Last night I was emailed by two different authors, one asking if I could please put my review of his book on Goodreads, and the other asking why I took his review down from Goodreads.
So, I did some digging, and discovered that there’s a little issue over on that site.
I religiously post the last paragraph of my reviews, and a link to the full review, as well as my star rating on Goodreads as soon as my reviews go live. When I got these emails, I looked into the issue and I realized that I have nearly 20 reviews (that I’ve discovered so far) missing. I know I put these reviews on Goodreads because I remember doing it, and I don’t remember much anymore (thank you, cancer treatment) so that means something.
Anyway, I asked the general Facebook and Twitter populous if anyone else had noticed something like this happening. So far I’ve been contacted by six people saying that they’ve noticed reviews missing that they had posted, or weird formatting issues. The interesting part of it is that it’s not just negative reviews missing. They span the gamut from high rated to low rated and anywhere inbetween. For this reason I think it was probably a system glitch rather than a Goodreads culling. I also don’t have any shelves missing, and I don’t think anyone else does, either.
The point of this is to say that if you are a reviewer that uses Goodreads, check your reviews and make sure none are missing/formatted weird. Maybe this only hit a few select people, but fixing it is a pain in the butt so I figure you guys should all check to make sure. Also, authors, please know that your missing reviews on Goodreads aren’t a personal slight. I vaguely noticed an issue last week, but it wasn’t until I was contact by authors that I really looked into it and realized there was a problem that needed fixing. I’m going through and fixing my reviews now, but there’s a lot gone. If you notice that I’ve reviewed your book on my site, and your review is missing on Goodreads, please let me know. It’s easier for you to inform me. Waiting for me to update it might take a while. I’m being as fast as I can, but there are a lot of problems on my Goodreads shelves, so it’s requiring a lot of digging, and digging takes time.
Thank you.
6 Responses
Thanks, Sarah
I usually cross my books to different shelves, and like you I don’t see any shelves missing. It’s strange. I wonder if when they started making changes to the format of the book covers and individual cover pages that the reviews got lost. Not all but some. Just a strange thing.
Thanks for mentioning! I would have never looked if it wasn’t for your mention today.
2 tips.
Review may not be completely gone. Somehow one of mine was hidden. It morphed into a comment that only I could see and only if I clicked on the comment link. My 3 star rating was not touched. As near as I can tell, that review was too short (I am guessing.) It was more of a thought than a review. (Author was not mentioned.)
Other thing I did was pull up GR in a different browser, one where I was not logged in. I compared the number of reviews listed to the public against the number of reviews listed on my account. There was a 7 review difference. I fixed 1, public view number changed, private number did not.
No idea how accurate that method is yet but it did seem to indicate that I’m going to have a long night :>P
Thanks for the heads up, Sarah 🙂 I’ll have to comb through my reviews and see if anything got chopped.
Thanks for the warning! None of my reviews were missing (I only have 17, but still, they’re mine) but I made sure to get them backed up just in case.
There has been a pretty massive uproar over at goodreads about the terms of service regarding negative reviews and books that reviewers have not read but are marked one star due to author behavior. There are some good threads all about it if you want to do some looking. Particularly this article by Ceridwen that explains the whole story, it is pretty interesting.