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Reputation is something that can be gained over a long period of time and lost rapidly. So, what happens when a good and trusted site changes its business model and becomes untrustworthy?

In real life the change to unreliable business soon becomes common knowledge and the business is over. The reason is simple: people trust new information from other people more and ignore the older feedback. Therefore we can conclude that reputation is constantly changing and gets updated when new information is received.

In WOT, the situation is quite similar. We calculate the reputation of a site almost in real time. In the worst case, the site's reputation is updated about 30 minutes after a new testimony has been received or someone has visited the site. The site reputations are calculated from trusted testimonies using our Bayesian-based algorithm.

The trustworthiness of a testimony changes depending on how old it is. A new testimony is considered more trustworthy than a week old. This does not mean that you have to testify every time you visit a site, quite the contrary. The time of testimony is updated every time when you visit the site. This means that your old testimony has been renewed. If you feel that your previous testimony is not correct anymore, you should change it accordingly.

Therefore, the reputations are always up-to-date.

We have released an update for the WOT add-on, which fixes some of the problems our users have reported to us. We would like to thank everyone for their feedback, we appreciate your help!

Here are the notable changes compared to WOT 20060928:

• Bug fix: the enter key should now work in the address bar for those who experienced problems with other extensions earlier

• Bug fix: the preferences dialog won't now occasionally forget some of its settings

• New feature: for those who find the current warnings too invasive, you can now configure how the warnings are shown

• New feature: the position of the reputation icon can now be changed anywhere in the toolbar, although it cannot be hidden anymore

• New feature: changes in the warning behavior for the sites where you have testified; now you are warned if you have given a bad testimony, even if the reputation isn't dangerous

Version 20061014 is now available for download from our website.

UPDATE: There was a minor problem in version 20061010 if the WOT button was moved to a different toolbar. This issue is now fixed in version 20061014.

A user recently contacted us with a valid concern: what if there are two groups of people with radically different opinions on the trustworthiness of a website? For example, the opponents of a political party will likely disagree with the proponents, or some people might be more liberal in they think is safe for children than others. What happens to reputations then?

Trust is subjective

In WOT, website reputations are computed using an algorithm loosely based on Bayesian probability. Each testimony is weighted by how much the system trusts the user or other source who gave it. If there are two equally trustworthy but opposite opinions, the reputation for the website settles in the middle, and nobody is happy.

The problem in asking users to evaluate trustworthiness is that they tend to trust different things. Also, while it might be possible for a single entity to evaluate websites objectively, not all users base their opinions solely on the facts. Instead, user testimonies are affected by emotions, prejudices, beliefs, values, or even by the lack of information. Because trust is subjective, we developed the concept of personal reputation for WOT.

Personal reputation

Once you have shared your opinion on a fair number of websites, WOT starts looking for other users who agree with you. These users are ranked by how well their testimonies match yours, and the most compatible of the group become your friends. You will never know who they are nor will they know you, but when WOT computes the reputations to show on your extension, their testimonies weigh more than those from other users. This makes it possible for WOT to better adapt to what you personally trust, while still not ignoring the overall opinion.

Your group of friends is continuously evaluated and should their opinions start to differ from yours too much, they are discarded and new friends are found to replace them. All of this happens completely automatically without the user ever noticing any difference. However, we do have plans to let you include the people you know in your group of friends in future.

As you probably have noticed, the WOT project is still in early beta. Some of the reputations in our database might not yet be accurate, especially those computed entirely from automatically collected data. By design, we depend mostly on you, our users, to tell us if we are wrong.

How to make a difference

Sharing your opinion is easy: just click on the reputation icon next to the browser address bar, and then click on any of the coloured indicator bars on the appearing window to give your testimony. When you close the window by clicking anywhere else on the screen, your opinion is stored in our database. Updated reputations will appear on your browser within half an hour on average.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the more you testify, the more your opinion matters. Also, if you notice a website that has a bad reputation by mistake, giving your testimony stops the extension from showing you a warning each time you visit the site.

While we do our best to assure that reputations are correct, sometimes you may bump into a site whose reputation is completely wrong. In this case, we encourage you to please report the problem using our feedback form. After receiving your report, we will carefully investigate the source of each reputation for the site and redress any problems we might find in the system.

Coming soon

We are planning on releasing a public interface (or API) to our database soon. This will allow anyone to make queries for reputation data over the web for any purpose. We are also continuously improving our website, so please stay tuned.