Greasy Fork

TART not working after Amazon removes rank from Public Reviews Written by You

Amazon broke TART by removing display of reviewer rank. This will be fixable, if that's all they change. But, I'm not going to jump right in and fix it, since it might be soon reverted by Amazon, or, they might change more... don't want to put in wasted effort. Let's live without for 5 or 6 days, and see.

I don't think they're updating the "Top Reviewers" list either. (I can't find my own name near my last known rank)

I wonder if sellers are spamming the top reviewers bribing them offline for reviews. *sigh*

TART is not really broken, instead Amazon has limited its capacity regarding showing all new votes, although some new votes will register.

It still records all new reviews with dates and AVP markings. In addition, I can still organize all these reviews according to submitted dates, or alphabet order, helpful vote amounts, or however I want to view them.

The most useful tool is that I can scroll down and click from this list on a review that needs an edit or update. This saves me so much time rather than scrolling, scrolling and scrolling through hundreds of written reviews on my Amazon profile page.

In conclusion, even with its limited capacity, TART is an extremely useful tool for me. I can figure out the ratios or other information very quickly with a calculator because TART has the data available on the footline at the bottom.

The only limited capacity are some of the new unaccounted votes, but they are not shown on my Amazon profile page either. Other than that I still use your program as much as I did before, - which is on a constant basis.

If I didn't have TART as my instant 'spread-sheet' I probably would stop submitting reviews, because regarding instant organization, TART is still a terrific program for me.

TART is broken in that it no longer displays correct values for Reviewer Ranking, Helpful Votes, or Upvote/Review Ratio. That is because of the change Amazon made to the layout of its Public Reviews Written by You page to delete reviewer ranking.

As you note, Jaxson, everything else about TART works to show the information Amazon provides. But that information has recently not been maintained by Amazon to past standards. I hope this is just neglect and not intentional.

AnotherFloyd should be commended for the work he has done on TART, as you do, Jaxson. It's well written, and he is not responsible for it being broken now.

It does make sense to wait 5 or 6 days to see what Amazon does before cleaning up TART so it works perfectly again.

Thank you, JohnSmithson for confirming all my positive statements regarding the useful tools that TART still provides and even in its current form, which Amazon has not maintained.

As a side note I have made another 'discovery'.

Even though an extra vote does not always show up under the TART total that is on my profile page, I still use the 'tabulate' button and occasionally the TART program will show a vote that was not in the program before. Therefore, TART is picking up some of the previous 'unaccounted votes', as Amazon finally gets around to listing them on our reviews.

In conclusion, even if no extra votes are recorded - occassionally click the tabulate button. Although the votes are not 'currently new' (as of that moment) - instead they are mostly likely, one of the unaccounted votes that Amazon has picked up from about 10/23/17 and onward, when their whole vote recording system changed and they removed our profile pages.

(Wow, that was a long run-on sentence, but I kept getting distracted with lots of interuptions).

Jaxson, you are welcome. TART is definitely a good program. I have never worked with user scripts before, so to learn more about them I decided to make a private personal version of TART that works with Amazon's changes. To do that I had to look closely at AnotherFloyd's code. It's quite clever.

Hi!

First of all, I would like thanks to AnotherFloyd for the great work made with this wonderful script.
I made a small fix to show again Delta icon near the Tabulate link.

---------------------

Below the necessary changes:

-find this:

reviewerRanking = lst[4].substring(9);
GM_log("Reviewer Ranking: " + reviewerRanking );

-and replace it with:

//reviewerRanking = lst[4].substring(9);
//GM_log("Reviewer Ranking: " + reviewerRanking );

-find this:

helpfulVotes = lst[9].substring(7);

-and replace it with:

charIdx = profileDiv.textContent.lastIndexOf(':');
helpfulVotes = profileDiv.textContent.substring(charIdx+2).trim();

---------------------

With this fix Delta icon show again for any votes update.
However, remain a problem that, some times, doesn't highlight the new votes received on the Tabulate page.

Or you could just make one change to line 672:

helpfulVotes = lst[9].substring(7);

to

helpfulVotes = lst[3].substring(7);

Or you could just make one change to line 672:

helpfulVotes = lst[9].substring(7);

to

helpfulVotes = lst[3].substring(7);

Yes, that's the way I've done it. Will put out an official release in a day or so. BUT, I will say that datrix's code may be a bit more robust for any additional, odd tweaks by Amazon.

