NOTE: There is no TL;DR. There never will be a TL;DR. Read all of it (especially the links), or don't read it at all. Only knowing bits of the story when it comes to the whistle system is what causes people to lose their whistles. You have been warned; it's not my fault you were too lazy to read all of it and went incorrectly flagging things no-one told you were abusive. Whining at me will get you nowhere.

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As many people know, Rage's thread was designed to give users the chance to up their whistle level, while helping the review mods get rid of all the review abuse from before the whistle system was implemented. While it proved a valuable resource for mods and regulars alike, it eventually became the victim of its own popularity, and was flooded with inaccurate judgements on what should and shouldn't be whistled, and because of the persistant headache it caused the review mod team, in the end it was locked.

There have since been a few attempts to re-create or copy the thread by users in the hope of getting links to "free whistle points". So far, they have all either fallen into obscurity, or been removed because of the exact same problems that ended up plaguing Rage's thread.

The main reason Rage's got locked was that people with misguided ideas of what was abusive and what wasn't were posting links to non-abusive reviews, which were then incorrectly flagged by other, equally misguided users (and people who were just flagging everything blindly). The result: The noobs got broken whistles, and the review mods often had to go into the thread and delete / belay the post linking to the review(s), thereby wasting their time.

This exact problem appears every time the method used by Rage's thread is tried. By posting links to reviews and telling people: "This is abusive, flag it.", there will be constant mistakes of that nature. This is where the point of this post comes in:

Instead of throwing a load of links here and telling everyone to flag the reviews they go to, another option is to tell people how to find said reviews on their own, without needing to be spoonfed by other people's links. So here you go: Everything I know about finding the damn things.

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First things first: What should you whistle?

This is something I'll not be giving specifics on, for the aforementioned reasons (and the fact that I'm not a mod, so you shouldn't be listening to specific rules advice from me anyway :P). However, if you want to play the whistle game, you need to learn to play it right, so here's a few useful links:

1. The review guidelines. Anything that's a direct violation of these will most likely be abusive, so it's a good idea to know them inside out before starting to look for abuse.
2. The review answers thread. It makes for a good read when trying to decide if something's abusive or just plain useless, and gives a lot of information about those areas of the review guidelines that are less well explained.
3. The new review answers thread. In addition to the same kind of advice the last one gives, this one is still unlocked, so if you have a question about something that hasn't been asked already, this is a good place to start (that is, if any review mods ever remember to check it!).
4. A reminder. While some of it is more a matter of opinion than anything else, it is still accurate with regards to what we do and don't know about the whistle system itself.
5. The abusive review game. It serves as a decent test of knowledge and understanding of the rules, as well as reinforcing everything linked to above it.

And remember: IF IN DOUBT, DON'T FLAG! Flagging stuff that could go either way with the review mods can cost you much more than you stand to gain by trying for a few extra whistle points in this manner.

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Done reading? OK, time to go find some abusive reviews! Listed below are all the places and tricks I like to go / use to find review abuse.

1. Turd of the week.
By far the easiest place to find abusive reviews is the TOTW (well, whenever it's not deleted at least). Just about every review guideline gets routinely broken here by butthurt idiots who think the review system is the same as YouTube's comment box. Lots of easy whistle points are left there every day, so be sure to check it regularly.

2. Front paged stuff.
The largest amount of web traffic goes through the front page, so naturally the most reviews get left for things on the front page. Ones to watch for are those submissions with 'adult' ratings or other questionable content, which often makes people use the review space for yelling at the author BECAUSE it's on the front page. Giving a flash a low score because of something the author has no control over is almost always abusive, and this makes odd frontpage choices a sensible thing to look into for abusive reviews.
However, it's not just the weird shit that gets review abuse, as the frontpage is also the most popular target for spammers and ad-bots, which will leave referral links and other blatantly abusive stuff in the review space. And let's not forget all the dumbass youtube commenters (who plainly haven't read the review guidelines) coming to the frontpage just to leave their crappy 2 cents on everything. All the random noobery on the front page alone can add up to a lot of abusive reviews a day.

3. The top 50 / weekly award winners.
As above, but often to a lesser extent. "This shouldn't be on the top 50 so here's a zero" is a common theme here, as well as all the usual review stupidity.

4. the 'Sort by score' button.
If you want to find abuse on a popular flash, but don't want to wade through hundreds of decent reviews just to find a few abusive 0-bombs, then this button is for you. Click on the text that says '567 reviews' (or however many reviews it has) to get to the review list for the flash. At the top there'll be a 'sort by date / rating' option. It's set to 'date' by default. By changing it to 'rating', and going to the last page of reviews, most of the hateful 0-bombing ones will have been distilled out of the rest of them, making it much easier to find them.
It might also be worth looking through the first few pages of the other end of the scale too, as some 10-reviews go too far when it comes to praising the flash (read: ascii art, text flooding etc.). It won't find all the abuse on a flash, but it makes a few dumb review types obvious at any rate.

5. Spam flashes.
Hoo boy, this one can get hilariously dumb. The abuse is so obvious I don't even need to go into why things from spam crews are worth looking at. Basically, anything with a Clock Crew, Lock Legion, Star Syndicate, or any of the countless other spam crew tags will get its fair share of shit, just for being made by a spam crew. Hell, some CC flashes are actually good, and people still tell the authors to go die in a fire for making it, just because they see spam as something to be destroyed at all costs.

