reviews being blocked

[dsrpmedia]

hi not sure where to put this

I`ve been a membersince 2007, in that time have done a hanful of reviews - usually only when someone goes above & beyond for good, or if a product is not all all what it is represented to be.

Lately I have posted 2 reviews (1 good, 1 not so much) and they have both been blocked.

I asked the developer of the component I gave the glowing review for if they saw it and they said they see it, but it is marked as spam so is not availble to the public.

I was logged in when I gave both reviews, any idea on why I am being blocked?

[Per Yngve Berg]

Mod. Note: Relocated the topic to the Extensions.joomla.org - Feedback Forum.

I presume you are referring to reviews in the JED.

[dsrpmedia]

yes, reviews in the JED

sorry if this is the wrong place I couldn`t find anywhere obvious to post about this

[anibal_sanchez]

Hi,

We have been increasing the controls to stop the spam. So, your reviews could be blocked by one of the new controls.

Please, check this JIRA issue about the topic for more information: https://joomlaextensionsdirectory.atlas ... /JDEV-1060

Additionally, you can send us a ticket to manually double check and republish your reviews. Please, send us a ticket to Reported Review: https://extensions.joomla.org/profile/ticket/add/

Best Regards,

[Claudia_A]

Hello!

Somehow this also happened to us lately.
We asked one of our customers to place a review, he did that, we received the notification from JED, then suddenly it disappeared.
We opened a ticket at JED, providing also a token to check our internal conversation with the customer through our ticket system, however we received an ambiguous reply stating it was one of the reasons under: https://extensions.joomla.org/support/k ... published/ it was unpublished.
It's very good that JED is trying to eliminate fake or commercial reviews, but I still see no reason at all why a review from a real customer with all details was unpublished?!

It's very strange that a week earlier we received a revenge review on another extension of ours, which up until that point had only good reviews, and still after opening a ticket and explained that we were blackmailed to provide some further tweaks to the extension, JED simply answered that we should add an owner's reply, although it was a clear breach of the terms under https://extensions.joomla.org/support/k ... published/

From our experience satisfied customers rarely return to leave reviews if not specifically asked for it, so at least when they do this, JED could make this easier for them, simplifying the current review system which only brings confusion to new users in search for a well suited extension. A simple rating system with a text would be much more helpful to the community (encouraging so more ratings, knowing the review process is more humane), like all other big communities have, including Google Play, Wordpress, etc. If a new user on JED has a more familiar review structure to evaluate, it will increase the chances for him to also choose a more appropriate extension to his purpose, which in the end is a benefit to the whole Joomla community, gaining so a new member.

[sozzled]

Frankly the response "we have been increasing the controls to stop the spam ... so, your reviews could be blocked by one of the new controls" is simply not good enough.

People take the time and effort to write reviews (and thank God they do) but then, when the JED "spamblocker" throws their hard work in to the bit-bucket and it is expected that the reviewers should report the matter to the JED team, that's just plain wrong (in my opinion).

The JED spamblocker shouldn't just flush all reviews away; these "suspicious" things should be quarantined and then released from quarantine after they've been vetted. Without the transparency of knowing what's happening behind the scenes, we have no way of knowing whether the JED spamblocker is acting in our interests or whether it's acting in vested interests operating behind closed doors.

I would rather see evidence of much "spam" being posted than no evidence that genuine messages are not being blocked.

This has gone on for long enough. Remove the spamblocker and allow the reviews to flow. If there are "fake" or "spam" reviews, then let them be dealt with accordingly by human intervention. Technology isn't to blame for this disaster; it's poor decision making.

[toivo]

Additionally, you can send us a ticket to manually double check and republish your reviews. Please, send us a ticket to Reported Review: https://extensions.joomla.org/profile/ticket/add/

According to the description of the ticket system, it is meant "for developers that have listings on this site".

A review I submitted yesterday did not get published and it was not shown in my JED profile either. Even if the extension is not mine, I submitted a ticket, asking for the review to be published.

Hopefully the reasons behind the blocking will also be fixed soon. The JED review system should support extension developers, even if human intervention would mean more work, compared to boilerplate rejections of reviews.

