I recall digital.france.com as being a website that had user reviews (Paris hotels) appearing below the hotel particulars... it seems they have redesigned their site - although the listings say "read comments" I can't find the comments anymore...
Do I have this mixed up with some other site?...

I never used that site for reviews, but tripadvisor.com and of course fodors.com has user reviews. I am intereted if there are others.

As mentioned, tripadvisor.com started out slowly, but it is gaining more and more user reviews on hotels in many cities

so do many message boards--frommers.com,
slowtrav.com, ricksteves.com, etc etc

I use www.venere.com frequently to look for hotels - I think their strong suit is Italian but it has other countries too - it includes reviews from people who have stayed at the properties. They emailed me last year to get my feedback on a hotel that I booked thru their website.

digital.france.com is a very good site and has lots of comments. I just looked at it and it looks about the same to me. If there are comments, they automatically are listed and then there will be a button at the bottom to click to see more if there are a lot.

It sounds like the hotel you are looking at just didn't have any comments. I think it defaults to say "read comments" when there aren't any yet. Try another popular hotel and you'll see plenty.

In addition to the sites already mentioned above, paris.org has customer comments on *many* hotels in paris, which can be sorted/found by number of stars, name, arrondissement, metro station, etc.:

http://www.paris.org/Hotels/

It doesn't look the same to me... I type in " digital.france.com " and it comes up www.france.com. The background is all beige, the format is totally different.
In the listing of recommended hotels that show on the first page, I clicked 'read comments' on several of those, with no results. I am sure hotels such as d'Aubusson, Britanique, Bretonaire, etc (pardon the likely sp. errors) would have comments... still bewildered.. but thanks!

http://digital.france.com/hotels/

This is the site. There are definitely comments for the d'Aubusson; don't see any for the Brettonerie, if that's one of the ones you meant.

Ah-ha! If I use the above url, I get the old site.. click on the middle link to go to the Paris Hotel Guide, and then you will see that they are working on a new version:
"Ooops! due to the new version of our website, the page you were looking for could not be located. Please start a new search from our homepage.
Click here to get there."

You may need to play around with it a bit. I found the reviews for the d'Aubusson by typing in the hotel NAME from the page I gave you.