Regarding reviews on items (no matter good or bad) on the Oxwall store. I saw tammy's reply about their review on OxwallAccessorie's free store item:
"sorry i should of add more details the plugin is great
what i meant was it also should be part of Twitter Newsfeed style plugin
so people with that plugin don't have to stumble across it in the store"
You reviewed an item based on lack of convenience for the Oxwall.org store - not the plugin. I see this type of review (but focused on different things) popular in the Oxwall Store's plugin review section. Most reviewers are basing their reviews on everything besides the actual plugin. Found that the plugin is causing a style error with another third-party plugin? They give it 1 star for that and that's it. Plugin set up is hard because it's an extensive plugin? 1 star.
I believe this is one of the more major problems with "bad plugins/themes" staying in the Oxwall store. People are using the review sections to judge the developer's communication and bugs about the item rather than how it worked or how it made a difference to their website. With more and more of these types of reviews growing, people make decisions to purchase based on the screenshots of an item, and only hope the plugin/theme will be good because the "most helpful" reviews were ones complaining about communication or a simple bug that has yet to get fixed.
Reviews on an item in the store are meant to be about that item. Give a judgement and star count based on how the item worked, did it improve your website? How well did the plugin perform, and how much of the plugin meets Oxwall's model set up for themes? That's what a review should contain. Instead of receiving those reviews, however, we end up getting more things like such:
"1 star...
...bad plugin, developer doesn't reply at all."
Read that. Do you think that would tell someone curious in making a purchase/download of a plugin know anything? No. Now, I can understand if you get mad because a developer won't reply to your support queries but first look at their terms/policies: a lot of developers state they do NOT do support on Oxwall.org but their own websites. Understandable. Most people that leave these unhelpful reviews usually are the ones that simply try and message a dev on the Oxwall website.
Back on the subject of reviews and Oxwall: facing the facts a LOT of the oxwall community is people not well-versed (or not at all familiar) with programming, design, IT, or even how to use a FTP application or what a Database. This is one of the reasons (I believe) that the reviews aren't detailed or even focused about the plugin. It'd be great if everyone suddenly got knowledge of these things, but stuff like that doesn't happen overnight. You can fix this, Oxwall, I believe; by doing the following:
-Review Section on user's profiles to review the developer (only show if they have a published store item);
This way the reviews like "bad developer, doesn't give support" can be placed here.
-Put more focus on store item reviews;
Only accept item reviews that truly discuss and cover the plugin/theme and it's pros and cons and anything else will be denied.
-Newer plugin items should only be published if their design fits the Oxwall standard;
Lots of plugins get a bad wrap because their dev decides to use their own design, but it's usually bad. To be blunt, a lot of "aron's" plugins use their own design and they are very outdated and unattractive. People get unsatisfied with this and plugins should have their static styles revamped before being approved. This doesn't mean if it has it's own styles here and there it should be denied, but if it tries and use an entire whole style straight from '99 it should be denied.
