[Kaistar]

Seeing as D-A-L is looking for some donations, an idea came to my mind.

Paid Reviews of Products/Software/Services?

To me it seems like a pretty good idea. Doing reviews of services and products and such would mean the forum would show up more on search engines *somewhat I think?* and to top it off, paid reviews pay. Lol.

A forum can be created for the reviews, with rating system for each review and members can maybe subscribe to review updates? I for one would be quite interested in those.

=)

Edit: Was also thinking, what about news about the tech world? Is it possible to create a forum for tech news and have a few dedicated members to post on it as often as possible? And as usual, email subscription for people who are interested. Maybe even group the tech news into Gadgets, Home Users, Business etc etc?

p.s. I think this thread should have been posted in the "Bring D-A-L to life 2008" but I didn't see that thread till now =X

[owen]

There was formally a forum where an automatic bot posted the latest news, but it wasn't really used by many people so has now been taken down. Members do generally post interesting tech news here when they come by it anyway.

The reviews section is a good idea, but the only problem is the fact that this is a forum at the end of the day. To have a system for paid reviews, we wouldn't simply be able to add a new forum called Reviews, there would have to be a new section of the site dedicated to reviews which is the generally accepted format. Posting reviews to a forum would seem to amateurish and people simply wouldn't pay. You also have to look at the user base of this site, for a review section to be successful it would require a large amount of regular users and contributors. We do have quite a lot of regular users here, but the majority are users that ask for help on odd occassions, meaning that our site traffic isn't matched to this sort of system and of course, the people with the money will know this. If they have their product reviewed, they want as wide ranging an audience as possible.

That's just my take on your idea, don't get me wrong I do think it's a good idea, but just not right for this site. Others may disagree.

[Kaistar]

Don't worry dude not offended at all =)

Am still thinking of possible ideas to help out. I like this forum but have not been able to contribute much to it and I don't have no paypal or cred card so yeah.

[k_9]

I do not have the money to pay to use a review. Although, i do hope to make a donation in the near future

[Kaistar]

Er I think there's a little misunderstanding here. The reviews are free, but the companies pay the reviewer (in this case perhaps D-A-L) to review their products/services. Lol

[bootneck02]

I agree with Owen the main problem with testing is that you need a recognised bench mark to be able to compare products, for example if you were testing a new sound card you would need the correct equipment to be able to sample the audio qualities of that sound card and the same piece kit for all the other sound cards you were testing against.

It is a good idea but finding some one with the time and money to be able to carry out testing in a objective and scientific way would be difficult, the only solution may be a university student using the laboratories at the college.

[Kaistar]

Hmm. What about software instead? Or services? Webservices?

[k_9]

I don't think those students would be very interested College... only two years away. I just need to decide which courses to take.

I'm already an A grade student... i knew i should have taken that 11+ exam for grammar school