Wow! You folks sure do write a lot of reviews. That’s awesome. However, showing the sheer number of reviews for some blends is putting a serious strain on the servers and causing a bunch of timeout errors.

In the hopes of alleviating the problems I have, reluctantly,  re-enabled the paged view of reviews. I know many of you didn’t like the paged reviews last time, and you’re probably not going to like them this time either, but they are now a necessity.

I have set the view to be a conservative twenty reviews per page for now. If that goes well and the performance problems disappear, I will inch the number up as high as I can without destabilizing everything again.

On every blend page you will find a PREVIOUS and NEXT button both above and below the reviews for that blend. You can use these buttons to go through older reviews for each blend.

Thanks for your understanding, and your support in keeping the site running. I greatly appreciate it!

Do what you can to help stop HR 4439, the so-called Tobacco Tax Parity Act of 2010, which will raise the Federal Excise Tax on pipe tobacco 775%, from $2.8311 to $24.78. This bill, introduced by Rep. Steve Cohen (D, TN) and Lloyd Doggett (D, TX), member of the House Ways and Means Committee, threatens the livelihood of everyone in the pipe and tobacco world, from tobacco blenders and manufacturers, to retailers, to the brick and mortar stores we love.

As a service to the entire pipe smoking community, Pipes Magazine has set up this page that allows you to automatically email your Senators and Congressmen. It takes only a minute or so of your time, and a letter will be sent. You can use their draft, or create your own. The system does everything for you – it couldn’t be easier. There is also an option to pay a small fee ($3) to have your letter printed and hand-delivered to your representatives. I highly recommend this, as it’s too easy for email to be sent into oblivion through the simple press of a button.

I am still tracking down the source of the recent problems. Viewing Blend details works again, but it is still not possible to submit new reviews. Hopefully it will be soon.

Happy New Year.

For unknown reasons, the Blend Detail page has started throwing errors and has been disabled. It will be returned to operation as soon as possible. Stay calm and carry on.

ps:  Happy Holidays

To all of the American users of Tobacco Reviews, let me say Happy Thanksgiving. I hope your holiday is full of good food, good friends and good tobacco.

This year, I am thankful for:

• The new location for Tobacco Reviews and myself (I am back living in the mountains of NC after a decade away);
• New hosting for the site, which mans the random errors when the servers reboot should be eliminated;
• The users who donated and subscribed to make that move possible, and allow me to continue working on the site, the site would not still be here if it were not for you;
• Time to work on the new features, the next of which will be unveiled after Thanksgiving!

So, thanks to you for making Tobacco Reviews what it is, and for allowing my to continue to afford to keep it running and spend my time working on it.

What are you thankful for this year?

It has been a while since I last posted some news here, and there is plenty to talk about, so here is a wrap up of the goings-on around Tobacco Reviews in the month of October.

• The sorting/listing of the reviews continues to be the old style, while I work on figuring out a better way to accomplish what I want for the unregistered visitors to the site. The main reason it hasn’t been changed back is that the voting mechanism is not working as I had hoped. Some people were using it to disagree with a review, not to rate the competence and clarity of the review. Until this is resolved, things will remain as they are.
• There is a great new feature coming in the next week or so (that won’t change your experience of the site, don’t worry) that I am pretty excited about: Tobacco Reviews data will be available as an API. Developers, start your engines! If you ever wanted to do something with all of the data in Tobacco Reviews, now is your chance to do so. Details on using the API will be available when the whole thing goes public, but if you just can’t wait, email me for details.
• The big feature under development now is the message boards. Yes, I am finally getting around to getting them built! The most important feature to note about them is that they will not be free and open to everyone. Only those who have donated or subscribed will have access to them. This is for two reason: 1) People tend to be better behaved when they have something at stake. 2) I need more subscribers to the site, and this is a great way to reward subscribers without walling off and charging for something I was already giving away for free. Details on pricing, etc. will be forthcoming soon.
• Tobacco Reviews (and I) are moving. My trip to the mountains was not all for pleasure. I am in the process of relocating to North Carolina now, and will be, hopefully, settled in up there in another month or so. Wish me luck.

Due to an unresolved technical issue, namely the downvoted reviews continuing to appear before the neutral reviews, I have reverted the default sorting to the “old way” and removed the voting and reporting features. It will likely take a week or two to get it worked out, since I am going backpacking in the mountains this weekend for my birthday.

If you are among those who wish for the reversion to become permanent and for the new sorting not to come back, think of this as your chance to put your money where your mouth is.

Thanks to a fantastic suggestion by Luca on the Tobacco Reviews Facebook Page, you can now set a cookie when logging in that will remember your details until you log out. you can close your browser, restart your computer, whatever. Unless you click on the Logout link, you will always be logged in to Tobacco Reviews. Enjoy!

The biggest issue people seemed to have with the new features was the new default sorting based on votes for/against a review. Today I have gotten part way to solving all of those problems.

As of right now, you can, if you are logged in, choose to sort the reviews by Votes (the new default), Newest first (the old default) or by Rating (high to low). I will probably add a few more in the coming week or so, but those options should address the majority of the complaints I got about the new sorting default.

Judging by the number of reviews that have been reported since the new features rolled out, I would say that people are pretty happy to have this feature. However, it seems that some folks are not quite getting how this is to be used, so I thought I’d post a little “how-to” guide for using the reporting button.

The following are the things that I really want reviews flagged for:

• Are blank or contain less than 10 or so words.
• Contain website or email addresses.
• Contain contact information ie phone numbers, postcodes etc.
• Appear to impersonate someone else.
• Are considered likely to disrupt, provoke, attack or offend others.
• Are racist, sexist, homophobic, sexually explicit, abusive or otherwise objectionable.
• Contain swear words or other language likely to offend.
• Break the law or condone or encourage unlawful activity. This includes breach of copyright, defamation and contempt of court.
• Are written in any language other than English.
• Contain links to or addresses of other websites.
• Are considered to be ‘spam’, that is posts containing the same. or similar, message posted multiple times.

(all of those, by the way, are taken from the Terms and Conditions of using the website, which I recommend that you review if you haven’t in a while.)

You will notice what is not on that list. There is no item on the list that says “You disagree with the Reviewer, who must obviously be wrong/mean/a shill for a competitor. We all have individual tastes and highly subjective experiences of tobaccos. I really don’t care one bit that Bob Smith has written reviews of every one of your favorite blender’s tobaccos and roundly criticized all of them.

That’s how it goes and you should grow up and stop basing your personal beliefs on whether or not people agree with you. Yes, people disagree, with you, on the internet. That doesn’t make them wrong. Even if it did coincide with them being wrong (and there’s only a 50% chance of that, now isn’t there?) it wouldn’t matter. If collective reviewing and rating is of any use, then the obviously wrong reviews and rating will fall to the bottom of the heap anyway. Geez, I even gave you a way to vote against reviews you think are bad.

Anyway, you can tell that a lot of people are using the Report This Review feature for the wrong reasons and it’s gotten under my skin a bit. Now that I’ve explained exactly what I want, and do not want, this feature used for, I feel comfortable saying that anyone from this point forward who misuses the feature will have their access to it (and perhaps the entire site) removed by me summarily, depending on my mood at the time I have read through all of their reports.