BlackBerry® World™ Development

[HuXu77]

I am on the featured page until Wednesday and I really want to take advantage of this exposure but when I went featured my users discovered a bug that made the app useless and I quickly turned around and fixed it but now I have two low reviews (out of the already few reviews I have) and its related to that bug that is now fixed.  But even though its fixed, those users can't go back and change their review!  This is COMPLETELY bogus!  At least let them review each release!  I have reviews back from when it was version 1 and its being reflected to new users as version 2 review, this is completely misleading and will cost me users! 

Yea I may have a free app but I am extremely customer service conscious and this being my first app I want it to be a flagship for the rest of my development career and having an app that has 2/5 stars doesn't look good!

I'm sure the review system won't be fixed by the time my app goes down from the Featured page but I wanted to get this thread started so Developer Relations can see my frustration and hopefully try and expidite the review system being changed.

Anyone else feel the same way?  For the time being would you be so kind to download my app and rate it higher?  Just to offset the bad review relating to the bug, I would appreciate it and if you have suffered the same, I will download your app and rate it better (if it's free, don't have alot of money to buy apps to rate)

[elena_laskavaia]

You can Deny the review and explain why. See previous posts about denying the review.

[XoomMan]

You can create a deny review ticket if you go to your vendor portal and click on reviews under Manage Products. It takes about 4 days for the denial to be approved before it's taking down. Denied reviews don't affect your average rating.

[HuXu77]

Yes I know I can deny the review but is there any kind of consideration to allow users to rate different revisions? It only seems to make sense.

[akinsella]

Hey HuXu77!

As elena_laskavaia pointed out, you can log into the Vendor Portal and deny those reviews.  Once denied, the reviews will not be displayed and the ratings of those two reviews will not be used to calculate your overall rating.  

In terms of changes - we're definitely going to be adding in two major requests from our developers - 

1. Show reviews/ratings for latest version by default, not all versions.

2. Allow your customers to edit their reviews/rating.

Still working on timing - but we know these need to fixed ASAP.

Alex

[zezke]

Thank you akinsella, those changes will be much appreciated!

[QuiteSimple]

---

akinsella wrote:

1. Show reviews/ratings for latest version by default, not all versions.

2. Allow your customers to edit their reviews/rating.

---

While I welcome change 2) (customers able to edit their reviews), I'm not sure what would be the impact of change 1)

You see, when you implement this change, this will basically reset the ratings and reviews of apps being in the market for months, apps, which have established good name in the audience.

So every time I update one of my apps, it will loose all reviews and rating it had before and it will be a fresh start. I prefer to push small upgrades (even cosmetic one) but if you implement that change, I will update an app twice an year max if at all (probably I will be forced to push updates via my own server and not via BB App World).

IMO this change (to show reviews for the latest version) is pointless because:

- Reviews are ordered by date, newer reviews come first, so reviews for the newer version will be visible, while older reviews will fade with the time

- Every vendor can deny reviews which are not appropriate

- User will be able to change their reviews, i.e. if user gets update which makes the app better, he/she can change his/her negative review

Not to mention the possible misuse of this change - if I have crappy app for example, I can push update after update and wipe out all negative reviews.

Please, please consider this before implementing change 1), it may lead to sale disaster and many frustrated vendors here

[pfluger]

Regarding #1, an option would be to only consider the last 6 months (or 1 year) of reviews to include in the overall rating.

These are usually the most relevant reviews anyway. And you could be sure to get rid of bad reviews for a very old, irrelevant version eventually.

[peter9477]

Well, it does sound a bit simplistic. Some apps have relatively few downloads, and obviously fewer still reviews, and if it was a blanket "last six months", there's a reasonable chance that could wipe out all or most of their reviews.

What might make more sense is if the vendor, who already has the option to deny individual reviews, could request removal of all reviews older than some date. That gives them enough control to remove all older reviews when a significantly different new release comes out, or to keep as many as they need to ensure they still actually have a rating.

(I haven't been involved long enough to actually have a good sense of what would work best... that's just another idea. I do think showing only the reviews for the most recent version by default is probably an overly simplistic idea.)

[pfluger]

Maybe make it last 6 months but keep at least 10 reviews?

Not a fan of the review denial like it is now. It makes it too easy for us to manipulate the whole rating system. Remove the option to deny reviews, instead give us the option to leave a comment. Maybe commented reviews by default would not influence the overall rating.

I think ebay adjusted there rating system some time ago to only consider the last 12 months. Never hurts to check how others are doing things.