Inappropriate Ratings

Its sort of been the unwritten rule over the years that reviews are accepted as there are those that get advanced copies. As long as the review indicates that the reviewer actually heard the material (as I suppose should be the case for all reviews). Myself, I received a couple different albums up to a month before release, I suspect because I was ordering other albums artist/label direct and they likely didn't want to deal with 2 different international shipments

Anyway, ratings without reviews do not enjoy the same liberty. This album along with the new Steve Wilson and Haken albums I scoured multiple times before the release date. I apparently wasn't vigilant enough on Kansas. The hilarious thing was the Haken album had numerous ratings that I had to delete multiple times before the release. Then 1 week after release it was still sitting at 0 ratings.  

How can there by ratings and even a review of the new Kansas album when it is not even out yet?

Hrychu wrote: OK. So perhaps numeric ratings are ok for some people. I totally understand that. But, if there's no review to accompany the numeric rating, IMO, it doesn't say anything. How can you just assume what the person who rated something was thinking if all you know is the amount of stars they gave to an album? You gotta know the person, that's one thing. But even then, it's still a guessing game.

Although that's broadly true I'm not sure why there would be any good reason to abolish this facility. All you have to go on is how the rater interpreted the descriptions provided for each star rating. With a large enough sample size this can provide a reasonable indication if a PA member might enjoy the album. The 'ratings only review' was intended to make the site more inclusive i.e. to allow non English speakers to contribute. We can debate it's worth certainly but at least it does achieve that.