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As I'm sure many of us were, I was bored on Sunday evening, so spent some time watching the videos and reading the 30+ pages of tenebre's thread regarding his experience with Blue Table Painting.

One of the posts in the thread suggested that we set up some form of review thread, where Dakka members can post about their experiences of various painting services, allowing the community to generate some metrics as to the reliability/quality of them.

Given I was bored at work yesterday afternoon, I started brainstorming some ideas for how such a thread could operate, and some questions that arose. I've posted my thoughts below, and am interested to see what y'all make of the idea.

I'd initially suggest drawing a line and only allowing reviews of completed projects that were delivered after a certain date - my initial thought was 01/11/2014. This would stop people carrying historical grudges which may no longer be relevant to a service including them in the feedback. Instead, we'd be allowing everyone a fresh start, and seeing what they delivered moving forwards.

I'd suggest we ask people posting a review to provide numerical scores (on a 1-5 or possibly 1-9 scale, where 3 or 5 is the average value, and the extremes are just that) looking at certain areas of their experience. I'd considered the following, but there may be other areas I've missed - Communication, Speed, Quality (?), Customer Satisfaction & Packaging of Completed Work. I'd look to provide some examples of what the extremes and average might look like, so that users understand the scale.

In addition, users would be offered the opportunity to post their free-format comments about their experiences, should they so wish.

The first post would need to be kept up-to-date, with averages on each value for a service (possibly with the averages only showing after X number of reviews?), and SPOILER tags holding links to each review. As with the Swap Shop feedback thread, I think non-review posts would be reported to, and removed by, the MODs, assuming they were willing to assist.

The questions I'd come up with were:
- Which board on Dakka would be best suited to this? Dakka Discussions, the Swap shop, or even one of the P&M boards?
- Should such a thread be a sticky or not?
- What do those posters providing a painting service think of such an idea?
- Should reviews, once they reach a certain age (say a year or two years) stop being counted towards the average scores?