Reviews: My two cents
Personally, I try to be fair and even-handed in the text of my review, but "honest and unmerciful" in my ratings.
For instance, I would never say a course was poorly designed, but I might say the holes lacked variety, or tended to the short side, and I would never say a course was poorly maintained, but I will comment on the lack of teepads or markers or usable signage. Mostly I want to be a reporter; relay the facts as I see them, but the slant, inevitably, is there between the sentences. I try to write my reviews to help people who, like me, are trying to figure out where best to spend their precious DG time, often in a new city.
And if I'm fair in my review, I'm not too concerned with someone taking issue with my honest opinion. Some courses are widely considered to be subpar, but people have widely varying opinions about what makes a good course too. An easy example is some that post multiple reviews here and elsewhere seem to highly regard long, challenging all woods courses, yet I don't. I won't rate them as high because of the lack of variety and natural scenery; challenge alone does not equal good, IMO. But others differ, and that's how it should be.
And one final thing I hope all readers of my reviews consider is that my reviews don't necessarily reflect how the course always plays, or how it always looks, just how it played and looked for me on often one particular day. I could personally see a wide range of opinions for my home course of Gillies Creek, for instance, depending on whether they played it spring or winter, got lost a bunch going it alone or cruised along with the help of a friendly local, or if the grass had recently been cut and the litter cleaned up.