Upgrades to Review Searches

[AsstModerator]

Hello everyone,

Before I start, I wanted to thank all the FPA members who wrote in about a bug with the new search function. Thanks to all of you, I managed to bother the programmers enough to get it fixed. I'd also like to thank Pharaoh for his help and suggestions with this article.


The Forums Team has been getting a lot of questions and complaints about the loss of the alphabet jumps at the top of the Review Pages. The reason for that is because the programmers replaced it with something better.

Go ahead and pop open the All Forex Reviews page in another tab or window...

All Forex Reviews

As you can see, the Alphabet is missing from the top. All the categories are still there. Scroll to the bottom and you'll see a line that starts with Filter Services. The box next to that says containing and has a drop down arrow. The other choice is starts with.

Test it out. Stay on the All Services tab and search for companies containing Craig. At the time I'm writing this, you should find two. One is ProForexMentor, owned by Craig Harris. The other is SummerStreetFx, owned by Craig Karlis. If you search for company names containing Dean, there are four owned by Dean Saunders currently listed. Not all companies list the owner alongside the company name, but many do.

Now try the search for company names starting with Best. Until another one is added, you should see a list of seven. The first is best-trading-systems and the last is the HYIP scam bestfxworld.us

For some reason I can't understand, the FPA gets about six emails every month asking if we've ever heard of ForexAutoMoney. Search for service names begining with forexauto and you'll find it along with several other companies. As of now, ForexAutoMoney has 55 reviews and is rated 1 star.

The searches work within each of the categories at the top. You can search for all companies beginning with a letter or word. You can also search within brokers, software or the other categories.

Try the Advanced Filter button. This adds labels, ratings and even recent updates as ways to narrow your search. The labels available will change depending on what category you are searching in. Select Brokers turn off Label All and then check the box for MT4. Then click Go. The broker list drops from 347 brokers down to the 83 brokers that have the MT4 label.

Please be aware that some companies may not have all the correct labels. I and my team do our best to keep things up to date, but there are over 1500 companies in the list.

Some people like to right-click and open a company's review page in a new tab or window. That works a little differently now. There are two ways to do it.

Clicking on the Company name in Service Name opens a preview screen. If the FPA has a thumbnail image of the company's website, it's displayed. There are links to the review page, forum discussion thread for the company and to the company website. Right clicking on any of links those will give you the option to open them in a new tab or window.

To open a service in a new tab or window without using the preview screen, look to the far right of the line it's on. In the Links column, clicking on the pencil opens the review page. Clicking on the globe opens the company's website. You can right-click on either of those to open the review page or website in a new tab or window.

Please play with the search functions. If you find any more bugs, report them in this thread or use the "Contact Us" link at the bottom of the page.


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[aerokan]

is there a way to search FPA editorial reviews of the brokers?(if they exist)

 

[hyper]

These upgrades are mainly cosmetic. What you desperately need is a revamp of your ratings and review system. You need to change the way calculations and rankings are made.

I have written about this before (https://www.forexpeacearmy.com/forex-forum/forex-brokers/7639-ufxbank-com-2.html#top).

Currently, if the user sorts by rating, it seems to be sorted by the whole number rating (number of stars), then by number of reviews. This is a bad way to rank. What you end up with is a broker who has an actual rating of 3.5 appearing higher than a broker who has a rating of 3.7 just because the first broker has more reviews, and the reviews that have a "no rating" are actually counted. Both brokers will appear with 4 stars in the list.

It would be more accurate to rank by actual rating and not by number of stars. Number of posts should not need to be accounted for in the ranking, because the rating values are decimal numbers.

Also, the lowest review rating allowed should be 0 because a 1 star may still be too high for some very bad forex products or services. The "no rating" reviews should only be for comments and not counted in calculating the overall rating.

I hope you will use a more accurate ranking methodology soon.

 

[AsstModerator]

I wouldn't call the ability to search not only for sites beginning with a letter, but also for containing certain letter combinations cosmetic. All those sites that begin with the have made finding some companies difficult using the old system. Finding them now is easy. That's why containing is the default choice.

I've passed your suggestion over to the programming team. Right now they are busy debugging some things on the backend of review moderation for me. The ability of my review moderators to spot some of the more intelligent review spammers is about to take a huge leap forward.

Aerokan, other than a few comments by Felix on a handful of brokers and rulings by the Scam Investigations Committee, the FPA doesn't do editorial comments on brokers. The same broker may change liquidity providers and get better or worse on slippage and requotes with no warning.

 

[cowmadagan]

I disagree with hyper. More reviews means a far more accurate test sample of opinions, and it makes it far more difficult to spam and artificially inflate a rating. I think a 3.5 rating with a hundred ratings should show up above a 3.7 rating with 25 or 50 ratings.

 

[hyper]

I disagree with hyper. More reviews means a far more accurate test sample of opinions, and it makes it far more difficult to spam and artificially inflate a rating. I think a 3.5 rating with a hundred ratings should show up above a 3.7 rating with 25 or 50 ratings.

I know what you mean, but I think you misunderstood me. You have to see how the rankings are currently done to understand what I mean.

Using your example of a "3.5 rating with a hundred ratings" and a "3.7 rating with 25 or 50 ratings", you need to realize that the 3.5 and 3.7 numbers are already weighted values, i.e. the number of reviews have already been taken into consideration to come up with 3.5 and 3.7. Therefore the number of reviews should not then be used again to rank them. The current ranking system will just consider both services as a 4 star rating, then rank them based on number of reviews. This is flawed.

 

[hyper]

All those sites that begin with the have made finding some companies difficult using the old system. Finding them now is easy.

It was easy to do a search in the web page in the browser using Ctrl-F.

The ability of my review moderators to spot some of the more intelligent review spammers is about to take a huge leap forward.

That sounds like a good functional improvement.

 

[hyper]

The "no rating" reviews should only be for comments and not counted in calculating the overall rating.

I should correct myself.

The "no rating" reviews are not counted in calculating the overall rating. If you look at Omnivest Capital | OmnivestCapital.com | OmnivestCapital reviews and ratings by Forex Peace Army, you can see there are only 2 reviews that have a rating, one is 4 and the other is 5, resulting in an overall rating of 4.5. However the review count is 3 because the "No rating" review by Felix is counted, and the star rating is 5 because the numerical rating is rounded to an integer (whole number), and this whole number, then the review count, is what is used in the sorting.

Instead of sorting by star rating then review count, only the non-rounded numerical rating should be used.

At the moment, brokers and other people working for them can simply submit a lot of comments with "No rating" and they will rise higher in the ranking due to increased review count.

 

[Eric Alyea]

How did I get to this page???

How did I get to this page???
Where is Toto? (the dog from Wizard of OZ")
I’m in Missouri not Kansas, and yes a tornado just killed people here (Missouri) this week 1-2-11.
To the point. I have looked extensively at the review system.
#1. Anything under 20 with 5 stars may be bogus.
#2. More input means aggregate correctness. Meaning the more votes the more real.
#3. I would rather trust a 4 star with 75, than a 5 star with 14.

I did a survey on this, but due to the nature of the hide and seek stalker’s and the no voice/lurkers, statistics may be invalid in research.
NUFF SAID:err: