Published reviews not meeting review rules/guidelines

[PhilTaylor-Prazgod]

Looks like some reviews that do not meat the editorial guidelines have slipped through the moderation process.



The rules quoted as of today:
(P.s. slight typo ;-) unnecesseary should be spelt unnecessary in the rules below (made bold to help identify it )

What's in a review?
You are evaluating the extension based on your experience and usage. Share your thoughts about the extension, the pros and cons. If this is a good extension, why? What is the killer feature? If this is a bad extension, what are the shortcomings and if possible offer suggestions for improvement. Only reviews that meet these guidelines will be published.

Having problem with the extension?
Please contact the developer if you're having problem with the extension. Send an e-mail to [email protected] e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it  or contact them through their website (http://www.templateplazza.com/content/view/98/44/). A review should not have any support questions.

A review is a serious examination of a person's experience with an extension which is presented on the Joomla! Extensions Directory. Praise, difficulties, or comparisons with other extensions are all valid parts of a review, including the reasons why.

Self promotion, by creating unnecesseary links to personal/business sites, shouldn't be part of a review for an extension.

A review is not a location for requests for support. Support question should be taken to the Joomla! Forum or the developer of an extension. Please stay courteous and don’t use any offensive language. After finishing, a review will be accepted by a member of the Joomla! Extensions Directory team if it abides by the guidelines.

Just 5 random reviews

[quote="http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,3209/Itemid,35/#rev-16134"]
This is a great module.
[/quote]

[quote="http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,3209/Itemid,35/#rev-16098"]Exellent! )[/quote]

Hardly a "serious examination of a person's experience with an extension"


[quote="http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,2395/Itemid,35/#rev-14632"]
Hi Developer from PDA
Many Thanks and best regards from me to You. Great Work!
Have a very nice Day and maybee visit me ones on my page http://www.pcte.ch
Sincererly Marcel
[/quote]

Removing the fluff and promotional link (allowed) this review is two works "Great Work" - that is not a review!

[quote="http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,2395/Itemid,35/#rev-14511"]
Hello,
Well done for this development.
Can you also clarify if this will work for both 1.0.13 and 1.5 please?
Many thanks[/quote]

Not a review - Praise 10% - Support question 90%

[brad]

Did you report the reviews you felt were incorrect on JED?

[masterchief]

Phil, you have to look at these things from a couple of angles.  You need to ask yourself who are the reviews trying to benefit.  If you are of the opinion that they should give you feedback that you can process and make your product better, I think you've missed the point of the JED - it's not about you (the "royal" you).  The JED is about connecting the community to "you".  I agree, reviews like "Excellent" or "It's not very good" don't help the developer one iota, however, they do help the community screen things from their point of view.  20 one or two-word statements of "Great work", "Excellent" may help guide a user to your extension more than some rambling critique.

Apart from that, if the rules specifically preclude a happy camper by expressing themselves in one word, then by golly I think we've missed the whole point of things ... don't you?

[PhilTaylor-Prazgod]

Apart from that, if the rules specifically preclude a happy camper by expressing themselves in one word, then by golly I think we've missed the whole point of things ... don't you?

How can a one word "review" fulfil the "rules" of submitting a review:

What's in a review?
You are evaluating the extension based on your experience and usage. Share your thoughts about the extension, the pros and cons.

A review is a serious examination of a person's experience with an extension

If you can achieve the above two sentences in one word then you are a better person with language than I am.

I believe that the way the "rules" are written they DO PRECLUDE "a happy camper by expressing themselves in one word" and therefore I guess that you (the royal you) are "missing the whole point of things" :-) :-)


@brad - the rules state "If you feel that a review contains incorrect information, please contact one of the moderators of the Joomla! Extensions forum"  I dont feel the reviews contain incorrect informaton, rather that they do not follow the guidelines on what consitutes a review.  Therefore posting the JED Forum is an acceptable way of contacting the moderators.  IIRC The reason that the review rules were created was that too many "reviews" were actually one word or support queries and that the guidelines were put in place to stop that.

If the moderators are not going to play by the rules why should everyone else? SImple in my eyes :-)

Not trying to flame anyone - but at the moment there seems a double standard and anyone that criticises get rebuked for doing so!

[LorenzoG]

I'll try to meet the issues Phil brings up in this thread and also give a glimpse what we are looking on when we are approving reviews.

The rules state pretty clear about what kind of review submissions we want to get from our members, namely "a serious examination of a person's experience with an extension". We must also be aware why we we have a review section in JED and it is to give the users valuable feedback how others have experienced an extension and in this way help the users with their selection process for to find the extensions that meet their needs. The review section also serve as a valuable feedback for the developers how their users have experienced their extension.

We receive a big amount of reviews each day and unfortunately, a considerable part of the reviews don't meet the requirement for to get approved since they don't contain any review. It can be that they are considered more as reports, support questions, bug reports, code improvements, rants, praises, commercial disagreements, not in English etc. We aren't normally editing out reviews so if they contain both a valid review and a question they get approved.

We do however editing out own links, expletive and exaggerated language. It happends quite often that the reviewer want to show how an extension looks at their own site and I'm then looking on the following things: Does the extension have a demo? .. and if in those few cases they haven't.. Is the reviewers linking a good example how the extension work? 

I agree with Phil, that the "random" reviews he brings up in his posting, aren't reviews that reach up to the standard we normally require for to be approved by us and they aren't neither specially useful for our members. However, when an Extension is new or have very few reviews, then we accept reviews with lower "review" quality and a praise can then be enough for to get approved and in this way give the developer valuable positive feedback and encouragement. This can be very important for not established developers to know that they have users that appreciate their work. As fast an extension get a couple of reviews, we raise the standard of the review for to get approved. We must also remember that some extension are so simple that is impossible to write a deep review, so this is also one thing we are looking into before deciding if a review will be approved. So there is the answer why those reviews were approved.

We also demand more of negative reviews than corresponding positive reviews for to get approved. If we believe reviewer write about an user related cause why they had an negative experience then we don't approve the review. Also we are trying to look if it's a commercial disagreement behind the negative review, it's unfortunately not so uncommon that the users use JED as a tool to hit back to a developer because they didn't get what they wanted. We also don't approve a review that we feel is unfair towards the developer. But the general rule is if the review is really a review, then it's get approved irrespective if it's a positive or negative review.

During the time we are working with the reviews, we are also spending a lot of time to follow up the reviews that are considered as reports. We also discuss internally how to improve JED so we get a bigger share reviews that actually can be approved.

I hope this helped a little to understand why some reviews get approved and some not.