Tech-support/manufacturer rating section?

[deddard]

A thought occurs (doesn't happen very often:D )
It may have been suggested before, but does anyone else think a section on this site regarding quality of service would be good?
I'm just thinking along the lines of a simple section which would list manufacturers/suppliers, and a standard format for polls - along the lines of
How do you rate this company's service
Excellent
Very good
Acceptable
Poor
Service? what service?

I wouldn't like to see a rant and rave section, but maybe a poll and a few details on each manufacturer (perhaps listing the region such as UK/US that the review is applicable to)
As long as it was made clear that the opinions were personal rather than the views of the site owners, would this sort of thing be ok from a legal point of view?

[classicsoftware]

Take a look at this (http://www.resellerratings.com). Also most shopping sites rate the sellers and allow comments.

[deddard]

looks good to me - didn't think they'd have UK sites there, but they do!

[Mark Miller]

I think the problem would be that if some people raved about a product and a third party by that recommendation bought the product and it turned out to be a lemon, it could get ugly.
Also this is a pc help site and I think the other stuff would get in the way.
IMHO
Mark:)

[Paleo Pete]

Well, if done at all it would probably be better as a thread in one of the existing forums rather than a forum of its own. After all, once you get enough responses to get an average the rest is redundant.

This is also a topic that comes up as a side note in a lot of threads already, so a bit of reading will probably give visitors a general idea of what to expect, and a lot of them have already found out..

If you look at the bigger picture, it's easy to see this would become pretty stinky at times as well...Maybe a CLOSED poll with no comments allowed...anonymous and nothing but a graph to show the percentages, that would probably eliminate the tendency for trouble, but would at the same time go pretty strongly against my long standing principle and...tendency if not policy... of NOT shutting off comments unless absolutely necessary...

[Charles Kozierok]

It's not a bad idea, but I won't do it for two reasons.

First, there are serious legal issues involved when you start up with something like that. It's not worth lawyer time ($200+/hr) to deal with this for a small number of comments, but I could still get sued.

Second, as others have pointed out, anything we threw together here would pale compared to resellerratings.com anyway.

c