Last month we announced  that a new WOT is on its way, and now we are ready to lift the covers of the beta version! Countless hours have been spent on listening to your feedback, analysing how people use WOT, and developing a new WOT with features that will not only improve the current user experience but will also serve as foundation for future upgrades that will strengthen WOT’s position as the most preferred website reputation & review service. The latest achievement of 80 million downloads and the increasing amount of monthly active users render us the responsibility to serve a growing audience with various needs and user habits. We truly believe that the new version will make a considerable change in WOT usage – by offering improved transparency and information quality.

What's new?

The new WOT comes with multiple improvements, but the major news surrounding the new WOT is the introduction of the categorization interface. This new categorization will provide greater transparency to the reasons behind users’ ratings and reviews. In practice, this means that when submitting a rating, you are asked to select one or more categories in order to provide supporting evidence for your assessment. These categories are then visible to other users helping them to make informed decisions whether to visit a site or not.

Other significant change is the simplification of the reputation components, leaving just “Trustworthiness” and “Child Safety” as key components while the rest have been merged into the categories feature described above. And not to forget, there has been a complete redesign of the rating window and scorecard that will provide users a more pleasant rating and review experience.

Take a test drive and let us know what you think – just by commenting on this post. You can also take a deep dive into detailed description of the changes. As a reward for your help, all registered beta users will get a “beta tester badge” on their user boards. Just remember to synchronize your account to get the badge!

Below you can find detailed information on how to download the beta version. Bear in mind that you should have Google Chrome or other Chromium based browser installed before downloading. No other browsers are supported at this point.

After downloading and installing WOT, please be prepared to spend a certain amount of time on familiarizing yourself with it and to help our developers to improve the quality of the new WOT by sending your feedback. Thanks!

Installation Instructions for Google Chrome

You can also find more detailed instructions here.

After downloading the (beta version), open Chrome and then:

1. Save the add-on file (.crx) from this link to your computer (e.g. to Desktop)
2. Go to Tools → Extensions ( chrome://extensions/ ). If you have already installed an existing WOT version, find it on the Extensions tab and disable it (by ticking Enabled) .
3. Enable "Developer mode" at the top of the Extensions page of Chrome to be able to install the add-on from file
4. Drag-and-drop the add-on file to the Extensions page of Chrome.
5. Select “Add” in the pop-up window
6. Synchronize the new add-on with your WOT profile (Check here for more details )
7. You are now ready to test the new add-on.
8. In case you wish to go back to old version, disable or remove the beta version and enable the old version. However, it is recommended to keep using the beta version until the public version is released.

WOT has a mission to make internet a safer place for all. Internet comes in many forms, in many languages, with multiple opinions, and with different ways to communicate. With the updated WOT community guidelines we want to explain to all WOT users – new and old - the community standards and best practices that all of us should follow when using the service.
 
The purpose of the guidelines is to help WOT users collaborate with each other in a way that everyone can feel comfortable and respected within the community. The power of WOT is that each one on their own initiative adds a small contribution that's accumulated into a greater result. The more people use the service and rate websites, the more information there is guiding users to make informed decisions. So, let’s respect everyone’s contributions and work together to help others to surf safer!
 
The community guidelines are divided into three sections:
 
General community guidelines
This sections explains the general standards of how to behave in the community and reminds users to respect the diversity of cultures and opinions that coexist inside the WOT community. WOT consists of millions of users, and thus people should treat each other with respect, regardless of their race, culture, or religion.
 
Forum guidelines
Here you can find detailed guidelines for posting messages on the WOT forum or commenting scorecards. By following these instructions you will make it easier for others to reply to your messages and help you with your questions.
 
Website owners’ guidelines
This section guides site owners on how to manage feedback from users visiting their sites. It's always good to remember to apply sound customer service practices to reward praise and find opportunities to win back your critics. A good approach is to work with the community and listen to what the users are saying.
 
Familiarize yourself with the community guidelines here.

