Why are add-on user reviews being deleted?
I've seen some rumors as to why 1-star and 2-star reviews have been being deleted on the pages of add-ons such as Adblock Plus: the most notable ones being that either the developers themselves somehow have the ability to delete these reviews, or some random people have been simply flagging them all for deletion and whoever is reviewing these deletion requests is simply complying (if so, then they seem to be using rather lax criteria).
Either way, I haven't seen official responses regarding this odd occurrence, from either developers or Mozilla. It's rather hard to trust anything that has all of its negative reviews deleted with no explanation, so I think this needs to be addressed.
(I would also like to know if I posted this question to the correct place. It's not about Mozilla Firefox itself, but it is about something integral to the Firefox experience.)
الحل المُختار
The Add-ons team has a separate forum where they hopefully can answer your questions:
https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/c/add-ons
Read this answer in context 👍 1All Replies (9)
الحل المُختار
The Add-ons team has a separate forum where they hopefully can answer your questions:
It is not due to censorship or such but pretty much all were not following the Review Guidelines for submitting reviews of Extensions and Themes (image and complete). https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/review_guide
Reviews get deleted all the time, even the four and five star reviews due to not following proper review guidelines.
There is a discussion here that makes valid points on why reviews can be deleted. http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=14596895#p14596895
There can valid reviews but people may give one star because they mistakenly thought it was the best rating and not the worst.
Modified by James
jscher2000 said
The Add-ons team has a separate forum where they hopefully can answer your questions: https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/c/add-ons
Thank you for informing me. I find it rather conterproductive for everyone involved, however, that this fact wasn't more readily apparent...
Should I close this topic as soon as possible and reopen it there if I feel I still need to?
Btw the support forum for a.m.o is listed on the bottom of addons.mozilla.org pages.
DoubleATam said
Should I close this topic as soon as possible and reopen it there if I feel I still need to?
It's completely up to you. If you want an answer "from the horse's mouth" you need to go where the horses are.
jscher2000 said
DoubleATam saidShould I close this topic as soon as possible and reopen it there if I feel I still need to?It's completely up to you. If you want an answer "from the horse's mouth" you need to go where the horses are.
After actually looking at that forum, it seems this discussion has already been had. In particular, I found this link https://github.com/mozilla/addons-server/issues/1906 and from the looks of it, it pretty much admits (though not explicitly) that the "independent group" that has been reviewing flagged reviews has been making some sort of frequent mistake.
I say this situation is very fishy* and needs to be looked into further by someone else, but I suppose that as users there's nothing we can do but cope with it.
\* (An add-on with literally 20 million users with literally zero 1 or 2-star reviews? Unacceptable. There has to be room for opinions even if it's simply personal preference regarding the interface.)
That explains why I could not find my negative review of uBlock Origin. Went back a couple days later, went through the date order, it was not there. We as users have the RIGHT to know when an extension has problems. Otherwise, what is the point of having reviews???? Are reviews simply a scam????? Seems so, if you are deleting negatives, allowing only positives. If I had seen what massive problems it caused me, seen in someone else's review, I would never have installed it and then lost TWO DAYS OF TIME trying to make it work and fix it.
Don't sugar coat stuff, let us know the truth. The TRUTH! I didn't read your Rules of Engagement so don't know where I might have crossed the line into negative territory.
Frankly, I don't CARE about your ROEs, I wrote from the heart, what had happened, what I tried to do to make it work, and how I happily deleted it, uninstalled it from both computers, and went back to Ad Block Plus.
So not only was my time WASTED trying to make it work, my time was ALSO WASTED writing a truthful review! Most of the other reviews look like the developer using different pen names. Suspicious!
In the future I will consider that ALL positive reviews are scams! What else can I think?
I bet you'll even delete this comment also!
WHY do I have to log in over and over and then be able to do anything on the page I wanted to write on? AFTER logging in multiple times? Navigation on this website is for the birds.
Hi notagains, I don't know whether you noticed this in an earlier reply, but the Add-ons team has a forum over here for issues with that site:
https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/c/add-ons
Regarding having to log into this site over and over, it sounds like the cookie set when you logged in was corrupted, cleared, or blocked somehow between requests. Obviously hugely inconvenient. But it would be best to start a new question about that if you want to post here again.