Yes, that's the way I've done it. Will put out an official release in a day or so. BUT, I will say that datrix's code may be a bit more robust for any additional, odd tweaks by Amazon.

exactly what I wanted to do with this fix, look for something that would be fine with even future changes :)

I agree with jaxson - the ability to quickly search my own reviews is incredibly valuable. Amazon used to have that feature in their own search but removed it a few years ago.

Seems they are updating the individual review upvotes again, but I'm still 25 votes behind behind for my 1300+ reviews (1575 vs 1600)

I can no longer pull up the previous 'your Amazon Reviews' pages where TART was installed. Anyone else having this issue?

The same on german amazon.de. You are redirected to the Profile page. I'm afraid, this is the end of the Reviews page.

Crap. 98% chance this is what Amazon intends, since they've screwed up most everything else that reviewers liked. 2% chance it's a temporary test, error, etc, that will revert.

I will consider doing something TART-ish with the profile page, as time and motivation allow. I see two possibilities, but, either would depend on getting the profile page to fully populate -- since it automatically adds older review entries as the browser is scrolled... I'd have to figure out how to do this with a script. Not sure how practical this is for users with THOUSANDS of reviews -- their browsers or hardware might not support such abuse.

Possibilities: 1) Do TEN TIMES the page requests, to bring up every review that has been written, on its own page, and assemble data from there. Since these pages contain no information about negative votes, that would no longer be shown. But, positive vote stats would still be kept. This would use more bandwidth for the user and for Amazon. And, it would take longer. And, it would be more prone to network errors that might bungle the process.

Or, 2) Use just the information on the profile page to assemble a quick reference chart, as some (many?) of us have appreciated that aspect of TART... when trying to find a particular review, for example.

Glad to see you are on top of this. Yes to both (1) and (2). Perhaps using a page from ARAT where the information is written out to a file first to combat performance issues? Then the second pass works from the data in the file to process and sort the data.

I don't know how many read this comment section, but I have seen repeated complaints sometimes make Amazon reverse bad decisions. Use the help link at the bottom of Amazon pages to get to a rep. If enough of us complain and continue to we may get to see our review list pages with up and down votes again. I've already complained once. Will repeat this evening. Squeaky wheels!

datagal, good point. DigitalTurtle, don't get too excited about my TART-ish ideas. I am very busy right now, with other interests, thus my reference to "time and motivation." The sad thing is, that with no Amazon TRF for me to post on, very few people would stop by here and learn of a new project, if and when I do it.

In case anyone would like to send an email to review-appeals@amazon.com maybe it would help. Here is some sample text. Items in should be replaced by your own reviewer ID's or rank as appropriate.

Here is is:

Hi,

On Thursday Dec 14th when I was logged in to Amazon and followed the link below I got pages of 10 of my reviews that showed both up and down vote totals.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/

If I tried to go to this link for another reviewer ID I was redirected to their profile. I could only use that URL to see my own reviews in that useful and helpful member-reviews page format.

About 2AM (EST) Dec 15th that URL stopped going to the 10-per page member-reviews page it used to and is now redirected to my profile page at:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.

As a top reviewer (currently ) I know that I and many other reviewers use the member-reviews page to tell how their own reviews are doing in terms of votes up and down.

Please restore the member-reviews page so a reviewer can use it to see detail of their own reviews in a much more useful way than the presentation on their profile page.

I wrote to Amazon about this issue, and received the following unhelpful response:

Hello,

This is xxxxx from the Communities Team; I just received your email, and trust this finds you well.

Thanks for taking the time to send us your comments on not being able to see reviews which got 'not helpful' votes. We’re continually working to improve the shopping experience and ensure we present useful information to customers.

The steps you have to follow to see the total amount of votes received are below:

1. Click on ‘Your Account’
2. Scroll down to the “Personalization” section
3. Click on “Product Reviews Written by You”

Votes will be displayed next to the reviews.

If you want to find out more about this or other Amazon.com features, please visit our Amazon.com Site Features Help pages:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_16465201_bid_208917?n...

I hope this helps. We look forward to seeing you again soon.

We'd appreciate your feedback. Please use the buttons below to vote about your experience today.

Best regards,
xxxxx
Amazon.com

JohnSmithson, in other words, Amazon support is unaware that anything has changed, and not capable of checking that what you told them is now the case.

Yes, AnotherFloyd, sadly that's a good summary. Not to mention that the procedure suggested for getting to the "Public [not Product] Reviews Written By You" pages hasn't worked that way for years.

I've been a highly ranked Amazon reviewer for many years now. I can't figure out why Amazon has turned against us when it used to cultivate us. It may be because of all the fake reviews (which many top reviewers contributed to during the free-product frenzy). Whatever the reason, it's disappointing.

