Candice B.

The Greatschools.org website is a resource I've used to quickly map the school location, find out socioeconomic composition, and school performance data. All this the site does well. It also has a useful article database, such as http://www.greatschools.org/gk/emotional-smarts/. My difficulty with the website is that it (routinely) sanitizes, deletes, or removes reviews about schools from parents and students. It also appears as if they only like positive reviews; positive review however poorly written are preferable over any reviews exposing any critical flaws with the school itself. That to me is a form of censorship. I want to post a review about a school where the principal cheated me out of my work hours, and they were also ethnically discriminatory, and they are celebrating a purported Hmong hero who was in fact a criminal who smuggled heroin (http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1101/S*******/new-york-times-forgets-that-vang-pao-was-a-drug-dealer.htm). They have a great display case about him at the school, and the principal is very proud of her association with him. The school also serves as a community center for the parents with ELL classes for them. Great Schools also won't let you log in with just Facebook (it wouldn't let me log in with my FB account).

This school review site is bookmarked for helping me find quick information about schools. In a single webpage, no need to scroll down too far, you can find statistics about each school in your school district. The student-teacher ratio, racial composition, school type, socioeconomic background are all evident in the top box. Graphs indicate performance levels for the past five years in comparison to state performance standards; tabs offer things such as school boundary, ranking, detailed and comparative assess, reviews, and students. In the past, I submitted a review about a school and it was published. There are times in a school district or school that if you submit a concern that you will receive some flack either from the teacher or the school. Either that or they totally ignore your concern. School digger is simple and straightforward to use and their data is based upon National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Census Bureau and the California Department of Education.

I have used CreateSpace since 2009 and created 3 self-published books. Really for someone who has good to excellent writing ability, it's a humiliating experience to try the commercial houses in NYC. They won't accept you unless you know an agent, and agents are usually swamped. With CreateSpace, my first book was sort of a desktop publishing experiment. Considering I didn't think I was going to survive the first year after cancer, it made me proud. The second book was actually the product of many years of writing, and it was polished, but again the commercial houses may like Maya Angelou, but she was their token. They don't like creative nonfiction bios or creative nonfiction autobiographical stories unless you are way down low like sitting in prison. With these next two books, I used Bookcover Pro to develop the covers. I also used another editor to achieve the ideal layout. I had to call the Createspace company a few times to get the cover right---my fault being a bit on the picky side one might say. And also I had a bit of an Adobe flattening issue that took some time for me to work out. It took a few extra trial orders to get things exactly right, but Createspace was great to work with, very patient, and they didn't even force you to work with just one developer. To this day, I am very grateful to CreateSpace, because someday, when I have more audacity, I hope to actually market my books more. The burden of marketing your books is on you, of course, and you should not feel shy just because you self-published! They have a lot of examples of DIY authors whose presentations and touring have helped get them established.

I've been using Ripoff Report for years. It helped me deal with a very bullish landlady, a boss who was extremely mean and sexist, a workplace that was wearing me down, a guy blogger who gets on my nerves, a cleaning fluid that is toxic, the same bullish landlady once again, and tee-shirt company displaying religious logo on underwear they were selling. All this venting really helped me think things through as well as possibly expose some things or organizations for what they are. RateMDs re-organizes their website and removes all their reviews; I couldn't even log in anymore. Not Ripoff. I also like checking out what some other people might have said about an organization or product.

Yelp.com uses all kinds of spy cookies and other means to infiltrate consumer-based reviews. In simple English, their programmers have (and use) ways to discover who you are, your identity, email, and possibly a lot of other information.
Considering they lead you to think you are reporting possibly anonymously, it is not such whatsoever. Example: I wrote a legitimate review about an optometrist who has really bilked me for the money using a pseudonym. They had someone respond to my review presumably from the optometrist company. Indeed his name sounds familiar but it is fake because the respondent also offers another name.

Here's the telling fact: Respondent addressed me by a previous pseudonym, one I had stopped using over a year ago. Respondent named a franchise that had closed down over two years ago that I had once used satisfactorily. I may even have given them a positive review a few years ago. Respondent could not have possibly dredged up all this information (previous pseudonym, reference to previous glasses at previous franchise as a basis for customer compliment) in just a few minutes (the responder from the optometrist posted just after I finished the review on a late by east coast time weekend evening).

So it's obviously Yelp has IT specialist posing as respondents from the company but addressing the customer using details obtained from previous Yelp postings and reviews.

We also have reason to believe Yelp is not a safe site. Try to open Yelp as a proxy website from IE and it will not open if you have a decent safety wall. Warning that the site has suspicious attack code embedded. I don't think it's unsafe, but I do believe they use spy cookies.

