The AVSIM Member Review System is one of the most powerful features available to you. Through it you can share your detailed impressions of products that you own with your fellow flight simulation enthusiasts. It enables you to contribute to the collective knowledge of this community and to help others decide where to spend their hard earned income.

The following is a brief set of instructions on how best to use and contribute to the Reviews collection. If you have any questions, please post them in the comment area below this article.

INTRODUCTION:

The Reviews System is packed with features and functions that are all designed to aid you in searching for, creating and contributing to reviews and review categories in the system. Hopefully without overloading you in detail, we will walk through the major functions in this tutorial.

BASIC REVIEWS ACCESS:

The Review System is just a very large database that consists of CATEGORIES, SUBCATEGORIES and ACTUAL PRODUCTS. When you contribute a review, you are doing so to an actual product that is already in the database or which you have added.

There are two ways in which a product can get added to the Reviews System. The Reviews System manager can add products, or you can. All members in good standing on AVSIM can contribute reviews and products and we encourage you to do so as often as you want.

All products can have multiple reviews. We encourage you to add your reviews to provide multiple impressions of a product. The more reviews contributed to a product, the greater the chance of averaging "bias" in the total scores given by the reviewers.

The main Index (Front) page to the Review System consists of five sections. We will start with the entry panel and drill down from there.

THE REVIEWS HOME:

The main entry panel consists of two sections and a button; "MY NAVIGATION" and the ROOT CATEGORIES of the Review System itself, and the ADD A REVIEW button. We will discuss the MY NAVIGATION further down this page, and the ADD A REVIEW button is self-explanatory.

The main panel, shown above is the main entry point for accessing the database. It lists the top level ROOT CATEGORIES from which you select to get access to the subcategories, such as aircraft, scenery, utilities, etc. The content of the main page will change from time to time as we add or remove root categories.

Making a selection at the ROOT CATEGORY level will take you to the SUBCATEGORY PAGE shown above. In this instance we have selected the Flight Simulator Root Category and this is what we are present with. Now we can select one of the subcategories, and go from there.

We have selected the Aircraft Products subcategory and we are then presented with the product page shown above. Here you are shown a product image, a title, the number of reviews that have been done for that product, Average Rating, Detailed Ratings, and then four icons. In order left to right, these icons stand for:

ADD TO YOUR FAVORITES: adds the product review page to your favorites collection in your navigation panel.

ADD TO YOUR WISHLIST: this adds the product to your wish list.

ADD TO YOUR OWNED LIST: this adds a notation to the Product Review page and provides a list of owners of this product in the community.

ADD TO TRACKING LIST: this will allow you to track the product review and be notified when changes or comments are made to it.