[wp-forums] Fwd: It's been pointed out to us that the reviews from our Plugin have been deleted.

[Mika A Epstein]

I don't know what warning you would have wanted? "Hi, someone spamming 
the review forums, we deleted them"? That's impractical to expect us to 
do with all the posts and reviews out there. We see spam, we handle it. 
You weren't the only plugin impacted by this, after all :)

The deleted reviews shared a lot of 'things' in common, like no other 
posts, IP address and email domain. If those REALLY are your customers, 
then we apologize, but if you look at it from our perspective, it's 
highly suspect. An account, made today, makes ONE post from an already 
suspicious IP and/or email (that is, one that had spammed before), and 
it's a 5 star rating? (There are more traits we look at with these 
accounts, but they all boil down to common sense.)

It really looks like spam. Normally when we block those accounts, when 
they're real we catch complaints from those people. When they're not, 
they just keep making more and more accounts, which tells us we were right.

The latest tactic was to review ALL the SEO plugins. Yeah, that got 
deleted too :/

Now as for negative reviews, we look at those too! If an IP posts a ton 
of negative reviews, they get yanked. If you think there are posts that 
should be, tag them with 'modlook' and we'll have a look. But generally 
we only delete spam. If it's a post that upsets you because they're 
mean/silly/irrational, we let 'em stand.

> Florin Muresan, Squirrly SEO <mailto:florin at squirrly.co>
> 5 June, 2013 7:19:53PM
> Hey,
>
> Thanks for telling me all this. I talked to the people from the team and
> yes, one of them was puting in reviews from time to time, but stopped 
> about
> 1 or 2 weeks ago, maybe even more.
>
> Concerns:
>
> 1) I saw that others tried to post reviews recently. One of them was for
> sure a client, but the others I don't think they were legit at all. At
> WordCamp Transylvania this weekend it has been pointed out to me that
> somebody may be trying to make us look real bad (happened to them, that's
> what they said)
>
> I don't know if the competition is doing negatives and also pozitives, but
> they're getting me a bit paranoid.
>
> 2) Some of the deleted reviews were from customers that I know and 
> were not
> spam.
>
> 3) We did not receive a warning before this happened. I know it's kinda
> stupid of me to pop in about all these just now, but I didn't know 
> what was
> going on (which just makes me even more stupid, it seems). Would have been
> nice to be warned before, though. I could have taken measures then, 
> and not
> wait until all this escalated. (and it would have made me look a bit
> smarter as well :)) )
>
> I can assure you that no one from my team is doing any of that review 
> stuff
> anymore. It stopped as I said, about 1 or 2 weeks ago. Since then, I don't
> know who has.
>
> How can we fix this?
>
> Best regards,
> Florin
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-- 
Mika A Epstein (aka Ipstenu)
http://ipstenu.org | http://halfelf.org