The review on the optometrist was warranted because, if I make a Trumpian assertation, it was. The franchise may change, but my visit was unpleasant enough that I did not want to go back. They work at being intimidating, and the doctor at being vaguely harassing. And the place is overpriced. And they take advantage especially of middle-aged women of color. That is my opinion and impression. I share it because I want to prevent other women from being exploited. It's just the decent (not at all sociopathic as 4% reviewer believes) thing to do.

On Tuesday after I ordered for next day delivery on Monday, they called to ask to delay the delivery. They say they needed to find a "local florist" (does that tell you something). Their accent is not understandable, but the tone is inhumane. You are obliged to repeat details on your order over and over again while they write it all down again (even though this is supposed to be online). They misunderstand you and you have to repeat details, or they doubt that your billing address is what you say it is even when you are looking at your account screen at home. This is the first time out of five orders that I have had this experience having to talk with them. They don't seem to have any kind of empathy, express any kind of sorry about the delay on their part. All this makes me very concerned about the quality of the delivery and what will transpire, adding to the stress with regard to my relative in the hospital. Also, you wonder whether any of your personal information which is stored in multiple places (online and in their country database) is secure. The calls with cs total over 40 minutes of time, and it really felt as if they try to stretch out the time for as long as possible, even though they lack much friendliness. Like I said this is the first time they have ever left an email to call them back.

As a follow-up, they promised that since they couldn't deliver Tuesday, they would try to deliver Wednesday, before noon to the hospital. I told them the patient may be checking out later today, and as yet, no flowers by noon. It is entirely feasible that this company will not deliver any flowers today thinking they will not be missed. Based on our conversation, these people are baiting the customer, and if you show any kind of irritability, they will make matters worse for you on purpose, out of their maliciousness. So rather than help the customer, they are looking for ways to cut costs, make a profit for themselves as subcontractors, and justifying it on the basis of any kind of perceived rudeness. Between their inability to communicate, their willingness to put you on hold and create frustrations, and their general lack of desire to provide for the paid for service, yeah, I won't use them again. I already deleted all my contacts in my address book, and am praying they won't eff up the other set of flowers I ordered for another set of people this week. Probably just writing this review, they will try to retaliate and eff up that order too. You wonder why I just don't call them back to cancel both orders? Because they are really odious people to talk to, you can't get a word in, they make you fight to try to get the simplest transaction understood. I am sure that a cancellation will take about 3 hours worth of phone calls! That would be a total of over $120 spent on two orders, one with possible extra fee for promised before noon-time delivery.

Today, Thursday, three days after the order date on May 30th, the full miserable revelation of the Proflowers/FTD scam has hit. They kept promising they would deliver to the hospital by noon on June 1, but by 3pm, I get a phone call from a woman with a nice "American accent" stating they couldn't deliver Wednesday, but they would try to redeliver again tommorrow! Here is the LIE: On the website of my Proflowers account under tracking, it states the flowers were already delivered by May 31st! They are LYING AND PRETENDING IT WAS DELIVERED! I call the hospital but such flowers were never received; they would log it in because he was staying in a unit where they would have to hold the flowers at the desk. I call my parent, and they did not receive anything! (My parent is also an Korean War veteran, even though he is not white. Maybe Proflowers discriminates against nonwhites, or their foreign telemarketers do).

Anyway just to rub it in these SORRY-ASSED SCAMMERS emailed me to tell me that my second order of flowers, scheduled for Friday, "is on the way" -- another set of people, just in memorium from several years back. You know, they picked the wrong person to lay a scam on. It's very clear that they use these sub-sub contractors, florists working out of sweathouse garages, to assemble flowers or to delay delivery. On Monday the telemarketers said they are answering from the Philippines. So this is the level of "random SCAM." The last few years, I had just been lucky. They don't care about people, all they care about is money! They picked the wrong person to lay a scam on, because I am also a journalist, and I am going to write an article about this, because this is just the tip of the TTIP iceberg everyone! (Just wait till TTIP passes! They'll be selling us dirt and calling it a panacea in a pill pocket!)

Days after the order (now Saturday) the status of the order is the same; they act as if the order "has been delivered" and the order shows as delivered but there is NO TRACKING INFORMATION, unlike the other order which shows tracking information by UPS. The one saving grace is a time-delay in charging PayPal. They already charged PayPal for the bouquet "that never arrived." (It was supposed to be a Pink Florist Designed Bouquet, meaning the shop even had options on Pink. And just to show how malvo they are, Proflowers Twitter over the past couple days has shown (https://twitter.com/proflowers) pink shower motifs.) I cancel the payment on the next order of flowers and notified PayPal the reason why: both flower orders were the same price but only one actually delivered.