I’ve come across a technical issue with listings which I wasn’t aware of before. I recently lost a beloved pet. So I had 3 pets on my listing. My reviews showed 3 pets. I updated the listing (because we all mourn in different ways) and deleted the photos and information about the deceased pet. Then I noticed a strange thing. All the reviews showed 2 cats, not 3.
This is bad because:
It deletes a pet in a way that is insensitive to petowners.
It creates confusion. Suddently the reviews say 2 pets, but 3 are being referred to. Some sitters might assume the host is being dishones about the number of pets.
Some hosts reading sitter reviews might think sitters are lying about their experience if they claim having sat in multicat homes but the reviews show fewer cats or if they claim cat and dog experience but the dog has disappeared from the listing.
I had already mentioned that there had been third cat as some of the house photos include all three. But it now looks strange that the reviews show 2 cats and the sitters describe 3.
This seems to be a similar problem with other updates such as the homeowner location changing when the host updates leading to reviews that describe houses or towns or countries that the host no longer lives in.
This doesn’t seem like that hard a fix. It would just require the reviews to not update the host location or the number or kind of pet with the rest of the information. The reviews are historical information, so the details shouldn’t change. This would benefit both hosts and sitters.
So could the mods maybe mention this to the teams that could get the change done?
All reviews link to the current listing and information about previous listing is not saved All previous reviews also change location when a host moves house because they are linked to the most current listing and information.
It can also be confusing when looking at a sitters profile - if I sit for someone in U.K. who moved to Australia- the review about me - now states I sat in Australia ( even if I’ve never been there )
Yes, I mentioned both issues in the OP and am aware of the cause. As a homeowner the interface has separate sections for Location and Pets. My suggestion would be that when homeowners update these sections the review section doesn’t update. I don’t think fix woud be that hard to apply universally.
When something changes in the host’s life – location, number of pets, kind of pets, etc. It should not change the reviews.
Just a bigger example of the insanity: Let’s imagine a sitter with cat experience getting an out of the blue invitation to sit a large dog. The sitter has no dog experience, but the host inviting them INSISTS they do or they are lying because there is a review showing them with dog experience. because a pet owner got a dog at some point after the sit and added it onto the listing.
So I just had further discussions with a web developer:
Maybe as a simple solution they need to take the number of pets and even the kind of pet off the reviews for the homeowner. If sitters are checking the reviews left for a homeowner by a sitter, they can read the reviews instead of getting caught up on a number which might have changed. It’ looks like the reviews left by owners for sitters don’t include the number of pets, so eliminating this for owners as well would be the simplest solution.
Because the type of pets can also change, it might make sense to also get rid of the pet icon altgether in the reviews left by sitters. It could be suggested that the sitters mention the type of pets in the reviews.
I don’t know whether reviews for sitters left by homeowners change when homeowners make an update on type of pets – eg adding a dog when the sitter didn’t sit for one, but that is also something to be looked into.
This seems worse IMO than the country issue – which I’m not discounting because the root issue is the same.. Maybe some owners want sitters with experience in a particular country. Most homeowners want sitters with experience with those particular types of animals. Imagine someone is looking for horse experience and I have no horse experience, but one of my previous cat sits now has horses. Will I now show up in a filter for horse sitting?
Here’s a low tech not very costly way for THS to fix this:
What if they change the form for reviews, so when a sitter is writing a review, first that sitter fills out the following:
Location: Where was your sit located: Country________ Province/State ______ Town/Village __________.
What type of pets did you sit? cats dogs small animals birds ……
How many pets did you sit? ____
Review Text:
So if you housesit for Mary in her flat in Paris France and watched her cats Collete and Voltaire but not her poodles Fifi and Aubergine who traveled with her to her summer place in Nice, it would be clear to future pet owners that you sat for 2 cats in Paris and not 4 pets in Nice. If you sat for Fred at his weekend place in Catskill where he keeps sheep, it would be clear after he sells the weekend place and moves to Brooklyn that you cared for sheep in Catskill.
This also means that sitters don’t “lose” their experience when homeowners “lose” pets. It means that homeowners don’t feel that their deceased pets are somehow erased even from the history of past reviews like pictures of leaders cut out of official history in dictatorships. And yes I will admit this feels personal to me today when I look at the 19 sitters who sat for my 3 cats and see them all listed as having sat for two cats.
Left a message about something I thought I saw where there were no numbers or names but apparently I didn’t see it. I now have tons of extra verbiage explaining WHY reviews make it sound much more complicated than the usual 2 cat sit. I know I have to let this go – or not renew my membership because THS really doesn’t care about anything other than getting people to pay for memberships.
Having developed software for 30+ years, I can assure you that “not very costly”, “low tech” and “easy” rarely are any of those. THS is taking the simple out of using current data when populating certain fields of past reports. Likely, they don’t even keep the old data. Why they don’t just remove those fields on the web page (the THS app does not included them at all) is puzzling but I have to assume they’ve programmed themselves into a tight corner that’s hard to escape. If it makes you feel better, computer programs are not at all personal.
Married to web developer, so I’m aware. But the web developer when I explained the issue declared it very bad and the type of the thing that most businesses would rectify ASAP. It’s a petsitting app that prides itself on the integrity of the reviews but they are actually messing with the reviews by changing them when the host’s update and obviously the homeowners have to update when they get new pets or pets cross the rainbow bridge. Whomever is in charge of the web design should have you know thought of that. Also allegedly, Trusted Housesitters has many members who pay fees and got some big hedge fund money invested so where are they spending it?
Yes, I think so too… And it’s a terrible design to boot: whenever a sitter’s profile is loaded, instead of just one request pulling up their 20 plain text reviews and various date/location/pet sit attributes, the backend needs to query each of those 20 individual HO’s current listings to pull those attributes. Of course we can’t say how complex a fix would be without seeing the code, but it really does seem like it should be simple to add a couple static fields to a review. IMO the trickiest part should only be deciding how to maintain clarity for users when a review shows a horse but the linked HO’s profile does not because their life has changed… makes me think about listing version tracking, but that’s just overcomplicating it.
Thank you @adelia . And I realize part of my obsession with this is because I’m having a lot of feelings.
I’m not a programmer or developer. But my training is about workarounds and finding solutions when resources are limited. I think developers often think about the best solutions and actually fixing the problem. I’m pro workaround. I think they’d be better off just not having the number or even the pet icon appear in the reviews. Hiding it if you can’t get rid of it.
It’s possible they need the pets to show up for filters if a user wants to find a sitter with say horse experience. But the current system could be completely inaccurate. Just because a host who a sitter once sat for got a horse at some point in time doesn’t mean the sitter actually sat for the horse. And they are de-emphasizing the system of inviting sitters anyway.
Sitters could be advised going forward to name the pets they sat for and type of pets they were in the review and/or if it’s not too complicated there could be a form for sitters to manually input the information after a sit so it could work into filters attached to them.
But it also irks me that we are all paying membership fees that are going up. They are using our homeowner photos to market their product – memberships. And they aren’t putting the money back into the business to actually improve the product.
