Rating System

Thecodingdude said
Sorry. I have to disagree. Changing the price of something is nothing compared to physically making changes to the codebase. New code is required in this case. Also, Envato works in valve time, a few months actually means a few years….

This is a pessimistic view. Remember, you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

quosik said

Stylius said

quosik said
And authors that have “blue steel paw” or “green paw” often fully deserve 5 stars but they don’t get them and major reason is inexperienced client and not faulty item.

Please explain me why is that. Why do top authors deserve 5 stars? how ratings are related to the number of files you sale? I can promote very well my items , and still, those items can have poor quality, bugs, and so on. You assume that all the files from Envato Marketplaces are top quality and all deserve 5 stars. As I explained earlier, it does not work like that. Many items have serious bugs, they are not top quality or they are not what the buyer expected, some items have poor documentation, and there are authors (even top authors) who give sh”t support, and most of the times they say: wait for the update and the bug will be fixed. As you imagine, a buyer won’t give 5 stars for something that he had to wait days so it could be fixed. The buyers deserve the right to give 1 star if they feel so, and deleting the ratings that you don’t like is bull”hit. What is the point of the rating system if you delete the ratings that you don’t like? Let’s all have 5 stars and delete the rating system at all!! Would that be fair?

But If customer says “I bought theme X and it doesn’t work because it doesn’t display menu, I give 1 star then.” – it’s NOT OK . The client made mistake by not attaching menu to its location in admin panel and it’s not our fault at all. Very often servers are wrongly configured and customers blame us for that, too.

Not all files are perfect and not everyone provides good support but just reducing number of clients that don’t have good, rational and real reasons to rate item poorly would help a lot.

How would you know if a costumer rated one star for one reason or another? The feedback thing? OK, but then, who would have the right to delete the ratings? The author himself? In that case an author could delete all one star ratings, and then the ratings will loose their point, because all authors would have 5 stars.

Another option would be reporting the ratings and the mods would delete them if they think it is necessary. But it still looks a bad idea for me. It is not correct to delete a grade, it’s like a teacher correcting an English essay, if two teachers correct the same essay, they will probably put two different grades. Rating an item, as correcting an essay, is subjective.

Moreover, the example of compatibility with IE doesn’t make sense. If the author said it is compatible with IE, the item MUST be compatible. When I purchase a theme I do not look if it is compatible with all browsers, mainly because I do not have them installed. I trust the author and purchase the theme believing that it is compatible. If then I see that it is not, I have the right to rate that item with 2 or 3 stars, because the author lied on the description.

You have to keep in mind that not all costumers are professional web developers. If they were, they wouldn’t need to buy items from you, they would create them by themselves.

revaxarts said
I know where this thread ends…

^ nooooo

Stylius said
Moreover, the example of compatibility with IE doesn’t make sense. If the author said it is compatible with IE, the item MUST be compatible. When I purchase a theme I do not look if it is compatible with all browsers, mainly because I do not have them installed. I trust the author and purchase the theme believing that it is compatible. If then I see that it is not, I have the right to rate that item with 2 or 3 stars, because the author lied on the description. You have to keep in mind that not all costumers are professional web developers. If they were, they wouldn’t need to buy items from you, they would create them by themselves.

I think you are missing the point. Maybe the item is not compatible with IE, but maybe the author didn’t noticed that it has a few bugs or maybe that browser doesn’t support CSS3 and what you consider a bug is actually a downgrade. I think authors get frustrated because they don’t now what the problem is and they get low ratings.

I think most buyers buy from Envato to save time and money, not because they don’t know how to do it.

CodingJack said

Thecodingdude said
Sorry. I have to disagree. Changing the price of something is nothing compared to physically making changes to the codebase. New code is required in this case. Also, Envato works in valve time, a few months actually means a few years….

This is a pessimistic view. Remember, you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

It’s been years since ideas were suggested…It doesn’t take years to make a better rating system. Envato could roll this out next week if they wanted to.

revaxarts said
I know where this thread ends…

No, staff can no longer use the word pipeline

Stylius, ebay has ratings for both sellers and buyers. Perhaps if buyers have ratings, author can rate “inexperienced” buyer and explain that some difficulties he might be experiencing are resulting from his own shortcomings and not item’s fault. Then low-rated buyer’s rating should have less effect on item ratings in future.

Example: Veteran Buyer with good rating has 100% effect on rating

New Buyer, with bad rating has 10% effect on rating or so

Seems like a reasonable solution to me, although with Envato time we’ll probably have grandkids before this is done)

This are great suggestions. As an author I’m really frustrating about this rating system as my items get 4 stars and I don’t have any feedback about what can I improve. I think envato should suspend the rating system until they come out with a new version, with some of suggestions that have been mentioned during this years.

As we all know this will not come any time soon, developers have been working on the new “mactuts” (who the hell need mac tuts, just saying )

CodingJack said

Thecodingdude said
Sorry. I have to disagree. Changing the price of something is nothing compared to physically making changes to the codebase. New code is required in this case. Also, Envato works in valve time, a few months actually means a few years….

This is a pessimistic view. Remember, you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

I afraid too much of honey (from the community before the past 1-2 years) made them to feel easy and just focus different random things rather than involving with customer experience.

Usually any expanding business will commit themselves to make user experience better and better as it is an obvious thing to do with/without customer feedback. But what happens here is expansion happens at the cost of user experience cut (particularly it seems Envato views author’s as sellers – not as creators / professionals spending time). In my personal opinion that is a bad sign for the very concept micro-stock as they landed well with this business.

Btw, when a business proven to be lacking commitment from their own intent, we can expect responses like codingdude and few other heated minds; some may exaggerative though – that happens on every open community. I hate Adobe but using it because we can’t use anything else. The same started happening here!