My Amazon reviewer rank, if it mattered, is probably in the 1500's now. But I need the review summary for a reason: I'm rehosting them on my own blog, and I was doing them in batches of 25-50 and I still have a couple HUNDRED to go. This is going to wreck my plans.

JohnSmithson, I hear your frustration and share it. For every competent Amazon rep there seem to be at least several that fall far short. The ratio used to be much better I think.

I too can't understand why Amazon would take away tools that make writing reviews fun and interesting. Tools that provide feedback to the reviewer to help them write more helpful reviews and know when to take another look at a review not so well received. Harrumph!!

Don't give up. Amazon has multiple support channels and odds are you'll eventually get a competent rep via email, chat or phone. Squeaky wheels.

On another topic - has anyone made an off-amazon reviewer forum? If so maybe some more squeaky wheels can be found... trying to stay positive.

Two notes:

1) There's /r/amazon on reddit.com Don't believe it's an official one, but it's one place to blab about Amazon frustrations.

2) Found a little bit of discovery. Chrome WILL save these dynamic webpages if you scroll down long enough. So I guess if you issue "5 x pageDown" every 5 seconds and give it a while, you may reach the end. Then you can save it (menu / tools / save webpage / complete) and once it finishes, all of the dynamically added content is still linked once you reopen the file. THEN

3) HYPOTHETICALLY, it can be done in FOUR steps

a) you need to do a 'setup', where you somehow manually scroll to the VERY END of all your reviews linked in your profile, and save that.

b) use that as the "core DB" extract all the links

c) go back to the profile to grab any NEW reviews and update the "core DB"

d) run through every link in the coreDB and update the reviews (and note the "delta")

Datagal, it looks like other reviewers are also contacting Amazon.

I sometimes go to a Vine reviewers group on Craig's List at forums.craigslist.org/?forumID=8465 At least one reviewer there says she contacted Amazon and got obsolete advice like me.

There are also some Amazon refugees at Goodreads, but I never go there any more.

I complained as well. The response I got was that my feedback was forwarded to the development team. I also complained that I am no longer able to see comments and respond to questions posted on my reviews (and we stopped getting notifications a while back). The old profile page allowed me to display either comments or reviews and that is no longer possible.

Like DigitalTurtle I'm most frustrated with not being able to see comments. If upvotes/downvotes are gone forever I can live with it, (though no way to see if you're being targetted I guess...) but not being able to reply to queries on my reviews seems insane to me...

Hi

I came over as I've been using TART - thanks very much and wondered what had happened with it now they've changed the view. What a pain!

Thanks again for the use of TART, though after ARAT stopped working. It was great to be able to go straight to a review and to see votes distribution. I wish we had the means to export the data to Excel or something to allow a summary view.

Purpleheart

@purpleheart Excel was very easy - copy all and paste into a spreadsheet, select tabs as separators.

@Another Floyd, have done any experiments with the new lay out? Any hope?

What if we gave you an input file with URLs? Is there still a way to parse out negative votes from source of the page? In the past when I looked at the source of the page I did not see where you got that information even when your code was still working. I was looking for something like "n out of x found it helpful" but I only saw "n found it helpful" but you still got negative votes from that page somehow... where did it come from?

It did say "n out of x found it helpful" for any that had negative votes.

But, no, there is no current available source for negative votes.

And, I have not gotten excited about doing anything. Though, I did send a note to Amazon. At least the response acknowledged that the page/features I wanted really are gone (some Amazon reps noted above did not get that), and would pass my feedback on up.

Found "total helpful votes"... But it's only available on the page after you post the review.

I noticed that too, I see more information about recent reviews.

Have you noticed that the "top reviews" for any particular item are shown with the writers' profile photos? But, if you click to view all reviews, the profile pics are removed.

It's obvious Amazon don't want review solicitors to spam the top reviewers. I can't find review ranking anywhere now.

Something's screwed up with their top contributor. I got a "top contributor" badge, but it's in... Pets? I don't recall having EVER rated a pet product because I don't have a pet! WTF?

Yeah, that's odd. Semi-related: I notice that I've been reclassified from Camping "Enthusiast" to Camping "Top Contributor". I assume the Enthusiast thing has been phased out, entirely.

Hi Kasey Chang and DigitalTurtle. Where are you looking when you see "...'total helpful votes'... But it's only available on the page after you post the review." and "...more information about recent reviews." Thanks.

I am new to this forum. Is there a way to see these remarks with the new ones at the top?

