Ratings Rebuilt

Did your ratings suddenly change dramatically? Hopefully not, but if they did, it’s because the ratings for all plugins were recently reset and rebuilt earlier this week. All ratings now correspond exactly with existing, non-deleted, reviews.

As Otto put it:

Back when we launched the review system 2.5 years ago, we tied ratings to reviews. However, up until that point, we had existing ratings in the system. At the time, some argued that the ratings should be wiped and everybody start fresh. I argued for the opposite, that we should leave the existing ratings in place until such time as we had enough reviews in the system to build up a good body of ratings.

That time has finally come. What you see now is the ratings that correspond to your reviews. The data comes directly from the reviews themselves, and is accurate. Any ratings previously left over from the pre-review world are no longer available.

Additionally, the ratings now will accurately reflect the actions of the moderation team. If a review is deleted for whatever reason, then the associated rating for it will not be reflected in the results.

Please keep in mind, this means that all of the people who thought making sockpuppets to spam the reviews with 5-stars on their own plugins (or 1-stars on their competitors) have had the biggest swings. It should go without saying that you should never leave multiple reviews on your own product (we’re pretty sure you like it 😉 ) and you should never attempt to hide behind proxies and fake accounts to leave reviews. Be honest. It works out better.

#directory, #repository, #reviews