Could be awesome, but you lose the rights to your own content

  • This plugin could be awesome, but the idea behind it makes it fail.

    Well-coded, very customizable, SEO-friendly with Schema.org – however there is one big problem: As a plugin user, you lose the rights to do anything you want with your content. All ratings are stored on a server run by the business behind this plugin – instead of storing them in your own WordPress database. Imagine the business fails or something else could happen – you would lose all your ratings as you would have no way importing them into another rating plugin. They have the power to do what they want with it. While this is basically the way to go for today’s social networks, I am completely against this approach in terms of WordPress.

    In my opinion it is perfectly fine to provide commercial plugins for WordPress, and it is also fine to regularly check the user’s license. But practically owning the user’s website’s data (or parts of it) is a no-go. That’s why I can only give this plugin a single star.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author RatingWidget

    (@ratingwidget)

    Hi @felix,

    We are very sorry that you think SaaS solutions are “no-go”. And I’m sure you are using multiple SaaS widgets yourself which also store the data remotely (e.g. Facebook Like button). Hosting the ratings data externally actually has a lot of benefits like saving DB load and improved performance.

    Anyways, if you’ll read the description of the plugin you’ll notice that we are not hiding that fact, on the contrary – we are explicitly mentioning it and proud to be the only ratings SaaS plugin on WordPress.

    Here’s the quote from the description:

    All Rating-Widget star ratings are fully customizable, cross-browser, support multi-language, CSS3 compliant and hosted by Rating-Widget.com.

    Your rating is not fair and I’ll explain why. If we were selling a red car, rating it with 1-star because it’s not blue (your favorite color) make no sense. If you like to buy a blue car go and shop on other place ??

    To help you out, we recommend to use GD Star Rating which is hosted directly on your WordPress server.

    Thread Starter Felix Arntz

    (@flixos90)

    Alright, you make a valid point there that you mention this in the description. Maybe I sounded a little too harsh, Sorry about that. But I’m not sure if I should change my rating. I mean it is subjective, I would love to use this plugin if it used the WordPress infrastructure, but in my personal case, the plugin is useless. Sure, this is not really your fault, but especially with WordPress, I like the fact that you control (almost) everything (in contrast to things like Facebook). Giving the plugin 5 Stars would not express my opinion as a whole, and any other rating would express it even less.

    Same opinion here.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • The topic ‘Could be awesome, but you lose the rights to your own content’ is closed to new replies.