[wp-forums] FYI

[esmi at quirm dot net]

on 16/04/2013 21:32 Mika A Epstein said the following:

> Post 2 is what I mean when I say y'all live and die by your own
> responses. I read Josh's replies as borderline hostile.

Um - my take was slightly different. More below...

> I try my
> damnedest to take things the best way possible, especially in text, but
> that post is an example of escalating attitudes, with two (three?)
> people who just butted heads. No one was a winner in that post.

Personally I think the OP came into that topic with a chip on his 
shoulder or an axe to grind. And there is never any reasoning with 
someone like that.

When it comes to reviews, I think we do have to bear a couple of things 
in mind:

1. People never really "rate" something that they can get for free. And 
I mean "rate" as in "consider important". Those who do take the time to 
come back & say something nice are often the decent minority. The vast 
majority take what they can get & run. You'll never hear for them again. 
Then there's the other tiny minority who are going to be awkward no 
matter what you do. All of this makes the review system something of a 
downer for developers. I'm not saying we can change that - we can't. But 
nor should we ignore the likely effects.

2. People are going to be far more motivated to come back with a 
negative review than they are with a positive one. And the really 
negative ones are always going to make the most noise. That will tend to 
skew any review system towards the negative. Again, that's just Life but 
we shouldn't ignore its effects.

3. Developers are not trained in Customer Support. Dealing with 
negativity day-on-day is hard.

4. Developers are not CS droids following a script for something that 
they couldn't care less about. This review is about their "baby" - the 
thing they sweated hours over, are proud of and then gave away for free. 
So when someone posts a scathing review out of the blue, it can *really* 
hurt. and I'll bet more than half of all bad reviews are actually 
support issues that the OP never bothered to actually ask about. Which 
makes it even worse.

Yes - we should always try to adult about these things and read/respond 
in the best way possible but saying and doing are often very different 
things. I, personally, do not think the only grounds for a review to be 
deleted are if it contains threats, vulgarity, insults or if someone's 
personal safety is at risk. I happen to think that if someone posts a 
review saying (essentially) "you stole this", it's defamatory and should 
be removed on those grounds alone. Ditto all of those ridiculous 1-star 
ones that say useless things like "didn't work" with no other 
explanation and no response if you try to elicit details. Those aren't 
reviews. They're just people venting their bad tempers in a manner that 
borders on childish.

Theme developers at least have a little kudos from the fact that their 
theme passed a very strict quality review by their peer(s). The plugin 
review (because it's not currently as stringent) offers no such kudos. 
So all plugin devs have is download stats and reviews.

I'd actually like to see a little more support for plugin developers - 
with mods possibly dropping into review topics (where appropriate) when 
OPs are getting out of hand. I don't think they should just be left to 
sort it out alone.

Your mileage may, of course, differ.

And this is all getting very meta, isn't it? ;-)

Mel
-- 
http://quirm.net
http://blackwidows.co.uk