It’s been a while since we’ve revealed any major changes to the WOT system, but there is a good reason for that! We have spent tons of time developing the next version of our service that will build WOT’s role as the most trusted community-powered website reputation service - a service that makes the Internet a safer place for all of us.

If you’ve been following the download tracker on our homepage, you will have seen that WOT has grown significantly during the past 18 months. This growth offers us lots of great opportunities, but at the same time it means that we have a responsibility to serve a wider audience with various needs and user habits. We have continuously analyzed how people use WOT and listened to your helpful feedback and we truly believe that this new system will make a huge difference to your WOT usage.

First of all, the transparency and informative quality of the service will be significantly improved and make it easier for anyone to come to a decision whether it is safe to visit a site or not. The new categorization interface will prompt users to make more accurate ratings and identify reasons to support their ratings. Users are also encouraged to leave more focused comments to help other users.

The new WOT will provide users with better reputation coverage on the rapidly growing amount of websites. This will enable you to discover the reputation for less well-known websites, as well as more established ones. We have also designed new algorithmic improvements to the system, which will improve the confidence of the reputations and increase the reliability and trustworthiness of WOT. We are confident that the reputation score will better match users’ own experiences in the future.

Whether a user is simply utilizing the traffic lights to make browsing decisions, or rating 100 sites per day, the new WOT will be easier to use and more engaging than ever before (you might even call it addictive). This will be a big step forward for us and we hope we will continue this great journey with all of you.

We will reveal further details about the key changes within the upcoming days and ultimately the new WOT will be out of ‘stealth mode’ with the beta launch very soon, so stay tuned!

As you might have noticed, a while ago we made some changes to the comment field on the scorecard. We have added some tips on commenting and a minimum limit of 30 characters. This is part of a series of product improvements that we are planning to roll out gradually.

The aim of these changes is to ensure that comments do what they are supposed to do – help other users decide if they can trust a site or not.

Here are some of our thoughts on what we think are quality comments:

• They should include descriptions of users experiences with a site. Explain what happened or what you saw that made you form your opinion.
• They could also include evidence to support the rating, especially if you have given the site a poor rating.
• They are truthful. It is good to keep in mind that each user is responsible for their comments.
• They are precise and to the point. It is good to make your comment informative, but there is no need to write a book.
• Obviously, spam messages are not good comments.

Do you have any other criteria for quality comments? Share with us in the comments section below!

Thanks to our active community, WOT today reached the significant milestone of

downloads.

Do you think we can reach 100 million by summer? You can help – Visit the recommendation page and let your friends know about WOT! :)

It’s that time of the year again! Thanks to your nominations, WOT has been elected as a finalist in About.com’s Readers’ Choice Awards in the Best Privacy / Security Add-On Category.

Each year, the awards highlight the best products, features and services. Last year WOT won its category with the mighty share of 75 % of the votes!

To help WOT win again, please submit your vote. The voting is open until March 19.

We are working on a new front page. You will see the result later this week!

The aim of the change is to give new visitors a better idea about WOT: where the ratings come from, how do they protect when browsing the web, and why should people use WOT.

The most significant change to current users is that some of the elements will change their place. The menu, currently located at the top of the page, will be moved to the footer. There you’ll find links to the forum, Community page, and elsewhere. For now, this change will only be applied to the front page.

Once the new front page is revealed (will happen very soon), we hope to hear your feedback. You can see a little preview of what is coming up on the right.

Edit (13th of February):The new front page is now published, but we are A/B testing it. Therefore, for now, only half of the page visitors see it. If you happen to be among them, let us know what you think of the new front page!