Improving Ratings on Devot:ee

In a blog post, Ryan Masuga addresses an issue with the possible abuse of 1-star ratings for add-ons. Ryan detailed three different cases where add-on ratings were possibly abused.

• One instance was a customer not getting emails from the developer (despite the developer’s public outreach to the customer),
• another was an add-on on Devot:ee not even being available yet and receiving a one star review (obviously not possible unless one of the private beta testers hated it),¹
• and the third one was a review on the purchase process not the add-on itself. Add-on developers have little to say about the add-on buying experience on Devot-ee.

The problems aren’t unique to Devot-ee. Anyone that knows App Store (iOS) developers or has an app of their own in the App Store knows that customers will leave one star reviews for reasons that unrelated to the app itself. This also happens frequently on Amazon, in which customers punish the product manufacturer for problems with delivery and ordering. It’s a case of the easiest road to bitching. For resellers of products (like Devot:ee, Amazon and App Store), you are the easiest way for the customer to vent about any frustration they have during purchase, delivery and post-purchase activity.

On the App Store there is currently no way to respond to or protest an unfair review. Wisely, Devot:ee seems to be considering this on their site. The comments of the post have some good suggestions and mine echo some of those:

• For paid add-ons, you can only rate them if you purchase the add-on. This is how the App Store tries to control ratings and reviews. If the add-on file is hosted by Devot-ee (links don’t go off-site) then it should also be the case for free add-ons. Perhaps this is in incentive to host your add-on files with Devot-ee.
• Allow developers to protest reviews and ratings that aren’t relevant to the add-on.
• Allow the community to mark reviews as helpful or unhelpful. Unhelpful add-on reviews can be hidden or removed from the tally, so they don’t impact the add-ons overall rating.

Read Ryan’s entire post and post your feedback to the comments.