Bad Replies to Bad Reviews

My plugin brother, Pippin, wrote an awesome post about How to leave a good bad review. In it, he mentions a pretty common kind of email/review:

Your crappy plugin doesn’t work. Waste of a download..

Hmm.. I should buy pro!

Fairly often, people get those as a review in the WordPress.org forums, and ask me (either as a plugin mod or a forum mod) to remove it. Most of the time, I don’t, and tell them that much.

You see, the issue is not that you got a bad review. We all get them. The issue is how you handle the review. If you get a one-star review slamming your code, and you reply with a reasonable response, then you’ve taken care of the matter in a mature, adult, responsible way. If, instead, you call them names or email them, well then, we’re into the other world.

If you’re demanding people remove a, single, one star review, in general I think you’re being childish. There are exceptions, where people are bitter and mean and everything falls into a hate-fest with slurs and pejoratives being slung around, and personal attacks galore, then you bet I’ll delete the thread. But you’ll probably get flagged for moderation too.

There’s a good way and a bad way to handle a bad review. The bad way comes in two main types: over reactions and under reactions. The unders, thats what you see from people like AT&T or Comcast, who pretty much ignore the complaints and use their power to delete them or shut them down. The overs are people who take their “Oh my god, this customer sucks!” to twitter and everything else, and generally make fools of themselves.

When you’re asking me to delete a forum post that says “This plugin sucks, the author won’t refund me!” and you’ve made no attempt to handle the situation, I nearly always tell you to try first. “Hey, I’m sorry you’re upset. The no-refund policy was clearly stated on the order page, and I did attempt to work with you to resolve this, but you were asking for a major modification to the code that I didn’t feel comfortable with.” The rest of what I said, though, is gleaned from the paragraph long rant about how a three sentence review was hurting his ratings and no one was downloading his plugin anymore. Clearly because of one, erroneous, one star review.

Go back to Pippin’s post. At the end, he shares an exchange with a very good ‘negative’ review, and a very good response. For the most part, that’s not what I see developers and the like doing. What I see is that knee-jerk reaction to an angry post, where hate feeds hate and suddenly you’re getting a bunch of bad reviews because you’ve been feeding the anger, and it’s a circle that ends with no one wanting to use your code because you’re mean.

Recently, a developer who fell into that cycle got ‘busted’ making dupe accounts. Sock puppets, if you will. He used them to try and push his plugins, even though his main accounts were all closed. So we emailed him. We reached out and said “Hey, you know we know this is you. What’s really going on here, man?” And we started talking! He explained his side, we pointed out that the whole thing boiled down to how he’d been mistreating users, and if he could stop that, we were willing to re-enable his account and everything.

The one thing we did not do was delete his old posts, where he’d kind of lost his mind. Those bad events in the past made him who he was, for better of worse, and whitewashing the past did not change it. There was one way to change it, and that was for him to stop acting like that and to move forward, being a better person.

For that same reason, I probably won’t delete that bad review. How it changes your product is not in the deletion but in the handling. If you take the task at hand, rise up and approach it fairly and maturely, it says more about you than anything else. If you are reasonable, thoughtful, and fair, you will have a better result in your reviews than anything else I could do with that deleted. You see, I would sooner trust a product that has bad reviews and good responses, than a plugin that has no bad reviews at all. One is understandable, the other is unrealistic.

And personally? I’d hand over that refund.

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

I’m Mika (aka Ipstenu) and I’m complicated. I’ve been on the net since the days of dedicated terminals and Novation CAT modems and solved Missionaries and Cannibals (or Goats and Cabbages) before I was six, and blog about WordPress and technical/computer things at Half Elf on Tech.

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