In reply to GarethSL:
Hi Gareth
The difference between a review and an advert should be obvious. If not, then either we're not doing our job properly, or the reader isn't reading it properly before drawing conclusions. My money is obviously on the latter.
You want us to f*ck gear up? Sounds great in theory, but I'm not sure how we could make that work as policy:
1. Once in a while a review item will fail during the review period, but it's rare. If it happened, we'd say so. Most gear these days is pretty decent in its intended use.
2. The turnaround time between us receiving a product and publishing a review is often a matter of a couple of months. We do longer term tests when we can, but in terms of content scheduling it's very tricky, and a big danger if we were to do so as policy would be that by the time a review came out the brand would have ceased selling that particular line. Stuff gets updated alarmingly quickly.
3. If you've only got two or three months to use something before writing it up, the chances are you're not going to destroy it. That's unfortunate, but we do try to be explicit about how long we've had something on test, and what we've used it for, and we also try to make allowances for this when commenting on durability etc.
You want juicy and brutal? How about fair and honest... We're not going to pull punches if we find something to criticise, but by exactly the same token we are not setting out to be nasty simply in order to come across as tough reviewers. We prefer to give credit where it's due, but criticism when warranted.
In the case of these shorts and t-shirt, it'd be hard to test them to destruction while using them for their intended purpose. How many t-shirts have you destroyed? Pretty sure I did go into every tiny detail - and I was surprised how long this review of a couple of simple items turned out to be as a result. The simple fact is, I didn't find much negative to say. I mentioned the price, at least twice, and that's clearly the biggest downside. I wasn't convinced about a pocket. The smell got a look-in. Other than that, all good. Is that bad? Would you have preferred we were unfairly critical?
I'm not going to comment on Arc'teryx's sizing consistency, or lack of - I've no idea about that. And re. build quality, I've never had cause to complain.
I don't want to come across as argumentative, but we take this reviewing thing seriously, so when someone says it's all just fancy advertising then that needs addressing.
If you still think we're just a mouthpiece for advertisers then I'll finish with some recent reviews in which some products do not fare at all well:
Rope bags:
https://www.ukclimbing.com/gear/review.php?id=9482
Assisted braking belay devices:
https://www.ukclimbing.com/gear/review.php?id=9402
Trekking poles:
https://www.ukclimbing.com/gear/review.php?id=8866