Rate/review gliders and harnesses

Hi All,

As you may all know, we have a nice new section on justACRO, the Gear section. Currently this is only a static listing of gliders and harnesses.
We would like to give some life to this section with gear reviews and ratings. We are envisioning something where our users can tell their opinion about the gear, and rate it.

This is not as simple as it seams for the first sight, and we need YOUR HELP, to make this new feature as good as it can be. The problems are these:

1. What should these reviews/ratings include? I think we need to specify a few aspect to review on a glider, and not just give a text field to add anything... I'm thinking about categories like: take off, landing, stall base manuvers, dynamic manuvers, construction quality. What do you think?

2. Who should make these reviews? The objective is to make a comprehensive review system, so we need to know who has written the review, how much experience he/she has. So we need some way to get a real life picture about our user experience level. Any ideas how accomplish this?

I hope you can add some valuable comments, and help us to make this new feature!

Lupus and the justACRO team!

Latest Comments

justACRO's picture

Still working on the rate features, but in the meantime i made a small feature for the site.
From now, you can set your takeoff weight in your profile, and your wing loading will be shown for each glider in the Gears section.
All you have to do is to go to a glider in the Gear section, and if you see a "?" in the Wing loading row, you have to click it and it will bring you to your profile edit page, where you can set your takeoff weight (at the bottom of the page). You can also get there by clicking "My Profile" and edit your Pilot details.
If it's set, you can will see the wing loading value for each size of the gliders. It's color coded by the values, similar to the wing loading table of Thriller...
What are your thoughts about this feature?

justACRO's picture

That is why I like to involve users, as they have nice ideas which I never think of! :)
You are absolutely right about reviews for all level of pilots.
My review categories are fine? What are the thoughts?

theo's picture

Yes actually if comments are compulsory it is perfect because the biggest problem would be people who click without having any ideas, with comment they have to know at least what they are talking about :)

To "follow" pilots "relations" with the gliders you could add questions like : how many flights/hours do you have with this glider ?(like you said) but you can also ask : is it your first acro glider or stuffs linked to pilots expriences and levels like that (the samples here are not the best ones and I think others should be nicer but the idea is here ;)) and so you can know if the pilot who commented knows the glider well and if he has a high level in acro or is quite a beginners wich are both interesting informations for the other pilots because beginners would mostly prefer gliders that are liked by other beginners while good pilots would be more interested by what other top pilots could think :) So I think you shoud not moderate what young pilots are saying because it is mostly their opinion that are important for other beginners because they can find themselves in the experiences of the other pilot. :)

The problem you have is to not creating a ranking of pilot due to this like this one is a bad pilot while this one is really good because I don't think it is the target of this but still you have to inform from what type of pilot this opinion is coming..

justACRO's picture

Thanks for you comment Theo!

I also think we need to make some categories which will guide the pilots to write their reviews.
The "5 Star" is good idea (btw it's already used for the videos..), but i think we shouldn't come up with predefined list to choose from, rather we just have a text field to enter a few words review.
What do you think about these categories?:
- Takeoff
- Flight
- Stall/helico maneuvers
- Connections
- Dynamic maneuvers
- Landing
- Construction quality
Each with a 5 star rating, and a text field, which is compulsory, so pilots can't just click-click-click-submit!
Also the pilot has to enter a few more information, like how much time he flew with the glider, or general comments.

How can we be sure that reviews are sent in by competent pilots? This seams to be a bigger issue for me :) We need to filter out reviews by beginners, or those who have limited experience on the given glider. Any ideas on this?

theo's picture

Hi Lupus,

Maybe the idea would be to make categories like you said and to be able to give "stars" or something for each categories for a glider but I think that a comment section should be important, mostly for the other pilots, so they can understand better where is the bad point, because saying a glider is nice or bad for stall manoeuvers has not any senses, pilots should be able to say "with this glider my helico turned really slow and staid in deep stall" or "the ears always stopped my connexions" or anything else that would help other pilots to know what is the problem and then to compare with other glider.

Because there are not any "perfect" gliders and all have their good points and bad points, and some pilote are really good to fly sat to heli or heli to sat or infinity and but bad for twisters or anything else, and having a glider wich is easy in twister and a bit harder in sat to heli is nice for them because, because they are good in sat to heli they don't mind. I know it is a stupid exemple but the idea is here : with a comment section pilot can know what other pilot did not like and see if they mind or not :)

I don't know if it is possible (it may be to hard or to long to do it) it might be something like that :
Stall manoeuvers : 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 stars
and then you can choose what you did not like :
the glider stays in deepstall
or the glider don't want to enter in helico because it wants to fly too much
or the ears are collapsing and it stops the combos
etc ..
and at the end an "other problems" question with possibility of comment :)

Regards,
Théo

justACRO's picture

Of course we don't want to make this review system a place for commercial posts. That has to be independent.

Your idea is nice about linking users to gliders/harnesses... I was also think about this, so you can check if you own or flown a glider from the gear section.

Thanks for the input.

HolzingerM's picture

Hi Lupus!

I welcome such a review board for our equipment as long as we can keep it clear with non commercial driven posts.
As objective (not emotional) as possible.
Not like in other forums

I have an additional idea for you.
maybe we can link the gliders and harnesses with our profile.
So interested useres can see how many of the registered users are using this type of equipment. Thats also an indicator for popularity

e.g. in the gear section of the glider U-Turn Thriller it is mentioned that
"x" users have posted that they are using this equipment