So, if you're a member who posts reviews fairly often, you're likely familiar with just how important it is to have your review up in the Recent Reviews list.
The was it currently works is, the front page of the site presents visitors with icons and taglines of whatever the four most recent reviews that have been published to the site are. You can click on Recent Reviews to see more, but most people won't do this, and they only see the four most recent.
These four reviews, while they're present on the front page, thus receive the most exposure they're ever going to receive, and because of this, the amount of upvotes the review ultimately gets is directly affected by how long it's able to be one of these four, and sometimes you can genuinely never know exactly how long it'll stay up before new reviews bump it off the page.
I don't think there's a perfect solution to this problem... If upvotes matter to you, your best friends are luck and timing... But it would greatly improve the playing field if the Recent Reviews on the front page could be expanded to six, or even eight, reviews, thus making it a little easier for reviews to receive the exposure they deserve.
We're aware of the issues this is creating and how people rush to get their reviews out. There are some vague plans to rework reviews, which should make reviews who don't stay there for very long much more accessible. I think only expanding that area wouldn't help much with the rate reviews come out, especially at the end of a season.
Optimally we'll manage to include prominent reviewers from the community in the design process at some point, but I can't make any guarantees in that regard.