Here's MU's response to my comment (both since removed) in the Google Chrome listing about textless ratings:

Macupdate-Trevor replied to your thread:
"They're quick ratings, which is a star rating without comment. You can leave them with one click."

I've also commented on them in EarthDesk and Typinator listings, and yesterday mailed the suggestion they *at least* be optionally displayed (though I'd rather they didn't exist at all).

Thanks for the reply Sjk. I like this site, the ratings have value. But it is their site I suppose and if they want to follow Versiontracker into obscurity it will be a shame.

I think the value of ratings is increased by enforcing even minimal feedback that explains/justifies (hopefully) reasons behind them. Otherwise, an option to filter out these semi-anonymous cluttering quick ratings would be much appreciated.

Thanks for your comments, Diarbyrag. Too bad MU doesn't have/recommend a place to discuss site meta issues like this or even have any obvious place where they announce site changes(!)

We added quick ratings to the site to encourage people to provide more ratings and reviews for all apps. When you leave a quick rating, a link appears immediately prompting you to "tell us why" - basically we are trying to make it easier for people to get involved and provide opinions about the apps listed. In general, people are familiar with and accustomed to using the star rating system form other Mac apps, like iTunes, to quickly help classify some piece of data, and thus are much more likely to use this type of system to help rate the apps here.

Initially we chose not to show the ratings at all, but users and developers were both confused, not understanding what had happened to the ratings they had just left, or why an app's total rating seemed different than what was in the reviews with text, so we turned them on for all to see. We would obviously love to see all ratings be accompanied by some review and rationale, and are trying to make it as easy as possible for people to get involved with other users and developers here. Statistically, it is better to have more ratings per app to represent the total overall ratings. Although people may leave a low rating without any review to help explain things, they may also equally leave a high rating, and with the ratings ow being shown, we feel that people will more likely create honest and accurate ratings.

We are continuing to test and monitor this system and will likely be making further changes to how it is working, including the option to add a full review at a later date to any ratings you create, and/or moving the ratings without reviews to a separate ratings tab similar to how we separate troubleshooting comments and responses.

MacUpdate is always open to feedback - you can email comments and suggestions to feedback@macupdate.com.

take care,
Chad

Chad, thank you for a comprehensive reply.

As I said it is your site and you are free to run it how you like.
Like many others I have based my purchase of many of the great software programs I now use on the opinions of other Macupdate members free or otherwise. It saves a lot of wasted time and money and for that I'm sure we are all grateful.

I hope you do monitor this new system, the ability to just click stars without justification might not give such honest results as a system where people actually have to think and write before they click. You have to add comments in the iPhone app store.

Anyway the alternative to filter out star only ratings would be better.

I value this site and would hate to see it's influence in the Mac community diminish.

Best wishes
Gary

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> We are continuing to test and monitor this system and will likely be making further changes to how it is working, including the option to add a full review at a later date to any ratings you create

The ability to update ratings/reviews/comments, and disallowing submission of multiple ratings (especially eliminating listings with multiple quick ratings from the same users), would be useful.

> and/or moving the ratings without reviews to a separate ratings tab similar to how we separate troubleshooting comments and responses.

Currently there's no indication when Troubleshooting contains feedback and it's tedious to explicit check there (especially to only discover it's empty). I'd much rather see Troubleshooting comments than textless Quick Ratings be included with Reviews/Comments.

> MacUpdate is always open to feedback - you can email comments and suggestions

The email I sent on Jan 11 wasn't acknowledged, leaving me wondering if you'd received it or not. Thanks for responding here so I know some bidirectional communication is happening. :)

Just for the record :)

I think quick rating option is a mistake. I do not like the idea of seeing "stars" posted by who knows by whom. What if it is a war of competing developers? I want to see real feedback from real people. Just a wish. And btw, I think Macupdate has a good future despite App Store release. The way you bring new information to us is something Apple will always lack.

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> And btw, I think Macupdate has a good future despite App Store release. The way you bring new information to us is something Apple will always lack.

The signal-to-noise ratio is *much* higher here… and even higher without "quick ratings" or at least when they can be hidden. :)

Hurray! Quick ratings are now separated under a new Ratings tab. Thanks, MU!

PS: Would be useful if an item count for each tab was displayed (maybe only when unselected?).

"Statistically, it is better to have more ratings per app to represent the total overall ratings"

I would typically agree with your statement, Chad, but that's not the case in this situation. There aren't hundreds or thousands of individual ratings for many applications, so even a single rating has a big impact. Often, these ratings are absurd. Even with a detailed description sometimes the ratings are absurd (i.e., leaving a 1-star rating because an application does not work with a specific scanner, or because the developer did not answer an email on a Sunday morning, and so on)

Most of the time I see multiple poor ratings from people who don't contribute much to the site. Chances are that they registered just to downgrade an application. This, of course, may be done by competing developers. The opposite also applies. A developer may register multiple accounts to give themselves high ratings, or ask users to leave high ratings. I've not seen many of these instances.

With quick ratings, there's no option to Agree (smile) or Disagree (frown) with the rater. This brings up another interesting approach: weighted ratings. Ratings are weighed based on a rater's "credibility score." This would bring up even more problems, although it's better than the current approach.

Many Macupdate ratings are useless, and I often look elsewhere now for higher-quality information. If changes are going to be implemented, hopefully the ability to edit one's own ratings/comments can be added.

I hope this feedback is useful.

Thanks for elaborating some of the more obvious problems with MU ratings, Espiridion.

And I appreciate MU not deleting this subtopic.

Espiridion - thanks again for the feedback. Obviously any system that is open for input by anyone will receive a fair amount of "noise" in both directions - people who leave a low rating *or* a high rating, which again, is why we are trying to promote more ratings in general - to help normalize the data (more data-points results in a better overall picture). Although most apps do not yet have thousands of ratings, we are receiving a significantly greater amount of ratings *and* reviews than we previously did. One of the main purposes of the quick rating system is to lower the bar and enable people to add a rating, and then they are encouraged to leave a full review as well, which many people do.

We do of course monitor that reviews and ratings and are very aware of how the numbers fall. One of the original gripes people had with the quick ratings was that they were intermixed with the reviews - we have since moved quick ratings to their own tab, and are continuing to improve upon the overall rating system. Stay tuned for further updates in this area...

-Chad

Yes, I think that's correct. And the reason Joomla! lists here is that many Joomla! programmers are Mac users. Joomla! is known to be Mac-friendly, perhaps the most Mac-friendly of the big guns in the open source CMS arena.

Run on a Mac?
Of course!
With MAMP:
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/16197/mamp

I'm confused as well. Joomla isn't mac software, it's not even desktop software. It's listed under servers but it's certainly not that. It's a content management framework (you make it a CMS).

It's a Mac program in the same my my websites are: They're not.

It rather seems that you didn't read anything at all. At least you didn't understand what Joomla is and what CMS in general means. RapidWeaver is not a CMS.

I don't see what could be confusing to web developers - granted, it's not a Mac-specific application, but the fact is you can install Joomla on your Mac if you have all the other components in place (Apache webserver on, PHP and MySQL installed). It's a great way of developing websites locally instead of across the internet.