Once upon a time there was a company called WP Bins (not their real name). They had a plugin that was flagged by the forum folks for going batshit on a review, demanding to know the definition of a review.
Schrödinger’s Review
A review is a forum post of someone’s experience using your plugin.
That’s it. We ask people to be honest and fair, to use nicer language, but really there aren’t too many limits. This tends to result in developers angry due to subpar/uninformative reviews.
I really get that. Getting a review of “This doesn’t work” sucks, and it’s as useful as tits on a snake. But the thing is, a review is someone’s experience. They can be wrong sometimes (like if they blame your plugin for something that isn’t your fault) but in general reviews are not malicious — they are either really happy or really angry.
WP Bins reached out to complain about a ‘non’ review:
It is someone crying because they have to pay extra for functionality included in the free version. This is not a review based on our product or what it can do, it is someone crying that we have the audacity to charge for the time/effort/resources spent to offer it to them.
We took a look and saw the review was a complaint that functionality they need isn’t in the free version. Which, you know, annoying, but valid. That’s a complaint. And the developer is free to say “We know, it’s not going to be free.”
I have often said the way in which you reply to a review is more important than the review, and Bins was a great example of that. The first comment was fine (basically saying “As our website states, those features are premium”). It was a bit snarky, but in the RTFM (read the fine/fucking material) kind of way.
But Bins also flagged the review for moderation. A mod stepped in, explained sorry, it’s a valid review, and that’s where we went off the rails.
And By The Way …
Bins and the Mods got into a pissing match of “It is a review!”/”It’s not a review!” until the Mods put their foot down and said “You asked us to look, we did, it stands.”
Sometimes you don’t get what you want.
Then Bins escalated to Plugins. We went in, cleaned up the (public) argument about if it was/wasn’t a review, explained we were doing so to protect Bins from their own frustration (which we understood completely) and then checked out the plugin.
This was the risk any time someone asked me to look at their forum drama. I always checked their plugins, because invariably the people who were the bitchiest about unfair reviews were breaking guidelines.
Bins was:
- Prompting users for a license, claiming it was required for updates
- Emailing users on activation/deactivation
- Not sanitizing
The first one was assumed to be a gaff. That is, they meant to say a license was needed for premium updates. Their methodology ran afoul of the guidelines, so it was explained how to correct that.
The email they were told to review.
The sanitizing was a requirement. And we’re talking basic stuff here:
'zip' => ( isset( $_POST['premium_addon_zip'] ) ) ? $_POST['premium_addon_zip'] : '',
'slug' => $_REQUEST['plugin_slug'],Kick Rocks
That’s when they got mad.
We will not be reopening the plugin on the WP repository if you can’t accept the fact that reviews are for reviewing products. And, if you cant accept that leaving one star (as oppose to 2 or 3) SOLELY because we have a premium version, well, is petty and childish (to use your lingo).
We don’t need the WP repo. We did it for users and to be part of the “community”. But if this is how the community responds to our philanthropy, then kick rocks!
Go ahead and pull the plugin.
I will note, we absolutely told Bins they were being petty and childish over a single one star review. He was being a truculent toddler.
And before we could reply:
If you are willing to delete my reply because of protecting me, then why couldn’t you delete theirs? You even mentioned that it was a piss poor review and hard to tell what the hell they are saying. So, why would you leave that up? I don’t need you to take down my responses. My response was sound. We have a great user base and people that can actually read what we put out the for them. Including the price structure and our model.
So, leaving his comment and removing mine is pathetic. Since we are slinging around insults here 😉
Bins got told “The review is a bad review, but it’s still a review” and “Do you want to turn this into a permanent closure?”
They chose to argue that there were not conflicts, and there was no email (there was, I got one). No mention about the license thing, no mention about security. Oh and they demanded we restore their bitching.
When someone gets there, and zeroes in on the one thing they feel is unfair, without stopping to address the security stuff, it’s no longer worth the time of day to talk to them.
Backtracking
At this point, we told Bins the plugin was closed, restored their angry comments, have a nice day. They were not banned!
Not until they made a fake account and left 5 star reviews for themselves.
But that’s not here yet.
Bins came back to plugin to ask we remove their ranty comments because even though we said a single bad review wouldn’t hurt them much, they were getting no sales.
NO SHIT, SHERLOCK!
The review wasn’t the issue! Their reply was the issue! Who the fuck wants to use a plugin if the developer is going to accuse them of being fake!?
We re-removed the angry replies and reiterated that if they wanted to come back:
- Fix the problem with the emailing
- Remove the license ‘requirement’ and make it clear it was only for premium support
- Fix security
That’s reasonable, right?
Bins said thank you, and then made the sock puppets I mentioned earlier.
Bin and Bag it
At this point, everyone gave up on Bins.
A month later, Bins emailed plugins and explained the sock puppet was their spouse (note: people argue this a lot, please DO NOT ask your partner to leave a review for you! It’s disingenuous unless they say “I’m X’s husband! I love this plugin!”)
You were banned for your overreaction to a single bad review. Your actions following that escalated and exacerbated the situation.
You called people names, you sent MULTIPLE emails alternately demanding we fix or remove your plugins, without addressing the issues we’d raised. Then you got [your partner] to make an account and leave a review as a paying user (which is incredibly biased, seeing as [they’re your partner]). We made an attempt to shield you from backlash, you demanded we allow your post to stand. You made legal threats.
At this point, it’s HARMFUL to the volunteers to permit you to run wild on our system and we are declining to permit you to do so.
Your use of our systems are at-will. We are no longer willing to permit you to use them, and since you have no code hosted here, you have no need to do so.
Bins grumbled but accepted this.
The Moral of the Story?
Reviews can really, really suck. They can be low quality, they can be worthless, they can be outright wrong.
But they remain one thing: Someone’s experience with your plugin (or theme).
You don’t have to agree with them, but you sure as shit shouldn’t rant and rave about people being ‘fake’ and how unfair it is that someone doesn’t like your choices. People don’t have to like your work! I know it sucks when they don’t but if Bins had just said “We understand your frustration. We charge for X because blah.” then none of this would have happened.
The other thing you don’t do is try to ‘fix’ the problem with good reviews from friends and family. That doesn’t teach you anything and makes you look like a scammer. You want reviews from those random people, as they will tell you what’s happening in the real world.
Finally?
It’s totally okay to charge for add-ons/features to your plugins! But remember, people don’t have to like that.
Comments
One response to “Plugins: Kick Rocks”
As a plugin developer myself, I’ve had my fair number of reviews that were frustrating. A lot are people who don’t use the forum first if they have any kind of question or issue and go straight to a 1 star review instead.
Recently, I took over a plugin that a developer had abandoned but, for various reasons out of my hands, the plugin team removed a number of revisions before I could take it on. As a result my first update was going to undo a number of changes made by the previous developer. I put details about this happening, suggesting if this was going to cause problems to consider not updating but, never-the-less, people had auto-update on (despite them telling me how critical the plugin was to their site) and it happened anyway. One person took their anger straight to a review – in this case the issue they had was being discussed in the forum and there was a simple workaround. They didn’t bother checking first and, as a result, it ended up with an angry 1 star review.
But, having seen the “the way in which you reply to a review is more important than the review” adage quoted before, this is something I always bear in mind. Swallow my pride, grit my teeth and leave a nice response, albeit suggesting they maybe ask in the forum first in future.
In the case of that previous example, I pointed them to the forum discussion, explaining the workaround. No anger from me, no arguing. My hope is that the way in which I respond to these reflect better than any negative feedback given.