Posts by sevenspark

familychoice said
As for the 1 star ratings – it’s unlikely even the worst theme would warrant such a low rating or it wouldn’t make it onto TF. Potential buyers know this, and understand that it’s been used as a vote of protest. Rather than falsifying the ratings and removing them, developers would do better to try and deal with the reasons for the bad feedback.

I agree with you on the whole, but we face two issues at the moment (regarding your last sentence above).

1. Not all 1-star “protests” are valid (see below for examples)

2. We currently don’t always know why we’re getting a 1-star rating (which is why we need a review system, which they’re working on).

Many customers here are excellent developers themselves, no question.

Many customers are inexperienced an willing to learn. It’s great to see customers with a self-starting attitude, and when they come to the author for support because they hit a wall, they’re eager to learn, grateful, and go on their way trying to improve themselves.

Unfortunately, there are also inexperienced customers, who believe they know what they are doing, but are in fact mistaken – these ones are the problem. I’m not in any way suggesting that this describes all or even most buyers, but there is no denying they exist. When they ask for support, they blame the product when the vast majority of the time they did not follow the instructions. These are the customers whose ratings are, well, useless, because they don’t reflect the quality of the product they are reviewing. Here are a few examples of reasons (ranging from silly to ridiculous) why I’ve received 1-star ratings from these buyers:

1. Plugin didn’t “work” because stylesheets and javascript weren’t loaded – 1 star!

(The theme the customer was using did not call wp_head() or wp_footer().... )

2. HTML template won’t install on my WordPress site – 1 star!

(Customer did not understand the difference between an HTML template and WordPress theme)

3. Author won’t write 300 lines of CSS to customize the plugin for free – 1 star!

(Theme authors can’t be responsible for free customizations for stock products, but customers still “protest” this with 1-star ratings).

4. No refund on a working product? 1-star!

I just recently had a customer who had flipped all the settings in their plugin control panel and then reported (rather abusively) that the plugin was broken. I reverted all settings to the defaults and the plugin worked perfectly, and did some free customizations to make it styled just the way they wanted with their theme. They were happy and thanked me for making it work perfectly for them. Then they changed their mind and decided they didn’t want to use the plugin after all, and requested a refund. I told them they were free to contact Envato and request it, but that since the plugin works properly, they were unlikely to receive it. Their response? 1 star!

(By the way, I tend to go above and beyond with support and I have a paid support assistant as well, like many authors, in order to provide the highest level of support possible)

That’s not to say there aren’t valid 1-star ratings from intelligent customers – certainly there are. My point is that not all customers are reasonable (neither are all authors, I’m sure). But I suspect 1-star ratings are more frequently unreasonable and unwarranted than any other rating. While I don’t have a problem with 1-star ratings standing (like you said, I think most savvy customers understand the implications and it won’t prevent sales of a good product), I can understand the issue here. I also think that these issues are frequently not addressable problems with the product, but more often indicative of a lack of understanding on the buyer’s part (as in my examples above). That’s why these 1-star ratings really bother us from an author’s perspective.

Again, the intent here is not to attack customers at all. I think most customers are great and I enjoy interacting with them. There are a few bad apples in any barrel. I just wanted to provide some perspective on what we deal with and what 1-star ratings often really indicate.

All that said, I think that asking for a review to accompany low ratings alleviates this issue significantly.

It’s become a de facto standard at this point, though it’s not a requirement so far as I know.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a theme that doesn’t have an options panel (in fact, many have become pretty bloated); but since customers now expect them, you’re likely to end up with some (a) customers who won’t buy because it’s harder to customize and (worse) (b) customers who are upset once they purchase the product because it didn’t meet their expectations.

I think you’re better off including an options panel, but if you choose to go without, make sure your users know what they’re getting

doru said

sevenspark said
There are plenty of buyers that will rate 1 star without contacting support first, trust me.

yes. they are called “other authors”

just joking, have no idea how widespread this situation is.

haha, I should have said “legitimate buyers”

That’s the thing, is no one knows how often this happens, or if it really is a frequent issue at all. I doubt any author would be dumb enough to do this from their main account, so I don’t see how this could be tracked or traced. That’s why I’m curious if anyone has any real evidence or if this is all just pure conjecture.

doru said

yes. if no angry buyer contacted you before getting that one star rate.

There are plenty of buyers that will rate 1 star without contacting support first, trust me.

VF said
I would like to display the following on my profile: Author is dead. Please leave him alone!

+1 haha

It’s well known that some authors purchase their own items to inflate their sales and ratings. While I agree that this is unethical (when done with that express intent), since there’s no way to track these users, I don’t see much point in worrying about it. While it seems obvious that a file with a 5 star rating after 3 purchases is gaming the system, it’s not proof – it’s perfectly possible that this happens legitimately from time to time.

As for authors rating their competitors poorly… if that’s being done, I agree that is even more despicable. However, I don’t see how anyone could have any proof of this. Correct me if I’m wrong. There are plenty of legitimate buyers who rate high quality items 1 star, trust me. How do you differentiate between those buyers and malicious authors? What evidence is there that this is occurring? It’s wishful thinking to think that the source of all 1 star ratings must be other authors with malicious intent and that all your customers love your products, regardless of how good they are.

====================

That being said, it’d be cool to see a system like Yelp Filtered Reviews for more trustworthy ratings

CodingJack said
Nice addition guys

justinfrench said

SurStudio said
Last month, last 30 days, or 60, or week, or any other period of time that allows us to leave the past behind, where it really should be.

Yep, that could end up being a nice solution. Would you default to “all time” or “last x”?

Really hope this isn’t added. A well selling item could be completely killed with one stroke of bad luck.

Agreed, this would be a terrible move. It only serves to make ratings more volatile and therefore less accurate. We simply don’t have enough volume for this – by artificially limiting the sample size you’d make the results statistically insignificant, and therefore much more susceptible to luck, as Jack explained.

Also, we already had the discussion over here

bloooming said

sevenspark said
hahahaha TIM TAM BRIBERY! Amazing

Is it working?

Haha well I actually started filling out the survey within 1 minute of your original post, so for me it’s just a nice extra

hahahaha TIM TAM BRIBERY! Amazing

You shouldn’t ever mess with Core WordPress functionality. When working with a modular system like WordPress, you never know what other component might rely on it.