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.
When I added in nginx I wanted to test everything again, and as I made my way down my list I thought “Isn’t there a way to do this and go make a coffee?”
People judge by how things look. If someone only wears a black turtleneck and jeans (Steve Jobs), we create a specific mindview of them and it rarely changes. Someone who always wears avant-garde clothes that are nearly unwearable (Katy Perry), we create another. If that person always wears a suit jacket (Tim Gunn), we have yet another view. Neither is right or wrong, of course, and they all have their places.
Tunnel vision is something that happens to all of us. We look at the world from our perspective (yes, I was Captain Obvious there, I know), which means when most people remark that a project needs something, what they really mean is they need it. This is the part of passion that escalates into angry and vitriol remarkably fast, by the way, so if you’ve ever seen someone go from zero to abusive in three comments, that’s often what’s going on. They really want something to the point that they see red and can’t get out of their tunnel.
If you’re stuck between writing code you like to do a feature you want and writing code someone else wants and you don’t have an investment in, you’re probably going to do what you want. This is the reason that’s hardest to understand, and it’s the one most people call ‘unprofessional’ because it boils down to “Oh you don’t like something so you’re not doing it?” If this was iOS or MS Word, yeah, you’d get fired. But this is Open Source, and the rules are a little different here. We make what we make out of that same passion you have to see what you want to see.
