I belong to a traffic exchange, (I know I know) called Link Referral and Exchange and the way it works is after you register, your website appears with a link and description. You are required to visit 30 websites a day, review 5 of them, pick a favorite, and make a post in their forum. For this your website is rated and ranked somewhere among the list of sites in the category you select when you sign up. The ranking is based on the quality of your reviews, given and received, plus the amount of participation in the forums. If you do your previously mentioned duty every day, your ranking is high enough to place you on the first page of the sites in your category and you receive a decent amount of visits. If your rank falls so do the hits you receive. It is an OK system. The issue I have is, I’m a web designer. I am trying to get people to contract me to build a website for them. When someone joins this type of service they already have a website. Plus it is no secret that the type of visits you get from these systems are not of the greatest quality. I do it mainly out of vanity. Yea, I’ll admit it. I want to read the reviews I get. So I’m getting 5s across the board every day since I joined, (the highest possible). Then some putz gives me a 4, which lowers my average, so I go to his site and it’s a blog. A prefab cms blog. A no talent, no style, no design blog. I go “high order”, (an old explosives term which means… “postal”). This poor review means nothing in the grand scheme of things. It is a stupid little comment from a stupid little person. Why do I want to do evil things to this individual? Of course I reviewed his site. I want to say I was fair and that the review was uninfluenced by the one he gave me…..NOT! To my credit, I did not say anything that was not true. Now I’m having regrets. Although I was honest about this persons website, They may have had as much pride in it as I have in my work. It may have taken them a great deal of time to put it together and considering the wording of their review they probably struggled to get it up and running. I detected no malice in their review of my website just an uninformed opinion. Something we are all entitled to. I may very well have taken something very dear to this person and for no reasons other than pride and vanity completely trashed it. The culmination of countless hours of this persons life, none of which they will ever get back, shattered by a few cruel words that did not need to be said. This poor individual, that I never so much as met, may never attempt another project of this scope again. I know now that no matter how bad the review I get I must realize that they are only doing what they have been asked to do and they are probably being as honest as I am. What gives me the right to react out of anger. Who am I to literally have the creativity stomped out of them like a big ugly bug. I feel so utterly and completely evil. I may have, out of anger, deprived the world of another…. blog…oh &%#@ em. Who needs the no talent piece of $%&@.