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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hmatheve" data-source="post: 3278073" data-attributes="member: 5463">Being an independent birder myself, I also find the ratio commercial / non-commercial reports rather biased in the commerical direction. I do agree that commercial reports are often just a nice listing of what they have seen, including stunning images. It can also serve as an extra service and 'souvenir' for the clients that were on that trip. From a commercial point of view it therefore makes sense that these companies and tour operators write up all these reports. Independent birders tend do be less interested to come up with a report afterwards.When preparing a trip, I do use these commercial reports for some specific things as getting a quick and general idea on time spent per site, timing of your trip and for notes on the recent taxonomy. They are also very good teasers and make me want to take time off and go birding. Aside from some site guides, most of the useful info comes from the decent independent reports.On the CloudBirders website all reports are categorized into 3 rough classes: independent, local travel agent, and bird tour company. In the filter section you can click on 'show more filters' and select the group(s) you want to see. That way it is very easy to filter out all these commercial reports if not interested.Another way of selecting the better and more informative reports is by using the rating system. Theses reports should get higher ratings and by clicking on the 'rating' column header you can sort the reports on it. We warmly invite all users to make use of this system! If everybody gives a bit of input it should be possible to find your way through the massive repository (almost 15.000!) of all kinds of reports...When looking for information on a specific (less frequented) birding site, or species, the free text search box can help you out.For the moment BirdForum isn't covered that well by CloudBirders as these are somewhat scattered over the forum and spread out over multiple pages. It takes quite some time to sort everything out and bundle the metadata - a pity as there are very decent reports hosted here.It would be great if everybody could submit the links to or pdf versions of their BirdForum posts to CloudBirders! Keep on birding, writing, posting and rating! <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" />Hans</blockquote>

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