/sharing data and opinions about them, parfumo is a better site for me.

ScentFan, I deplore most censorship, but I can't speak to what goes on at Basenotes because I've never had the patience to cope with the technical problems that used to crop up there on a regular basis. Hopefully they've solved them.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by rowdy, but I think we can agree that disputes can be positive in that they show engagement and interest. I'm all in favor of a good argument as long as the participants differ over ideas and don't get personal and nasty. And I think it takes a kind of integrity to publicly air a grievance in the hope of resolving it as opposed to simply bad-mouthing in private. Sad to say I've seen a lot of that.

Well, no point in rehashing the whole thing, Cryptic, but I was amazed at the draconian measures taken to prevent discussion. In my case, the parties involved reached a mutual understanding in private about a dispute but we were kept from airing it publicly. Actually, ordinarily, I wouldn't engage in such a dispute but I was offering large, expensive samples and felt protective (perhaps overly so) of those for whom they were intended. I also didn't like moderators acting as thought police, declaring what was or wasn't appropriate for discussion and arbitrarily closing topics. One involved perfume and death and the topic was summarily closed, as if we don't all die! What if the person who posted was facing death? I had a hunch that was the case. I certainly would have liked to try to help. Too often moderator actions were the exact opposite of free speech principles in most of our countries. I know private forums don't have to adhere to them, but I prefer those that do.

Perfume and death? Interesting topic. I hope the hereafter has a fragrant equivalent of the Rainbow Bridge where we can be reunited with long-lost discontinued and pre-reformulation perfumes. Sounds like a perfectly acceptable topic of discussion to me, but someone no doubt found it ghoulish or irreverent or something and complained. The good news is that you won't see that happening here. They delete spam and duplicate threads, but that's it.

LOL! Reunited with long lost perfumes! Now that sounds like heaven. Yes, I see it doesn't happen here and let me add my thanks again to Apicius and the other volunteers who run parfumo, it's big asset being the exhaustive database with a permanent collection of reviews, as Apicius states. Over time, I do plan to transfer my sniff fest reviews there, expanded.

Tinctureall, 60m lottery? If I won one, I'd be in Paris talking to perfume designers!