Anytime you make a post, whether it is a question, answer, review or reply, any products you mention will be automatically linked to the corresponding product page here on TheSupplementRating.com. This is to help those people browse the site easier. Most of the time, when someone mentions other products in their review, viewers will want to take a look at those other products too. Instead of having to search for them, visitors can now click on the automatically generated links in the posts.
So, if you post something and you see links magically appear in your post, don’t worry! This is supposed to happen.
It has been brought to my attention that two popular supplements on this site are known to contain steroids. These products are legal to purchase in the United states but may not be for long. With the recent increase in popularity of Tren products, there has been more scrutiny of their uses and side effects. Read the entire article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/sports/24steroids.html?_r=2&hpw
This was recently brought to my attention by a visitor of the site. The companies involved are ASN, QFL and SNI:
FDA Takes Enforcement Action Against Three New Jersey Dietary Supplement and Protein Powder Manufacturers
Companies failed to declare allergens in products and correct filthy conditions
The U.S. Department of Justice, on behalf of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, has filed a complaint for permanent injunction against Quality Formulation Laboratories, Inc., American Sports Nutrition Inc., Sports Nutrition International LLC and Mohamed S. Desoky, who oversees operations at all three companies.
The companies, located in Paterson, N.J., manufacture dietary supplements and protein powders and distribute them throughout the United States. The companies also export powder mixes and dietary supplements for sale by private label customers.
The government\’s complaint, filed July 1, 2009 in the U.S. District Court of New Jersey, alleges that the companies have failed to follow current Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) by manufacturing and storing food under filthy conditions and in conditions that may cause major food allergens to enter into products not intended to contain them.
The complaint also alleges that the companies failed to disclose major food allergens on the product labels and have other labeling problems.
During a recent inspection, FDA investigators found that several of the companies’ products contained milk ingredients that were not declared on the product labels. In addition, the company failed to clean processing equipment between batches and control allergens in the facility.
FDA investigators also discovered live and dead rodents and rodent urine, feces and gnaw holes on bags of product.
In three inspections, FDA investigators noted deviations from GMP standards. The companies promised to make corrections, but they failed to do so. The complaint requests a court order to stop the companies and its officer from manufacturing and distributing the products until needed corrections are made.
“This company has consistently failed to correct filthy conditions in their plants and to make sure that allergens are appropriately declared on the labels, despite frequent warnings to do so,” said Michael Chappell, the FDA’s acting associate commissioner for regulatory affairs. “The FDA will not tolerate companies that fail to provide adequate safeguards.”
Consumers with allergies to milk ingredients who have used these products and are experiencing any symptoms should contact their health care professional.
Consumers can report problems with FDA-regulated products to their district office consumer complaint coordinator.
We just added a new Pre-Workout Supplements category. We moved a bunch of older products into this new category, including NO-Xplode, naNO Vapor, Black Powder and more. We know that we weren’t able to get them all, so if you find any supplements on the site that should be in that category, hit “Report Listing Error” and let us know so we can change it.
Our newest feature enables TheSupplementRating.com users to be able to submit their very own bodybuilding, fitness, diet and exercise articles. There are already a few articles to get the ball rolling. Take a look at the Article Section to review and submit your own articles.
To help visitors find the best deals on supplements, users are now encouraged to share prices they paid for specific supplements through the price sharing feature. Simply look up a supplement and click the “How much did you pay for XYZ” link. You can share the price you paid, quantity or size you bought and the store through which you bought.
In order to curb spam and bogus prices, visitors can still “flag” any posted prices which are incorrect, out of date or clearly some sort of spam.
Here are a few improvements that are going to make their way to the site within the next few weeks:
- Full Price List - I have several databases of prices for various retailers. To keep things simple, if there are any matches for a specific product, I limit the page to only show 4 of the top retailer prices. A new feature will be added that will show all prices found for that product.
- Users to Post Prices - Since I don’t have all the information on the net, I am going to create an extra section for users to post where they bought the supplement, and for how much. This will help people find the best prices around the net. One thing I want to prevent is company reps spamming the site, or people posting incorrect/bogus info.
- View all Questions, Answers, Replies and Retailer Reviews Posted by a User - Currently, you can only get a list of all supplement reviews posted by a user. I will be adding a new feature that lets you see other stuff posted by someone.
- Article Database - As the site is establishing a larger presence on the web, I want to include more information about muscle building, exercise routines, diets, supplementation, etc. I am in the process of figuring out how to allow users to upload articles and somehow be compensated through some sort of article competition. This is still an idea in the works.
Again, if anyone has any ideas, feel free to let me know about them! The site has been created by the users, for the users since the beginning.
As you can tell, the major update went live a few weeks ago and little problems and bugs have been sorted out in the last few weeks. The main new features in this update include a totally re-designed layout, additional review statistics, and most importantly, a user system.
I had been receiving tons of complaints about having anonymous reviewing and a lot of people suggested I move to a user registration system to help create some accountability for the reviews. I was very hesitant for a while, because I know many people don’t like to sign up to something, but after seeing enough questionable reviews, I decided to go for the user system.
The registration system is really simple and is really only in place to help visitors see all the reviews done by one person. Since you now leave a trail of reviews, we can get a better idea of who this person is and if their reviews are biased or not. For example, someone might sign up and leave a negative review for every single product from a certain manufacturer. Or, the might leave a great review for every product by a single manufacturer. This helps us better identify possible unbiased or skewed reviews.