[dsrpmedia]

I agree - it is nice to see good reviews - but it is mission critical to see the bad ones as well - for a long time I used the reviews as a major consideration when purchasing an unfamiliar extension - but I must admit I have less faith in the review system now than I did a week ago when I tried to post a review warning about the fact that a particular developer was still taking payments - but had stopped supporting the products more than a year ago, and my review went into limbo. I posted a ticket about this and got response that my word wasn`t good enough, they want some sort of video of the product not working. which I am eventually going to do, but it seems like they are putting the onus in the wrong place - if I am unhappy with a particular companies` support system or product line it is my obligation as a member of the community to be sure my fellow developers are aware of that particular pratfall as well

[sozzled]

I also agree (about seeing negative reviews as well as favourable ones). Speaking for myself, I would prefer to see hundreds of bad reviews (including spurious/"spam" ones) instead of seeing none at all!

Perhaps the JED team has a point about the "need" to increase "controls to stop the spam" but I haven't seen any evidence of it. From an outsider's perspective—outside the JED team, I mean—their explanation appears to be an example of cybercrud.

[Claudia_A]

Reviews are most welcome, but the current issues are that the system is way too complicated, as mentioned above, and does not encourage any user at all to post a review, not to mention the tricky sliders as well, which are by default set on 0 so it requires way too many user actions, and also a lot of focus dragging the sliders and writing text for all 5 fields, instead of one.

1. Needed simplicity. The former review system was much better simply by encouraging many more users to post a review, rather than this complicated one which requires more time, extra time that is tricky to demand from the average user, encouraging so mostly mean comments, since it's proven that without being kindly asked for, satisfied customers rarely express their feedback.

There is a reason why on all other major platforms the review systems are as simple as possible: to minimize the time spent on actually conceiving it. We cannot demand so much information from the average user because of the time investment in order to get familiar with an unknown system, rather than having a standard one, not to mention the ambiguity that comes with the current JED format.

2. Protection. The second issue here, is that JED should help more in eliminating
such revenge reviews, not to treat the developers as enemies. I have
nothing against bad reviews, they are sometimes also a good indicator
and good to have, as long as they are technically accurate and not as revenge or as blackmail in order to provide free tweaks or customizations, a tactic which has unfortunately increased over the years. This needs a success change at the JED proceedings in order to protect the developers against such tactics (at this moment from our point of view there is only a 50% success rate on effective issues solving). Such revenge reviews do not bring any real insight to the normal user.

3. TRANSPARENCY. A third issue is that even good reviews are not published, although we opened JED ticket, proving with our internal ticket references that the user exists and he is genuinely happy about the extension. When this happens, we get slightly irritated that both the customer and us are investing time in it for nothing.

The 2nd and 3rd reasons lead me to believe that once again, and I cannot stress enough on this: WE NEED TRANSPARENCY!

[sozzled]

I posted a review of an extension today. It took me 10 minutes to write what I wanted to say (goes to @Claudia_A's point about the need for simplicity). My review was successful. I think I was lucky (I'm not sure). How about, once a day, everyone tries to write a review of someone's product and let's see how many people are successful and how many people fail?

[sozzled]

Again, today, I successfully posted a review of another extension. It took the same amount of time as yesterday (about 10 minutes) and so far so good. Perhaps I'm one of the lucky ones who's able to have their reviews published? Again, I'd be interested to know if others continue to experience problems; let's see how many people are successful and how many people fail?

[toivo]

You must be one of the lucky ones. I raised a ticket about the review I posted, and the ticket is now closed. The JED Review Manager was unable to tell me exactly why the review was blocked but was still able to confirm that "the automated decision was correct".

The rules are here: https://extensions.joomla.org/support/k ... published/

Most of the items are clear but how does one interpret "One-line Reviews" - does one have to enter full sentences in all parts of the review? Is every VPN regarded as "an IP masking service"? What about users posting reviews from inside a corporate WAN?

[sozzled]

A quick update on this topic: again, today, I successfully posted a review of another extension! I just thought I'd mention it.

[toivo]

Sigh. A couple of weeks ago another review disappeared after 5 minutes. I have just raised a ticket to get it reinstated, if possible.

If spam filtering in the JED review system produces too many false positives, it discourages genuine users from providing feedback. Reviews are essential to maintain the quality of third party extensions.

[sozzled]

Reviews are essential to maintain the quality of third party extensions.

I think you're preaching to an empty church, mate. The JED team is uninterested in what we developers think.

I wonder about the existence of the JED team: there has been no news of JED "team meetings" since 30 June (nearly six weeks ago).

[Vimes]

Reviews are essential to maintain the quality of third party extensions.

I think you're preaching to an empty church, mate. The JED team is uninterested in what we developers think.

Amen brother.

