First off, I am both sorry and somewhat surprised to hear that traffic is down. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised as traffic of new members asking "new member questions" in the forums is also down. This is by far my favorite photography site and you and your team have done a great job with it.

I can understand the reluctance to use review ratings as many users will shoot straight to the rating and ignore the detail and nuances in the write up, which you seem to have always strived for. My thought would be to try to carry some of those nuances over to the ratings. The way I could see doing that is to have more than a single rating for each product, but also allow for a summary description. If increasing traffic is your goal, I would put the summary description at the start of the review with perhaps a few references to the detail in the text below.

A few thoughts:

Starred or numeric rating topics for lenses:
  • Optical quality-sharpness
  • Optical quality-distortions, abarration, flare, etc
  • Build quality
  • AF Speed
  • Overall


Starred or numeric ratings for cameras:
  • Image Quality
  • ISO performance
  • Color Rendition
  • User Interface
  • User Experience
  • Overall


Then provide three written sections in each summary, which you typically already include at the end of each review:
  1. Compared to....
  2. Special features
  3. Overall summary


As a quick example, I saw you gave the EFS 15-85 5 stars. While I love that lens, the build quality isn't 5 stars, but the IQ is close AND it has the very special feature of having a FF equivalent focal length range of 24-136 mm!! Which makes it an amazing walk around lens on an APS-C body. So, I get while overall it it 5 star (I'd probably do 4-4.5), I'd be concerned about communicating too much with a single rating as, in this example, the build quality isn't as good as other canon lenses.

Just some thoughts, I've always enjoyed your reviews, but understand that you need traffic flowing through the website.