Some people don’t like registering, and that is fine. I now have to manually approve any reviews submitted by guests, and I am very pickey with these reviews. It takes a while to get your review approved, so your best bet is to just sign up.
We have just started work on totally re-designing the site. Some of the features that would be included would be a similar ratings system, except are also working to integrate a user system. This would help increase the accountability of the reviews. Guest reviews would still be allowed, but our plan is to eventually phase them out.
Users will be able to upload a picture and a bio. Visitors reading their reviews will be able to see their profile and a list of all their reviews. Hopefully this will help promote higher quality reviews.
Here is a screenshot of the new layout:
Thanks to everyone who submitted ideas. We received about 15-20 great ideas for the site!
The following were suggested, but are already parts of the site:
- Users can rate products - Duh…
- View top ten for each category - You can already sort by rating for each category.
- Be able to vote ratings down if they seem biased/fake - We already have the flagging system in place to remove unacceptable reviews. We could do some sort of “X out of Y members found this review useful”
- More discounts and Manual price match - This is pretty tough considering that we don’t sell anything. I’ll pass this info along to our sponsors.
Here are some of the suggestions and what I am considering doing:
#15: Have “Price Paid” instead of “Value” - Having members share where they bought the product and for how much does help people save on supplements. The only problem is that I would need to also specify what size they bought, shipping, discounts, etc. I am considering creating a separate page for each supplement for people to post the best prices they could find. For now, users can just mention how much they paid and from where in their review.
#14: Allow reviewers to say where they bought the supplement from - Similar to the previous suggestion; I think I will create some sort of separate page for each supplement on the best places to buy it.
#13: Taste option - Have another field (0 through 10 rating) for taste. Supplements in pill form could have an NA. I had considered this when I first built the site, but decided that reviewers could just mention it in their reviews instead of creating a whole extra field.
#12: Create more categories based on fitness goals - The supplements are already categorized like this somewhat. It is hard enough to figure out the correct category for each new supplement already, so it would be even more difficult finding the right goal too. Some supplements do multiple goals at once, such as burning fat and building muscle.
#11: Allow users to create supplement blogs/journals - This would require me to create some sort of username/password type system. It is very possible. Each product page could also have links to any blogs/journals on that supplement. This info could be very useful. The only problem is that it would be very difficult on my part to create such a script. This is a good idea, but I am going to wait a while before making the commitment to developing it.
#10: Allow people to post their names - In theory, this would help establish credibility amongst reviewers, however it would be useless unless you could log in and post using some sort of username. Otherwise, anyone could pretend to be you and add a rating. Again, this will be pretty tough to script, however I would like to implement it sometime down the road.
#9: People who liked this product also liked… - Right now, I don’t know how I would add this feature in because I have no way of knowing with my current data. If I were to do some sort of username system, I could implement this feature pretty easily.
#8: Get more traffic - The site already receives nearly one hundred thousand visitors each month. However, more traffic = more reviews = more useful.
#7: Include product info for each supplement - I have always wanted to include the manufacturer’s description and maybe nutrition info, but it would take so darn long to add it for each of the 1,700 supplements I have in the database right now. I will look into ways of importing this data rather than having to manually enter it for each product.
#6: Remodel the layout - I have had a number of people tell me this throughout the life of the site, and I had several people suggest this as part of the competition. I have tried multiple times to make the site more attractive, but without too much success. The problem is that I am colorblind and everyone has a different opinion on what looks good. Take a look at the progress I have made though: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.thesupplementrating.com
#5: Create a rating value that incorporates number of reviews - I have always wanted to do something like this, but never could decide on an appropriate formula. The idea would be to create a mathematical equation so that a product that has a rating of 9 and 100 reviews gets a better score than a product with a rating of 10 with 1 review. The issue is that it would need to work for all instances. For example, I don’t want a product that has 1000 reviews and an average score of 6 to be better than a product with 3 reviews and an average score of 9. I will eventually be able to figure something out; I assume the formula will just hit me one day.
#4: Show recommendations by age/gender - Right now, I don’t collect a gender value for the reviews, but I should start doing that. I want to create a “More detailed statistics” page for each product, where it shows ratings trends, breakdowns of ratings by gender or age, standard deviations, outliers, etc.
#3: Have featured professional reviews for each product - It would be great to have some featured reviews by reputable fitness experts to help supplement the average Joe user reviews. I could gather a team of a few experts, create a profile for each and have them all review a number of supplements. Obviously I couldn’t do this for all the 1,700+ supplements currently in the database, but it would be great for some of the most popular products.
#2: Show more recent reviews - Before this competition, you could only see the last 3 user reviews from the home page. Since a handful of people suggested allowing visitors to see more, I created a page that lets you see as many recent reviews as you want.
And here is the #1, the winner of the contest!
#1: Create a Question and Answer section - A major problem used to be that users would post questions are reviews. They would give the product arbitrary scores which would totally ruin the validity of the average product scores. I would delete them, but a lot of the time, they would be very good questions. Right after receiving this idea, I went ahead and implemented it. In the few weeks that this feature has been live, there are already 85 questions and 57 answers!
Congratulations Teja A. - you just won yourself a $50 Bodybuilding.com Gift Certificate!
Thanks again to everyone who participated. If anyone else can think of ways to improve, feel free to give us your ideas!