A couple of months ago one of the J team approached me to get involved in helping fix the JED. Naturally I agreed immediately. I was told Jaz would contact me, which she did asking if we could chat on Glip. I asked when would be good for her and......nothing was ever heard from her again.

[toivo]

The ticket I raised a week ago about an unpublished review has now been closed: "The decision to unpublish was correct. If you refer to https://extensions.joomla.org/support/k ... published/ you will see all of the items which are checked and to which a review must comply. The filtering we are using is not making a mistake here and the review has been correctly removed. Sorry."

May I suggest that the filtering was wrong in this case?

I would have understood if the JED Review Manager had had the courtesy to tell me which particular guideline from the list was breached. As I was left in the dark, with no other recourse but to open another ticket, here is the full review of the unnamed extension:

Effective but now outdated

Functionality (100): This extension adds an extra string of characters to the administrator URL as protection. It can block IP addresses or subnets and bots.

Ease of use (0): Cannot be used on PHP 7 unless the error reporting in Global Configuration is set to 'Simple' because of Deprecated messages.

Documentation (80): The documentation is very basic but adequate for the purpose.

I used this to: just for testing to find a simple method to protect the back end URL.

Perhaps someone else from the JED team could kindly point out what was wrong. Based on frequent feedback here about unpublished reviews, I am sure many other users of extensions would like to see their reviews published at the first attempt, too.

[dsrpmedia]

yes - super frustration

I have had 3 reviews blocked in the last couple months.

they should not make it so hard to review a product - it has really shaken my faith in the user review system.

Something else I found less than awesome - I didn `t get the dignity of a response or notification, they simply did not publish

when I looked through my list of reviews thgey are not even listed there - should there not be the item in question and the reason they are blocking the review?

[toivo]

when I looked through my list of reviews thgey are not even listed there - should there not be the item in question and the reason they are blocking the review?

That is an excellent idea! Each blocked review should still remain accessible to its author with a clear indication which rule was breached. However, that would require some design, development and testing effort by volunteers, familiar with the back end of JED.

No doubt the suggested level of transparency would reduce the number of tickets the JED team has to handle. It would also improve the UX of Joomla users who wanted to contribute to JED by writing reviews, but stopped after the first few were not published for non-identifiable reasons.

[alledia]

There's a lot of posts on this forum about this:

viewtopic.php?f=262&t=951089
viewtopic.php?f=262&t=940920

Some JIRA tickets too:

https://joomlaextensionsdirectory.atlas ... -1060?jql=
https://joomlaextensionsdirectory.atlas ... -1058?jql=
https://joomlaextensionsdirectory.atlas ... -1052?jql=
https://joomlaextensionsdirectory.atlas ... -1086?jql=
https://joomlaextensionsdirectory.atlas ... -1081?jql=

This has been an on-going problem for quite some time. We've had reviews disappear for a year now, and more vanished in the last couple of weeks.

JED team ... what can we do to help?

[toivo]

The JED Team is not winning any friends with responses they give to tickets about blocked reviews. I am sure I checked every rule and was confident that my review was compliant.

The review has 'disappeared' because you have failed to comply with the rules for posting a review. Please read https://extensions.joomla.org/support/k ... published/ carefully and ensure that if you submit further reviews, you are following the advice given.

Why are the volunteer contributors not entitled to know what went wrong? It seems pointless to raise tickets if they always get the mushroom treatment.

The management should do something.

[sozzled]

@toivo: It is unfortunate that you, I and every other person who uses the JED knows the outcome. The outcome is that nothing is going to change, nothing is going to happen, the complaints will continue to roll in unheeded, and everyone's confidence in the JED will continue to be eroded. That's an unfortunate fact; that's what we're seeing today and, worse, it is affecting confidence in Joomla as well.

Despite repeated calls for action, for some kind of "intervention", it's the same old story. I've gotten to the stage where I'm beyond caring any more. *sigh*

I'm not even sure if the JED team even exists any more.

[toivo]

Something is happening in the JED space: https://volunteers.joomla.org/teams/ext ... er-27-2017

The reviews and scoring functionality will remain a closed subject and its code will not present to the JED Devs - only available to JED Team Members.

Hear, hear!

The efforts to improve the process are ongoing. We expect further additions in the short term. We are already working on an updated review (IP Detective) checker that Hugh is setting up.

The buggy review system deserves an update, based on my first-hand experiences of blocked reviews and tickets about them getting the mushroom treatment. Either my profile or my IP address have been permanently blacklisted.

The whole review process should be reviewed by independent auditors. How about a user satisfaction survey for starters?