Sometimes you want to respond to a review because someone might give you a negative review for seemingly no reason or someone may be having a problem and post it in the user reviews instead of contacting you!
Part of what this would need to work well would be notification when a review is posted. There are notifications for forum posts and other changes, but not for reviews.
I filed a separate feature request for this - #382 Send Notification to Developers When a Review Is Posted - because I might also want to respond to a positive review, but the few times it has happened on my very small project, I didn't find out for a few months - when it was too late to get the poster's attention.
Last edit: Joe 2015-02-19
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Although what is needed here is the ability to respond to a review on the project page itself so other viewers can read the response before forming an opinion based on only one side of the story, there is a partial workaround that at least allows a response to the reviewer.
Take the user's name and plug it into https:///sourceforge.net/u/username in the address bar of the browser and that takes you to their SF home page where you can send them a message. It would be nice if there was a way to do this automagically - to respond to a review privately.
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There is a need to respond to very old reviews. The lowest rated review on our project complains about something that we improved and fixed two years ago. Yet we cannot add a note to say this has been fixed.
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There should be an "Unfair" button next to reviews. Responding makes sense when the user is making a fair complaint. But sometimes a rating is just outdated, grossly unfair, or simply trolling.
And in that case it shouldn't count towards the rating.
1) Example from Fred Toussi. You fixed something ages ago, but the bad review because of the bug remains. You can not do anything about it.
2) for aqemu someone gave one star, because there's no portuguese translation. Even if you want to count that as a valid complaint, that should never be a reason to give a project with thousands of lines of code a rating of 1 star, maybe 3 or 4 stars, but even that is not nice. And let's be honest the whole software development world revolves around English. Nothing against translations, but as a developer who is developing stuff in his free time, I can't make translations myself, there's simply no time for that, and I only can speak two languages fluently (working on more, but that's another topic :-) ). So this is in my opinion an extremely invalid reason for giving a negative rating.
3) Of course then there are the haters and trolls you can always find online. They shouldn't be able to manipulate ratings.
4) Example: Someone didn't understand something about the project and basically wrote a support request as rating. That's not even a "review".
SF should clearly define
1) What constitutes a review
2) What is a valid reason for a negative rating
3) What is an invalid reason for a negative rating
Then there should be an "Unfair" button next to the spam button. If the review is widely outside of what is defined as valid "review", SF should remove it or request the user to make a change (in a limited time period) before removing it.
The Unfair and Spam buttons could also be merged into "Unfair/Spam" for streamlining it.
Things like this are causing a lot of frustration.
Last edit: Tobias Gläßer 2016-05-31
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https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/site-support/5805/
A feature similar to Google Play would be great!
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2013/05/all-google-play-developers-can-now.html
Part of what this would need to work well would be notification when a review is posted. There are notifications for forum posts and other changes, but not for reviews.
I filed a separate feature request for this - #382 Send Notification to Developers When a Review Is Posted - because I might also want to respond to a positive review, but the few times it has happened on my very small project, I didn't find out for a few months - when it was too late to get the poster's attention.
Last edit: Joe 2015-02-19
Although what is needed here is the ability to respond to a review on the project page itself so other viewers can read the response before forming an opinion based on only one side of the story, there is a partial workaround that at least allows a response to the reviewer.
Take the user's name and plug it into https:///sourceforge.net/u/username in the address bar of the browser and that takes you to their SF home page where you can send them a message. It would be nice if there was a way to do this automagically - to respond to a review privately.
There is a need to respond to very old reviews. The lowest rated review on our project complains about something that we improved and fixed two years ago. Yet we cannot add a note to say this has been fixed.
There should be an "Unfair" button next to reviews. Responding makes sense when the user is making a fair complaint. But sometimes a rating is just outdated, grossly unfair, or simply trolling.
And in that case it shouldn't count towards the rating.
1) Example from Fred Toussi. You fixed something ages ago, but the bad review because of the bug remains. You can not do anything about it.
2) for aqemu someone gave one star, because there's no portuguese translation. Even if you want to count that as a valid complaint, that should never be a reason to give a project with thousands of lines of code a rating of 1 star, maybe 3 or 4 stars, but even that is not nice. And let's be honest the whole software development world revolves around English. Nothing against translations, but as a developer who is developing stuff in his free time, I can't make translations myself, there's simply no time for that, and I only can speak two languages fluently (working on more, but that's another topic :-) ). So this is in my opinion an extremely invalid reason for giving a negative rating.
3) Of course then there are the haters and trolls you can always find online. They shouldn't be able to manipulate ratings.
4) Example: Someone didn't understand something about the project and basically wrote a support request as rating. That's not even a "review".
SF should clearly define
1) What constitutes a review
2) What is a valid reason for a negative rating
3) What is an invalid reason for a negative rating
Then there should be an "Unfair" button next to the spam button. If the review is widely outside of what is defined as valid "review", SF should remove it or request the user to make a change (in a limited time period) before removing it.
The Unfair and Spam buttons could also be merged into "Unfair/Spam" for streamlining it.
Things like this are causing a lot of frustration.
Last edit: Tobias Gläßer 2016-05-31
Review replies are now available for project admins to post feedback on any review of their project.
Thanks Dave!