80 million downloads and over 42 million rated sites. These are beautiful numbers and as WOT is a crowdsourced service, all the credit goes to you - the WOT community - new and old users!
WOT Services – the company – is a group of people with a vision to make the Internet a safer place for all. Luckily the vision is so strong that millions of people have decided to contribute to it by taking the time to rate sites, share their experiences and leave explanatory comments to help other people make informed decisions whether to trust a site or not. Just think about it: WOT receives over 1 million new ratings per month and over 300.000 new sites are rated on a monthly basis by the community.
In case you’re interested in the Top Level Domain (TLD) distribution of all the ratings since 2006, here’s some high-level statistics:
Distribution of absolute numbers of all user ratings

• TLDs with biggest amount of positive ratings are .com, .de, .org, .net and .uk
• TLDs with biggest amount of negative ratings are .com, .ru, .cn, .info, .net

So, .com is the most common and the most rated TLD with the highest amount of user ratings in absolute numbers.
However, when you look at a single TLD and its ratings, and compare the share of positive and negative ratings, the list of top TLDs changes:

• TLDs with biggest percentage of positive ratings: .gov, .edu, .int, .fi, .cu
• TLDs with biggest percentage of poor ratings: .pw, .tl, .io, .sh, .asia.

Looks like people tend to trust .gov, .edu and .int types of TLDs which in general represent an organization rather than a commercial company.  You may also find interesting that there are some TLDs of small countries that do get quite a lot of poor ratings and the question is whether they are popular among people with questionable purposes.
In case you haven’t noticed, you can find more WOT community related statistics here. Also, a list of TLDs can be found here.
The whole WOT team thanks all WOT users for their dedication and support. There will be many interesting news coming up in the near future, so stay tuned!
 
Warmly,
WOT team
 
P.S. Guess what is the highest number of ratings received during one day this year (including all ratings from all users in just one day)?

As some of you have noticed, if you enter a WOT scorecard for a country-specific Blogger subdomain , you are now shown the WOT reputation of the same subdomain at blogspot.com. For instance if you are trying to enter a scorecard for example.blogspot.fi, you are now shown the reputation of example.blogspot.com. This is not a bug, it's related to Blogger's recent decision to redirect blogs to country specific URLs depending on the visitor's location which caused a couple of issues:

1. One blog could have a different reputation depending on your location. For instance, if you're travelling, a blog you frequently visit might have had a totally different reputation if the people in the country you're visiting rated it differently.
2. If a blog was created by a spammer, or for malicious purposes, it wasn't enough to rate one hostname to warn everyone. You'd have to rate all the different country specific URLs too.

So now that all the Blogger domains are mapped to .com, each blog will have the same WOT reputation in every country, and it's enough to rate whichever ccTLD Google determines is the most appropriate for your location. In addition to this change, we are now also treating blogspot.com and other popular shared domains as effective top level domains (eTLDs), which means their subdomains no longer inherit the parent domain's reputation. This change also affects wordpress.com, tumblr.com, and many others. If your blog used to inherit a reputation from the parent domain, it may now show up as unrated. Don't be alarmed, it will have a reputation once enough people have rated it.

You can see the affected country-specific Blogger domains here

Opera has just published the latest version of their new Chromium based desktop browser named Next, and WOT is one of the first add-ons available in the extensions catalog.

The most significant change in Opera Next is that it's no longer based on Opera's Presto rendering engine, but on WebKit, the same engine used by Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari. If you want to take a deep dive into Opera Next, check out their announcement

For all WOT users using Opera, the good news is that since Opera Next is based on Chromium it will include all the latest WOT features that come by default in the Chrome add-on. WOT is also updated quicker to Chromium based browsers than others.

There won't be any major updates to the WOT add-on for the Presto based browsers, so we encourage all Opera enthusiasts to try the new browser. The WOT add-on for Opera Next comes with various small improvements and bug fixes while it also includes our newest warning screen and welcome tips for new users.

Opera has well over 300 million people using its range of mobile and desktop Web browser applications overall. WOT team has worked with Opera for a long time and we are happy to make the WOT add-on available in Opera Next, for both Windows and Mac. Wishing Opera team all the best with their new browser!