It also seems that the option of forwarding comments to email has been discontinued. I looked at one of my cookbook reviews and saw 2 new comments that were not forwarded.

Bummer. I keep over a dozen tabs open in my browser ALL the time. One of them used to be Amazon. Monitoring my reviews, but, also keeping me in touch with my watchlist, and looking up reviews of things I might buy. NOT any more. I can go a week or more without ever thinking of Amazon. I expect that overall reviewer activity is way down. I would not be surprised if -- sometime in the next year or so -- someone notices, and realizes the screwup, and tries to institute a remedy. But, the remedy will not be what we're used to, or expect... more likely half-hearted and lame.

@Allison (1) Yes, Amazon stopped sending notification of comments as well. I have one review where people post a lot of questions, I had to bookmark it so I can check if there are any new questions! I am very annoyed at Amazon that they made it hard for me to be helpful. (2) The information you are asking about is in the source of the page that one can see with Web tools
@AnotherFloyd. I feel the same. I see more and more of useless one sentence reviews. Is this the future?

(2) Source code of the profile page?

When do you access it? I have looked at the profile source code a few times for other stuff and again today, and don't see the total votes.

I just saw the tally. It is at the top of that page that says "thanks for the review we will send you an email when it it posted". Nice to know but really useless in the larger scheme of things.

For those interested in seeing their downvotes ("Not Helpful") there is the backdoor --as long as your review has one or more images-- of clicking on "See all customer images" (to the right of the start of customer reviews) and then clicking on the image you posted. This opens a window with your image(s) on the left half and the text of your review on the right half. Scroll this window and at the end you find see your upvotes and your downvotes. You must *not* be logged in Amazon to get this information.

@Drumaldry - Thank you, especially for the informative You must *not* be logged in Amazon to get this information." - That was the extra step that I didn't even think about.
Amazing that Amazon will let everyone else see the total vote results, and yet try to keep the total downvotes a secret from the person who wrote the review.

I am adding the following to all my reviews.

NB Amazon no longer alerts reviewers when comments or up and down votes are posted. If you would like a response to your comment, please write to me using the address in my profile. You could also write to Amazon and ask why they are withholding feedback from reviewers.

@Drumaldry Too bad I don't put images into my reviews.

@Allison -- Not suggesting to do it for all of your reviews, but adding a relevant image to a few of them, in which monitoring votes might be of interest to you, could be an option.

IMO, Amazon is not withholding the feedback of comments, since they still are posted at the end of a review and not hidden. It is more the case that in the last of their convoluted attempts to get rid of shill reviewers and the "under the table" negative voting wars among Top 10Ks (trying to improve rank by attacking higher ranked ones) their pro bono you-have-a-comment alerting service became a casualty of reprogramming collateral damage.

@ jaxson -- Not so amazing. Remember the _Jargon File_ aphorism about not attributing to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity : )

@Drumaldry - not only do I agree with you but there is a saying, 'you just can't fix stupid' and in my experience, I find that to be so true.

@Drumaldry As I looked at the image files, you only see the negs for that one review. I have almost 600 and while there are a few that do generate piles of negs, it is the overall trends I am interested in - what do readers like and dislike.

And Amazon has been withholding the neg vote count for a long time now. And they are withholding their previous efforts to alert us to comments so that we can respond. Semantics, but it's about all you can do in a couple of sentences.

As for getting rid of shill reviewers, transparency is the ticket. If a person only posts 4* and 5* reviews, and loads of them, then that person is not reading critically, whether paid or not. Bell curve applies to books too, although fortunately we can hope for a northward skew if professional editors cull some of the turkeys.

Interesting that something triggered a "we can't publish this" note from Amazon about one of my reviews. I changed the wording of the note and it went through. It now reads:

NB Amazon no longer alerts reviewers when comments or up and down votes are posted. If you would like a response to your comment, write to me. You could also ask Amazon why they now hide feedback from reviewers.

@jaxson They closed the backdoor to the negative votes at least as of yesterday. Now neither plus nor minus votes show up in the images|text windows. Either a coincidence or Amazon programmers read this forum.

@Drumaldry - Yes, yesterday I noticed that they closed that 'back door' too. After my prime membership is up, I am done reviewing, and I am done as an Amazon customer too.

I only joined Prime last year because Amazon started deleting all my Full-Purchase product reviews due to their 'free freight' on a large order. Apparently, this voided out my entire purchase. Unfortunately, they are now retroactively deleting lots of my reviews due to the free freight over the past few years, before I joined prime.
No coupons, no promotions, no discounts, no deals and no incentive products were on any of these orders, just the free freight that is automatically generated when the eligible products total over that 'specific' free freight amount. Furthermore, I do not use or have any paypal account.

