NoLongerJSUser

– we don’t pay anybody for reviews. We do provide freebie. And it’s really freebie – as opposed to some concurring companies, we don’t expect our users to pay again in one year for possibility to update plugins.
Sorry – lets break it down to semantics. You compensated individuals who reviewed you positively with goods that they would’ve otherwise had to purchase. Furthermore, you engaged in this on website properties not of your own. You are correct, you didn’t “pay” them, you compensated them. Would it not be ethical then for those reviews to be marked as “has been compensated based on the content of their review”?

– our paid plugins: hey, it’s our code and we can do with it what we want and give away or set any price we want, right? I would understand you being angry if we would steal it or something. We don’t force anybody to use it.
I don’t care what you do with your plugins that people pay for. They’re all open source and can be purchased, forked and resold as someones own. For all I care you could compensate them with free air, provided the air holds the same exchange value to the reviewer as a value added plugin they’d have to otherwise pay to access.

– of course we hope to get more feedback and of course we are most happy with positive one
That’s fine – we all do. Again, I get the feeling you’re missing the nature of the issue. wp.org is not your web property. You compensated others after they presented you in a positive light on someone else’s web property, without disclosure that they were compensated, with the intent of positioning yourself above others. If you want to claim that your intentions were honorable and you couldn’t in your wildest dreams imagine that someone would leave an artificially inflated review for the hope of receiving compensation, I’m not sure I get that feeling from your responses. Nor do I think any other reasonable person would as well.

At the end of the day, you can do what you want and I can do what I want. My experience as a business owner has been that if you’re truly interested in how you’re doing, you listen to the ones that rate you the worst.

The fact is, if plugin reviews are infiltrated with reviews where the reviewer has been compensated, regardless by whom, with what or when, the intentions of everyone involved becomes suspect. I know you’re trying to make money and run a business. However, if you read nothing else from me and disregard everything said to this point, please make sure you understand the following:

As the wordpress economy grows and competing plugins come to market, a plugin author can just as easily say “Thank You” for every 1 star review left on a competitor’s plugin as they can a 5 star review left on their own.

Is that why the free plugin can be claimed until 31st December 2014? Without a cap of the review having been submitted before a certain time period (or before the email going out), you’re asking people to leave 5 star reviews on this site and you will give them free stuff. No where does it say in your “newsletter”, reviews had to be submitted by a certain date – I did read it carefully and also looked at the account creation date with alot of your current 5 star reviews on wp.org ??

It seems like legitimate concerns, questions or other’s experiences with the jigoshop plugin are trying to be hidden under a bunch of fluff. If I were to have written a 5 star review today, submitted the url to you today and asked for a free product, would you have seriously said “no” because my review didn’t occur before a cutoff point that you didn’t define? I’ve got a hard time buying that one.

Like I said 3-3.5 for the jigoshop code because I used it to make money and it made me money. -3 for sketchy tactics of the “jigoshop owners” who are in my opinion trying to influence ratings on a website they don’t control, only to further their own gain in a biased fashion, rather than actually putting out a quality product that people innately want to review positively.

Again, if you’re insinuating that reviews had to be placed before your newsletter was published, why was their no cutoff date? Furthermore, even if you do institute a ‘cutoff date’, you’ve already shown your hand, as a similar ‘thank you’ could be instituted again. Likewise, if you’re truly interested in people’s honest feedback, why are you only awarding 5 star reviews, regardless of when they were placed. Why not reward any one that offers any valid feedback. Maybe I would’ve offered valid feedback you could’ve honestly used, but only rated it a 4.

From this point forward, the only thing that can be said is that jigoshop paid people in free premium plugins if they submitted a 5 star review. This tactic is truly setting the bar lower for the wordpress plugin repository. If every plugin author payed in some fashion if someone submitted a positive review, the honest feedback, us, the WP community, look for in making decisions that affect our businesses would no longer be reliable.