Over the past few months the reviews on BlackBerry AppWorld have been overwhelmed by people leaving their BBM PIN’s instead of actual relevant reviews. The image to the right (full size) shows a few recent reviews of the puzzle game Pixelated. Only one of these reviewers does not post their BBM PIN, and despite the generally high ratings, most spend very little text actually reviewing the game.

Furthermore, publicly posting your PIN is just asking for trouble. The 24 year old girl pleading for perverts not to send her nude pictures is going to be disappointed. She could have saved herself (and the people who have to read through these reviews) a lot of effort by simply not posting her BBM PIN at all.

These types of reviews do not help out somebody actually trying to use them for their intended purpose of learning what other people think of the game. In this case the application is free, so they can simply download it with no risk, but these BBM PIN reviews are starting to become common in paid applications as well.

Given how out of control the situation is, I propose that RIM needs to step up and automatically deny any AppWorld review that contains a BBM PIN, in the same manner that they are already blocking reviews containing select curse words. It would be a drastic step, but the situation needs to be taken under control.