Therefore, their 'new system' does not specify what reviews are receiving votes, we have no idea regarding any negative down votes, and there is no way that we know when or where there is a comment on any review. In addition, (in my case) Amazon is randomly deleting reviews, and I have no idea which reviews have been removed, because they will not notify me.

If you check out the reviewers in the top 50 bracket, (which is where I have been floating around for the past year or so) - many 'old time' reviewers have stopped
reviewing, and I will be stopping too.

Thank heavens this is only a hobby, and it does not impact my life, which makes it easier to just pull out.

Email Memo from Amazon:

Hello,

When a Customer Review is marked "Amazon Verified Purchase," it means that the customer who wrote the review purchased the item at Amazon and did not receive the item for free or at a large discount. We want to make sure that shoppers know that reviews marked “Amazon Verified Purchase” are written based on purchase experiences that are available to most Amazon customers and not on special deals, free products and applied promotional credit (this includes free shipping).

We hope to see you again soon.

Best regards,
Aaqil S.
........................................................................................................................

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If yes, please click here:
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Whoo hoo bad news. Today my email address no longer appears on my profile. What are they thinking?

Now, the profile help email that is on the Profile page no longer works. Amazon becomes Gormenghast.

I'm guessing this is to stop companies contacting reviewers. Kind of makes sense, though there are downsides. Will this lead to outside paid reviewers coming in, rather than actual reviewers who at least have something to lose (fear of their account) who knows? Companies will continue to use the emails they have in their accounts (I still get emails even though since the rule change I do not test free products on Amazon), but as those are wiped, what will happen? I'm curious to see.

As of this morning the upvote count vanished from the edit pages. Nothing is left that is any fun.

Is there a Reddit page that talks about this stuff? I have not found it.

Well, it looks like Amazon has permanently decided not to give reviewers any way to tell which reviews get votes or comments. Given that its stock price keeps going up and up, I'm sure they don't care that some are not happy. Oh well.

Thanks, Floyd, for having given us TART for a while. I learned a little about scripting and TamperMonkey from you, and appreciate the lesson.

Thanks, John. It was fun.

This morning there is no longer a reviewer ranking so there we go. It's all gone. Thanks Floyd for helping us while you could.

Spoke too soon. The count is back up this afternoon.

FWIW, there's a "rank" in the personal profile now. In the personal "about". You'll have to click on "show more" to see it. And the individual items now show upvotes. But there's no "page" scrolling.

This morning there is a new layout which puts the upvote count on a public page. Is this a change that can be exploited for counting votes?

@"Kasey Chang" said: FWIW, there's a "rank" in the personal profile now. In the personal "about". You'll have to click on "show more" to see it. And the individual items now show upvotes. But there's no "page" scrolling.

Thanks for that note. I guess Amazon is trying to put a little interest back into the process. I'm guessing (based partially on my own behavior) that review activity is way down.

@Allison said: This morning there is a new layout which puts the upvote count on a public page. Is this a change that can be exploited for counting votes?

Interesting. That removes one of the TWO hurdles to making a TART-like summary table. Here's what I wrote in an email to another TART user, regarding the other hurdle (having noted that any solution would have to work for an unknown, large number of reviews, possibly 8000, as I recalled):

The other big problem is dealing with the infinite scroll on the Amazon profile page. I've never dealt with infinite scroll before. Apparently, there are 2 approaches to dealing with it:

1) Skillful programming, in which the Amazon loading scheme is deciphered, then put to use in loading material in the background, in chunks. I took a look at the first level of Amazon's scheme, and, sadly, could not make any sense of the URL tokens used in making the calls. The next step would be to download Amazon's script, and try to figure it out, there. Meh, that's getting pretty deep in the weeds for a self-taught hobbiest... AJAX, jquery, and whatever other advanced coding that I don't expect to be all that accessible for someone of my skill level.

2) Crude, git-er-done approach, which forces the profile page to scroll until all reviews are loaded. This would be more my style. BUT, we're talking about possibly 8000 review synopses, for a hell of a long page, and greater likelihood of hitting hardware or browser limits. These limits would be tested on other peoples machines! Even running fake data on my own computer (to simulate 8000 reviews) would not insure that others would run as well.

While my interest level in Amazon is WAY down, if not for this hurdle, I think I would go ahead and do the project.

Now, if there's a programmer out there with solid insight about approach #1, above, and wishes to share information that I could understand, that would be great. Absent that, my interests will remain elsewhere.