[cuppajava]

I swear the majority of reviews I get are negative reviews of people either misunderstanding the bot, people complaining the bot is broken when the client requires an update, or leaving 1 star reviews for small bugs that then drag down the score of the bot permanently even when the bug is fixed.

I know other authors experience this too and it makes the star system pretty useless. Would it be possible to enforce moderation on people misusing reviews or something?

Not that it really matters I guess, it's just annoying that every time I get a review I cringe because I know it's going to be negative.

Edit: honestly with how misused the star system is you almost might as well remove the stars and just let people leave text reviews. A 2 star bot might be totally fine but the 2 star will make users needlessly worried.

 

[american express]

The majority of reports dealt with on RuneMate are from Bot Authors reporting reviews they deem irrelevant. This is typically because an end user is using the review section on RuneMate to report bugs, rather than leave a review.

Ideally, the review section would only be for positive things. But due to the nature of game updates and things changing, one bot rarely works perfectly forever.

Bug reports should be posted in the bot's own forum thread, and reviews on the actual review section.

The trouble with this, is from an end user's perspective, if the bot isn't working properly, then that is actually a legitimate part of a review. EG: for a combat bot if someone left a review like this: "this bot kind of works for fighting but wasn't able to bank and withdraw more food, as advertised".

The above is actually both a review (kind of works) and a bug report (broken banking).

It would be nice to have a checkbox someone has to agree to before leaving a review that says something like "I am posting a REVIEW and not a BUG REPORT. I acknowledge that BUG REPORTS should be posted on the forum thread for this bot". But whether that actually changes anything is another thing...

I guess the purpose of the review system is to help people trust whether a bot is working at a glance, rather than having to go through 50 pages of forum posts reading the latest updates/bug reports. But recent reviews on a new version supersede previous ones anyway, and one negative review on a new version can outweigh positive ones from earlier versions.

How about moving to something like this:

"Review page" shows:
Last updated: 6th December 2019
Last used: 3 hours ago
Upvotes: 12 ^
Downvotes: 2 v

With this, at a glance you would know how recently someone else has used it (eg: when the last session ended), and the upvotes/dowvotes would provide a simple metric for knowing whether the current version is working/end users are able to get it working.