While the previous community inputs are tied to the community as a whole, other inputs are directly associated with individual members of the recommender community. Several sites encourage text comments from their customers. Systems such as Drugstore.com’s Test Drives gather comments about a single product and present these as a means to facilitate the decision-making
process. While text comments are helpful, they require a fair amount of processing by the targeted customer. The customer must read each paragraph and interpret to what degree it is positive or negative. To simplify this process, most sites offering the opportunity for the community to write text comments also encourage the members to indicate some form of numerical score or ratings. Just as recommendation systems can use the ratings of the targeted customer, they can also gather the ratings of all customers to provide data for use in producing recommendations.