Andrew Nevins
(@anevins)
WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support
I think the people who are frustrated with the plugin won’t be writing in an informative perspective to begin with. It can then be up to the plugin authors/ contributors to figure what went so wrong.
Sorry, I’m not sure you understood what I meant. People being frustrated with a plugin is not the problem. The problem is that sometimes users have wrong expectations because they misunderstood the purpose of the plugin. You usually don’t vote down a washing machine because it cannot play music – because playing music is not the original purpose of a washing machine. The same should apply to plugins. And there is not much a plugin author can do. Of course they know what went wrong: The user has misunderstood the purpose of that plugin. The problem is not to figure that out, but to make clearer what the review is about. It should be about the existing plugin, as provided and specified – nothing else.
Andrew Nevins
(@anevins)
WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support
I mean, people giving 1 star are frustrated with the plugin and probably won’t be thinking about “how should I make a good review”.
Hello all,
I second everything @chris said above.
Reviews that add a low star rating to a plugin because of lack of functionality the plugin was never supposed to be having or because the user never thought of reading the manual are the worst possible feedback. They are not useful, are off topic and, worst of all, are misleading for potential new users and waste the developers time.
A help message (as Chris proposed above) near the review submission form, which would encourage users to leave useful reviews and at the same time discourage them from leaving a review if they haven’t read the manual or the FAQ, could possibly help. Additionally, review flagging and mod approval after N flags could also help.
Let’s face it. The current way of doing things encourages users to leave irresponsible reviews. Many users need to be educated about leaving useful reviews, because currently they do not seem to understand it.
For what it counts, I think a help message that stands out near the review submission form would be a good start.
George
A help message (as Chris proposed above) near the review submission form, which would encourage users to leave useful reviews and at the same time discourage them from leaving a review if they haven’t read the manual or the FAQ, could possibly help.
I like your optimism, but I don’t share it. 🙂
People don’t read things. Really.
Let me give you a really good example:
https://wordpress.org/themes/getting-started/
That’s the page where you have to go before you can upload a theme to our theme directory here. It puts it in the queue for submission to be reviewed and such. Clicking that Upload button at the bottom take you to the upload page, with a really big “Add Your Theme to the Directory” text.
This last week, I’ve had to delete two commercial themes from the directory, because they were accidentally uploaded by users who thought they were uploading a theme they had just purchased to their own websites.
Let me re-iterate this chain of events for you:
1. Somebody purchased a theme.
2. They came to this site instead of their own website.
3. They proceeded to create an account here on our support forums.
4. They clicked through those screens.
5. They uploaded the ZIP file of the theme they just purchased.
All this had to occur for this to happen. Twice. Last week.
People don’t read explanatory text. They just don’t. If it’s not right there, in-your-face, then it doesn’t work. What’s more, you need to hide the “dismiss” button in order to get them to read it in the first place.
Sigh. Make that three times this week.
I read your post. 😉
Seriously, I think there are two different cases:
- People who don’t read things, because they never read things.
- People who don’t read things, because there is nothing to read.
Adding a description would at least reduce the second type of people who are not clear about how things work.
Sure, if you have tons of users, a certain percentage will always fail. I wouldn’t be overly ambitious, but I’d say it’s sufficient if the improvement justifies the investment (i.e. adding a sentence).
What you describe could easily be the result of poor language skills. (There’s quite a few people who don’t speak English. Perhaps they recognized the words “upload” and “theme”.) But I don’t assume that these people also post bad reviews where you actually need to write a text, which already constitutes some kind of minimum threshold.
Andrew Nevins
(@anevins)
WCLDN 2018 Contributor | Volunteer support
Another example, see the information at the bottom of the textarea when you post a comment? The majority of people don’t read that.
I don’t agree. I don’t think that you should stop communicating only because it is not 100% efficient. What is the point of having this forum if the majority of written information remains unread? And isn’t it even a contradiction to offer a blogging platform and at the same time say that people don’t read anything published on the web? I thought we do all that because we assume that we do have readers.
