Exposing reviews and ratings

Posted by Jesse Andrews on May 31, 2009

When browsing userscripts, you now have the option to sort by their average rating. Also scripts must have a sufficient rating before they are shown on the homepage.

In the 5 months since reviews were added to scripts, you guys have added 2372 ratings. To highlight cool scripts, I've added sorting of the scripts by their rating.

Right now the rating is the average of all reviews (without any weighting). This leads to two issues: 1) a highly script with a single bad review (60 five star ratings and a single 1 star) will come after a script with a single five star review. 2) reviews that the community vote are unhelpful (10 people vote the review is unhelpful) are included in the rating.

Now that reviews are exposed I expect the number of reviews to increase, and to iterate on the ranking algorithm to fix the mentioned issues.

You could comment on this post if you were logged in.

2 points
login to vote
Posted Jun 1, 2009

Yeah, one of my scripts gets added; Userscripts.org Reviews Column.

6 points
login to vote
Posted Jun 1, 2009

The problem with reviews is that with scripts keeping updated, the reviews are not.

2 points
login to vote
Jesse Andrews article's author
Posted Jun 1, 2009

GIJoe,

Good point. Perhaps this can be addressed with "decay" of how much value a review has as it gets older - or perhaps as people mark a review as not helpful since it is old?

3 points
login to vote
Posted Jun 2, 2009

Maybe reviews should be linked to specified versions of the script.

2 points
login to vote
Jesse Andrews article's author
Posted Jun 2, 2009

They are internally. But removing all reviews for older versions isn't necessarily a good thing.

2 points
login to vote
Posted Jun 3, 2009

Not to remove reviews. Linking script versions to reviews.

With a new script version a bug or something else bad maybe fixed that was said in a review. So with the new version that review isn't accurate anymore, but people still read those bad reviews and think the author didn't care and didn't fix it.

I think the main focus should be on the current version reviews, but old reviews should be available too or possible updated to the correct script version.

I hope i made sense, because we won't want to have bad reviews that aren't accurate anymore.

1 point
login to vote
Posted Jun 8, 2009

How about displaying "3 new versions after this rating/review" or "No script updates after this rating/review", so that people can easily see if the script has been updated since it was written?

2 points
login to vote
Posted Jun 8, 2009

Also, I just tried reading some reviews:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/reviews/31864

Even as an experienced user and frequent visitor to this site had a really hard time finding a link to click on to get to the script.
The "About" tab is very uninformative and non-visible.

"YouTube HD Ultimate" title should at least be clickable, or as I think has been asked for many times, please add the green Install button to the most common tabs.
(About, Source Code and Reviews)

5 points
login to vote
Posted Jun 10, 2009

As for the "new version vs. old review": Considered that usually a new version will a) fix, b) add, and c) improve things, but rarely d) makes things worse, a "weighting" of reviews could take "bad old reviews" with a smaller weight, while "good old reviews" will keep full weight? Still not perfect, though - since it's hard to tell if that issue has been addressed by one of the updates or not.

Another approach could be to let the Scriptwright "mark" a "bad review" as being no longer fitting after having released an update. The system then sends a notification (PM) to the author of the review to update it. As soon as it is updated, it again counts with full weight. As long as it is not, it counts with half weight. If there's no response from the review writer within a reasonable time frame (say, 3 months), it will be marked "outaged" and no longer considered for the overall ranking.

If this approach is considered, the following should be considered as well: When a Scriptwright makes a new release, the system should check for "past bad reviews" and offer to "mark" them. If he does not mark them, they are linked as "applying to the current version" (i.e. counted with 100% weight). If the Scriptwright decides to mark them - see above.

1 point
login to vote
FirefoxWindows annjim User
Posted Jun 24, 2009

haha good

1 point
login to vote
Posted Jul 14, 2009

Jesse,

Have you built any way to get RSS feeds for reviews?

Something like http://userscripts.org/feeds/users/6623/scripts... for reviews of my scripts?

Curtis Gibby

1 point
login to vote
Posted Jul 22, 2009

One other thing is wrong with reviews...
What's the better:
a script with 1 review with 5 stars ?
or
a script with 200 reviews with 5 stars and 1 with 4 stars ?

At the moment, it's "1 review with 5 stars", which seems wrong compared by "200 review with 5 star and 1 with 4 stars".

1 point
login to vote
Posted Sep 8, 2009

RE: izzysoft: Great idea. There should definitely be a way for an unfair or outdated review to be removed - probably at the discretion of the scriptwright and one other reviewer - or at least be able to post a response to the review. This was in the old system, before it was a "review". Right now, scriptwrights can't even post responses, outside of the "discussion" area.

1 point
login to vote
Posted Nov 12, 2009

My vote is to show both time-tested scripts and latest scripts on the home page.

There are people who frequent userscripts.org and when they see a new script listed on homepage which happens to be specific to the site or activity they do on browser. So they think why not try it and see if its useful. This way the new script with 0 installs gets some exposure. Otherwise the person visits this site and sees same ten scripts (with highest rating) listed on homepage, he gets bored and exits the site.

A lot of users in a rush use the review - comment area to report bug etc. So an ability for the author to reply to that review comment and the ratings adjustment accordingly would be nice.

2 points
login to vote
Posted Aug 11, 2010

Please - ADD ability to report the user and delete the forum posts.
there is allot of spammers. Fake scripts and so on.
for example user: http://userscripts.org/users/148943