Suggestions

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.

To do this we will want to create a new MySQL table with at least these columns: user_id, email, email_verified_time). This change will go hand-in-hand with the following other suggestions: https://onlinebookclub.canny.io/suggestions/p/allow-users-to-change-the-email-address-of-their-account-themselves-but-1-requir https://onlinebookclub.canny.io/suggestions/p/require-users-to-verify-an-email-address-is-theirs-via-a-secret-otp-sent-via-ema It would also greatly help in catching users with duplicate accounts, namely in cases where two different accounts attempt to add the same email address to their accounts.

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.

Many reviewers don't seem to understand that the 'editors' are just their peer reviewers, and then they think OnlineBookClub itself is not properly "training" its editors when editors sent wrong or contradicting information in their scorecards.

Ask: (1) Did you read the book in full before writing your review? (2) Did you skim read the book at all? (3) Are you sure you carefully read every single word of the book? (4) Did you read the Review Team Guidelines & Basics page in full before selecting the book for review? (5) Were you aware that the Guidelines require you to take notes of the first instance of profanity? If a reviewer admits to being unaware of the Guidelines, we can let them use that excuse once to avoid being banned. For self-purchase books, the review can still be approved and paid. For other reviews, the review can be rejected without banning the reviewer. This way, we can track the use of that excuse since it only makes sense once, and if a reviewer gets another invalid PRQ they won't be able to use ignorance of the Guidelines as an excuse again.

Currently, in situations where we cannot or do not know how to resolve a flagged review, we are to email the management and wait for their answer before we can close the flag. Unfortunately, this prevents us from moderating other flagged reviews because once a flagged review has been assigned to us, there is no other way around and forward than resolving it first. Therefore, I suggest that a button to "escalate and skip" a flagged review be added to the page, similar to how we can escalate a Review Team Error Report when we don't know how to reply or otherwise think it is best management get involved. For clarification, I am attaching screenshots of a case where I was stuck for a few days while waiting for the management's response. Here's a link to the page: https://forums.onlinebookclub.org/review-team/admin-flagged-reviews.php

Add the option to move a book from the back up BOTD queue to a regularly scheduled BOTD. In addition, add a link for us to access the back up queue outside of swapping a book for promotion.

Currently, this automated announcement email provides the author a direct link to the published review, as well as the general author dashboard. ( https://forums.onlinebookclub.org/authors/ ) Instead or in addition to these links, can you please add a direct link to the author dashboard for the specific review request associated with this published review? (Example: https://forums.onlinebookclub.org/authors/?bookid=61778 ) Thank you, Tori

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.