Thanks @Marten for your supportive post.
It’s a fact that I am a passionate Weaver and wish to give something back to the community.
It’s also a fact that a couple of developers have stopped supplying me with evaluation software because I was too critical in the past.
In cases where I feel the need to criticise (constructively) a product, I always contact the developer with my views before I publish a review. Often enough a developer will accept the criticism and act upon it. In other cases, they will inform me that “that’s the way the product works” and don’t supply further evaluation products.
In other words: “If you don’t like my products, you can take a running jump and don’t expect anything in the future”.
In such cases, my review doesn’t get any further than the draft version.
This leads me to @habitualshaker 's comment — As Stuart states — If I’ve reviewed a product, it’s worth taking a look at – especially as a non-professional Weaver. You may find some mild criticism in my reviews, but if you don’t see a product review at all, it’s due to one of two reasons:
Either the developer doesn’t want me to review his products, or I have decided that I can’t write a positive review for said product.
Please feel free to take a look at the products that I review and decide for yourself if it’s a product that you wish to have in your library.
As in @tav’s case, I pay monthly fees for my website. It is self financed with no ads and no requests for donations, purely as a service to the Weaver community.
It takes time to test a new product, to write a review and to publish said review on the various platforms that you might find reference to it. My personal time.
Please allow me the freedom to decide for myself which products I do or do not review. My service includes a monthly newsletter and is free of charge. You may feel free to subscribe.
If you don’t appreciate my reviews or the fact that I only review the products that I can see in a positive light, please feel free to ignore them.
If you appreciate them, then take a look at the reviewed product and make your own decision about it.
If you have discovered a product that, in your opinion, is ‘crap’, then feel free to mention the fact here. This is the one forum that won’t banish you for negative criticism.
If you feel that I have wrongly given a product a positive review, then contact me directly. If you point out something that can be corrected, I can contact the developer with constructive suggestions – that’s the cool thing about my situation — I’m more or less in regular contact with the developers that I review and, to be perfectly honest, they DO listen to constructive criticism!
Footnote: The fact that I haven’t reviewed a product for some time and haven’t published a newsletter for the last three months is due to my personal situation.
NinjaNews should be up and running again very soon!