6. New flash submissions.
The under judgement stuff can still be reviewed, even though said reviews can't be seen by anyone. Sometimes, people will use this fact to leave deliberately abusive stuff on flashes they think won't pass judgement (in which case, the review will be visible only in the obituaries, away from the reach of the whistle system). Sometimes these predictions go wrong, resulting in very obvious abuse being left on newly passed flashes. They get removed relatively quickly, but if you can catch them they make for free whistle points, so it's worth a look every now and then.

7. The Audio portal front page (especially the top 5).
Due to the lack of traffic, the audio portal gets very few reviews left in comparison with the flash portal. However, because of that same fact, the abusive reviews left there will stay there for much longer than your average abusive flash review. This is especially true for things that have gone off the front page, but the easiest place to find audio abuse is the top 5, where people often like to bitch about things being in the top 5, and giving them lousy scores because "this shit doesn't deserve it!".
Protip: the top 5 is selected by A-Bot, based on votes alone. If it gets in the top 5, then (by definition of what a vote signifies) it DOES deserve it!

8. 'Meme' flashes.
Lazers, Barrel rolls, desserts of questionable veracity; you name it, if it's in a flash people will be tempted to spew whatever meme the flash is about. A good example of this is the Lazer collab series: the number of ascii art shoops I've flagged in the review lists for them is just moronic. Same goes for any other flash that either started or is centered around a meme.
(This includes flashes that start NG related memes and activities, like the infamous 'B').

9. People's review lists.
If you see a blatantly abusive review, check the rest of the user's review list by clicking on the link in the review (to go to his userpage), and then scrolling down to the 'flash reviews' or 'audio reviews' links at the bottom. A really bad review is practically proof of not knowing the review guidelines, and if they leave one abusive review (be it through ignorance or malice), chances are there'll be more where it came from.
However, if you find a link spammer with more than a handful of spam reviews, it's best to notify a review mod instead of flagging them all, as review mods have said that they don't always give out points for every single review left by spambots and whistled, and can just destroy the whole list. Ergo, you'd be wasting your time if you flagged them all. Small lists of spam is usually OK (since they can be cleaned up with the normal tools), but it's still worth contacting a mod over it (after flagging them all first :P).

10. The obituaries.
Weird, no? The last place you'd expect to find abusive reviews is somewhere where you can't actually flag anything. However, applying no.9 to the obituaries can turn up some surprising stuff in people's review lists. It doesn't matter if the flash was deleted or not, the review was still written, and if it shows a complete lack of knowledge of the review rules, then the same thing usually applies here too.
This doesn't have as high a success rate as looking in the lists of reviewers of recent (non-deleted) flash, since abusive reviews aren't cleaned completely from the system on deletion, and will re-appear in the obituaries if the flash gets deleted, meaning the review abuse you would've found by looking in the existing flash reviews may have been removed already by the time you find it in the obituaries (more so than when you use new flashes as start points to look for abusive review lists).

And if all else fails:

11. Google advanced.
Why bother searching yourself when you can get the world's most powerful search engine to do the work for you?
Well, a couple of good reasons actually. The first is that it's way more fiddly to set up and use, and also that it can bring back abusive reviews from ages ago (like, pre-2003 when there weren't any review guidelines at all). However, when used properly (and when it works) it can make finding abusive reviews very, very easy.
Firstly, go to the Google advanced search option, and enter any of the following in the "Search within a site or domain" box at the bottom:

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/revie ws (for flash reviews).
or
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/review s (for audio reviews).
or
http://www.newgrounds.com/art/reviews (for art reviews).

Then, enter whatever keywords you can think of in either of the two top boxes. 'fuck you', 'stolen', 'php?act=idx' (<= it's a common part of several popular spam links) 'blam this', 'front page', or anything else you can think of to use as keywords when looking for questionable reviews. If there are any reviews containing the keywords you enter, Google will find them. However, it can't tell the difference between a review and the authors response to a review (and sometimes it can bring back results of already deleted reviews for some reason). It takes practice, and patience, but there's no hiding from Google. If it's been left, regardless of where or when, Google can find it, making it a powerful tool when looking for them.

And lastly:

12. Everywhere else.
Hell, some of the most retarded crap I've ever seen was found by complete accident while going through old favorites, random portal entries, and so on. Just because a flash / audio / art submission doesn't fit any of these points doesn't mean there won't ever be any abusive reviews left on it. Just keep your eyes open, and be curious about what might be in that last flash's review list. If you have a hunch about something, why not go look there as well? It can't hurt, right?

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That's all, folks!

Although, by no means is this a definitive list. I'm sure there are loads of other tips and tricks at everyone's disposal that I don't know about. If you want to share any tips you have, or want to add anything to what's been written here, please do. The more collective advice that gets posted here, the better.

NOTE: I will let people post links to flashes that get more than their fair share of review abuse, provided the following is heeded in their comments:

- It isn't the TOTW, on the front page, or somewhere else already covered in this newspost. That's just pointless given the context of all this.
- No links to reviews / descriptions of which reviews should be flagged / anything that points out exact reviews. That's what killed Rage's thread, and I'm not letting comments with any of that same spoonfeeding mentality through.
- It actually does attract a lot of genuine abuse. Only if you're absolutely sure what you're seeing in the review list is against the rules (i.e. you've read the review guidelines and the linked threads, and have seen a review mod say that what you're reading shouldn't be in the review space), should you be posting it here.

And above all else, have fun laughing at all the hopeless, moronic, and downright bizarre things people like to write in that review box. Enjoy!