The JED, reviews, voting, and you

Many Joomla! users don't know what goes into the administration in order to make the voting system in the Joomla! Extensions Directory valid and meaningful.  For example, it might surprise the average directory user to know that every single review is read, its entirety, and evaluated for relevance, honesty, tone and validity.   Not only that, but the votes themselves are regularly scanned for anomalies.  After all of the voting administration, of course there is the handling of the report system that keeps the directory as free of broken links and misinformation as possible, publishing of new extensions and more.

As of this writing there are more than 70,000 users of the JED. Those users have placed more than 100,000 votes and favorites, and among them nearly 27,000 written reviews.  There have been more than 3,900 reports resolved in the JED.  It's easy to see that there are currently 3,300 extensions available in the JED, but there are also many, many more that never see the light of day for one reason or another.  At least five, but sometimes 15 or 20 extensions are submitted each day.  Each of those extensions is tested to see if it will download, and then install properly.  We don't actually test to see if the items "work" per se, but we do want to make sure they're valid extensions.  With all we go through, I'm still amazed every time at the attempts to skirt the rules of the voting and review system.

 Most "violations" of the rules really aren't violations at all.  It's just that the user never read what goes into writing a valid review.  According to the stated rules a valid review is: a serious examination of a person's experience with an extension which is presented on the Joomla! Extensions Directory. Praise, difficulties, or comparisons with other extensions are all valid parts of a review, including the reasons why.

 Any submitted review that doesn't have the qualities of a person's experience with the extension, is rejected.  If it's a complaint about a user-specific error, or a request for a feature, or a question in general... that's a support issue and the review will be dismissed.  Examples of other non-reviews that we get are complaints about whether something should be a commercial (fee required) product or that it costs too much.  Not a review.  Also, complaints about the quality of support or a dispute with the developer over a transaction experience are not reviews and will be summarily rejected.

Since each of these non-reviews has to be read anyway, they take away from the time that could be spent maintaining other portions of the JED. So if you haven't taken the time to read the rules, please do.  They might explain why your reviews aren't getting through.

More serious issues with voting and reviews concern manipulation by extension owners or their associates.  The simplest and least-understood is the rule not to vote for extensions you own.  The voting rules :

Voting

• It is not allowed for a any person to solely rate an extension to artificially inflate the rating or vote count.
• It is not allowed for the same person to have more than one account on the Joomla! Extensions Directory.
• It is not allowed for an extension developer to give negative votes to other extensions who are in competion for rating ranks, or to submit votes to extensions which offer similar functionality.
• An extension developer, his family and\or colleagues are not allowed to vote on extensions from that developer.

We take these rules seriously, for the benefit of the community.  When extension owners violate these rules, they are given warnings, temporary suspensions, and sometimes in extreme cases, permanent bans.  It often surprises extension owners that they are not allowed to vote for their own extensions, because physically the directory allows it.  When we come across those votes we remove them. 

Some of the more troublesome cases involve extension owners who deliberately give competitors "one star" votes, while giving their own extension "five stars".  For example, the owner of a Youtube plugin might give his own Youtube solution 5 stars, while giving the other 5 or 10 video plugins just one or two stars each.  This type of manipulation is not tolerated, and when it is discovered it is addressed swiftly.

The most severe transgressions occur when multiple user accounts (either owned by an individual or by the extension owner's friends or associates) attempt to inflate an extension's ratings.  These situations are easily discovered using our analysis tools and we are proud to report they are few and far between in the JED as it exists today.

The Joomla! Extensions Directory is by far the most expansive, complete and accurate of any add-on resource guide for an Open-Source project that I am personally aware of, and is certainly unique among any of the readily available CMS packages.  The reason it is so vast and of such high quality, is because of the collective community involvement.  From the extension developers submitting their offerings to the users reporting errors, we could not have such a wonderful directory without the community--and surely the community is strengthened by the directory.

By keeping the directory as clean and well-maintained as we can, we hope to ensure the longevity of the JED's impact.