Goodreads Authors/Readers discussion

Got a couple of new ones yesterday - moved from accusations of sexism and racism to religious bigotry! A couple of the ones from the 11th Jan had gone, but if that was Goodreads, why didn't they remove them all? I guess they could have been removed due to working on someone else's complaint and we had overlap!

Jane wrote: "Got a couple of new ones yesterday - moved from accusations of sexism and racism to religious bigotry! A couple of the ones from the 11th Jan had gone, but if that was Goodreads, why didn't they re..."

Yeah, my book is now a "turd". I guess they change their computer feeds periodically. What I've been wondering is, after everyone's book has been trashed, what will have been accomplished? Is the goal to take GR down and we are just pawns? Or, are there enough people across all these platforms who will fall for their "fee"? Apparently, GR is not the only platform being attacked.

I've written a blog post about our adventures with Goodreads scammers Feel free to share, I believe the more people know about it, the more chances we have to make Goodreads / Amazon finally notice the problem.

Overnight Goodreads took down most of my 1 stars, but not all, so the ratings are still skewed. They have left the one from Kevin R up on each book. I'll have to get on to them again. I haven't received a ransom note yet!

Goodreads could slow this down by not allowing anyone to post a review until they have been a member for six months.

Alina I posted your blog link on my Instagram feed
@mkwhiting04

Rita wrote: "Goodreads could slow this down by not allowing anyone to post a review until they have been a member for six months."
Of course they could. I was under the impression that they vetted reviews before posting them. How can it possibly not be odd to GR that multiple, 1-star reviews suddenly pop up in 1 day? I am no techie, but, I am sure there are multiple steps that could be taken to prevent this circus. I am equally sure that real reviewers would not object to reasonable rules. Everyone has them.

Rita wrote: "They have left the one from Kevin R up on each book."

It's interesting, they left Kevin's review under my book as well. Note that "he" has 9 five-star reviews. Does that mean that someone has already paid ransom and the scammers provided fake positive ratings as well?

MK wrote: "Alina I posted your blog link on my Instagram feed
@mkwhiting04"

Thanks, MK, I believe the more exposure the better. I'm not on insta though.

Here's a new wrinkle from the scammers. They have been caught posting phony reviews, so, now they are posting them on my blog. I will report this to GR as well. These people need to get a job.

I received a response this morning, suggesting I now 'clear my cache' which I am looking into! Goodreads have removed all the fake reviews, so I'm happy with the action they have taken. They just need to come up with a way of stopping this.

'clearing my cache' as suggested by Goodreads takes you to another website called Clearing My Cache. I won't be doing this, especially since my ratings have now been restored.

Rita wrote: "'clearing my cache' as suggested by Goodreads takes you to another website called Clearing My Cache. I won't be doing this, especially since my ratings have now been restored."

Yep, I got that too and quickly closed it out without doing anything. This is the social media, technology-heavy society in which we live. I never trusted Zuckerberg and have never done social media and never will. For me, if two people read my books and like them, I'm happy. This is not my day job, it is what I love so screw all the hype. It just gets us in trouble. Also, as to the scammers posting on our GR blogs, I have 7 whole followers and two friends so I'm sure that's really going to hurt sales. From what I can tell, our techie world has only served to create a new, criminal element without commensurate benefits for the non-criminals.

Oh, I'm sorry, I have three friends.