Suggestions

This is time-saving because otherwise a lot of hourly customer support staff's time is used up from the messages from editor's asking about these warnings or complaining about them and wanting to appeal them

This will help prevent duplicate and fake accounts, especially from scammers or those attempting to dishonestly get around a ban or account limitation. For instance, someone who gets banned from the Review Team for plagiarism will often simply create a new account so they can submitting plagiarized reviews to get paid (i.e. scam us and steal money from us). Likewise, it's common for a single scammer to create tons of new accounts on the website (i.e. "duplicate accounts) and submit many fake reviews each day, with the potential to steal practically infinite money from us. While I don't support making it so all reviewers or members are absolutely required to verify their identity, what I would want to do is offer expedited payouts and similar rewards to those who are verified. Namely, such members can be exempt from most of limitation put in place to weed out scammers and fake/duplicate accounts. The steps to verify an identity would ideally include all of the following: - Email address verification (I believe this is already required for Review Team Members) - User must provide their full legal name, their legal address (no P.O. boxes), and their birth date. - Photo ID Upload (Require name, birthday, and mailing address to match what we have recorded in database). - Phone number verification by being sent an SMS with a code. (Requiring two-factor authentication for login for verified members would be ideal.) - Mailing address verification by being sent a code via postal mail. In order to avoid unnecessary cost of sending texts and postal letters, I suggest doing the verifications in the specific order listed above such that one cannot move onto the next step until the first one has been completed. For example, before we would spend the cost to postal mail a user a letter with a secret we would first have verified their name address via their photo ID.

I think this will be clearer.

This would go hand-in-hand with an affiliate program, since any reviewers that an official affiliate refers would than have that affiliate assigned as their coach.

This would be a simple page that gives an overall view of the status of the different aspects of OnlineBookClub. This would serve two purpoes: First, it would let customer support staff check for backlogs and such when asked about a seeming problem (e.g. an author asks why their review has not been approved and published in over two weeks, so the staff member can check if it is due to a backlog in the editors scorecard system). Second, it would allow management to check for the issues regularly (e.g. once per day) so that we do not need to even wait for a member to reach out with a problem to notice a backlog and get it fixed.

Not all reviews can be re-enabled, but for those that can, I suggest the reviewer have the option to do that on their History tab. A review could only be re-enabled if (1) it is a bulk review order (i.e. the author/publisher ordered more than one review) AND (2) the total number of reviewers who have selected the book is less than number ordered. In other words, when a reviewer cancels their review (or it gets canceled and marked as "not complete" for some other reason such as the reviewer not updating their status on time) the book is then re-listed for other reviewers to select for review, meaning other reviewers have probably picked it up and it is no longer available for any reviewers to select for review, including the one who canceled it. In that case, which is the more common case, we cannot allow the reviewer to re-enable. However, in the rare case where a previously canceled review can be re-enabled, I suggest a button appear on the reviewers History tab that says "re-enable" to allow the reviewer to re-enable that review, basically as if they were re-selecting the book for review.

Enable the authorized staff members to record the refund request with the the order information, original transaction number, refund reason, refund amount, and transaction or confirmation number for the refund. The software would then also need to automatically update the database to cancel any associated review or advertising packages.

I believe this will save a ton of time, for both the escalating staff member and the management who it is escalated too. Moreover, it will make it easier to use the FAQs since we can have the database automatically order the questions by how many times they have been asked. That way the FAQ won't get as cluttered with odd unique questions that were really only asked once or twice.

Some options: https://withpersona.com/pricing https://stripe.com/identity#pricing

Those lucky few reviewers approved for this program will be guaranteed to get their reviews fully moderated and either paid/rejected within one week of submission. (This is 3x-6x faster than the current system, in which it can take a week or two for the scorecard, a week or two for the review to published, a week or two for the review to paid after being published, and then even longer there is any disputes or such.) However, the criteria to get approved for these ultra-fast approvals and payments will (of course) be very strict and even many legit long-time quality reviewers will still not qualify. This is because if even one or two scammers got through and approved for this, they could steal thousands from us very quickly. Keep in mind, every dollar stolen from us by a scammer is stolen from honest reviewers. It's all the same finite pool of money being used to pay the reviewers, so the more scammers steal from that poll, the less is left for honest reviewers. The tentative strict criteria one must meet to even apply for acceptance into program is as follows: - Must have a linked Facebook account that is at least two years old. - The name on the Facebook account, your OnlineBookClub username, and your "full legal name" as shown on your valid government-issued photo ID must all match. (Middle names are not considered, so "Scott Hughes", "Scott Michael Hughes", "and "Scott M. Hughes" would be considered as all matching for this purpose.) - You must upload a selfie of you holding your valid government-issued photo ID, and that must be manually checked and marked verified by an admin (typically me). - Must have at least one verified purchase review of a BOTM on at least one major book retailer (e.g. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Walmart, Target, etc.) and the name on the review must at least loosely match the name on your account. ("Scott H." would be considered a loose match for "Scott Hughes" and "Jon"). The name on your PayPal account must match both your OnlineBookClub username AND the name on your photo ID. - You cannot have any significant PRQ disputes. - You cannot have any open typo disputes. (The application process will include a check of your previous reviews to see if there was books that contained typos that you marked as containing none, or books you otherwise marked as containing significantly less typos than they contained.) A reviewer who meets the above criteria can apply, but then a manual account review by a human admin will be done before the approval is finalized (similar to the current manual approvals for Level 6). The manual review will check for any indicates, even slight, of skim reading or other scamming/dishonesty, as well as then also more quickly checking that the reviewer is providing high-quality reliable work. It will be a lot of checking and qualification upfront, but that means then each review the reviewer submits after that will need to undergo much less checking. Most of the checks we currently do after a review is submitted (which accounts for the time it takes to approve the reviews) before sending the payment is primarily simply to prevent money from being sent to scammers.