General discussion

SeanW: "1) Many sites aren't selling anything, so why ask for "vendor reliability?"

Wait a minute . . . wait a minute.

Unless I'm misunderstanding the statement, you are not compelled to rate all four categories, and WOT is not "asking" for that. For example, if a site is not likely to have child visitors, like a newsletter site for Churchill memorabilia (yes, I'll admit that child visitors there are possible, but highly unlikely), then I generally skip a "child safety" rating. Just like if a site doesn't sell anything, like some computer help sites, I don't bother with a "vendor reliability" rating.

And, BTW, if a site that I would normally skip a rating for, like that Churchill memorabilia site and the "child safety" rating I used as an example, has even the slightest reason for rating a section that I wouldn't rate normally . . . like if I discovered that the Churchill memorabilia site peddled porn in only one ad, then I would indeed give it a poor child safety rating.

Now my skipping these ratings may screw up the WOT algorithm, but there's nothing that says you MUST check something for all four. Unless you're a "clean your plate" freak or have OCD, leaving a portion of the ratings blank seems to be OK. Or correct me if I'm wrong, Sami.

And if I'm wrong, then I need to go back and redo some of my ratings to check all four whether they apply or not.

On the behalf of the WOT team I want to welcome you the the Web of Trust. I saw that you have nearly one thousand postings in SiteAdvisor and reputation 9/9. Well done!

Let me quickly respond to some of your points:

1) Vendor reliability: Yes you are right, it is not always relevant, although many non-commercial organizations (like museums) also sell stuff. When you rate a site, you can simply ignore it, but I understand that one may be tempted to also rate that component if the site in general is good. One possibility would be to add "not relevant" option, but this is not that easy to implement since reviewers might disagree on that as well. If someone has a good solution for this we are happy to hear it.

2) Child Friendliness: Not child friendly definitely includes porn and other adult content, hate sites, weapons etc. I think it is important to give a site a poor rating for Child Safety in case the site otherwise is good, but falls into one of these categories due to the nature of the content. Providing Child safety rating for a scam or malware site is not so critical, because WOT will warn or block the site anyway, if one of the other components has bad reputation.

Please note that you can go to WOT settings (link is on top right corner of the rating window), select the "Ratings" tab and remove the check marks for Vendor reliability, Privacy, or Child safety. This will totally remove those reputation components from the rating system for you: you wouldn't see them and you couldn't rate them. I mention this especially as a solution for the users who are totally uninterested of Child safety.

3) "It took me some time to establish that a Red child safety rating didn't affect the sites general rating": I get your point, and one option would make Child safety a binary indicator: the site either is Child Safe of not, and use some other way to indicate that instead of the color, or use different color (blue) as you suggested.

4) "I do miss from SiteAdvisor is the "This Site Is Good" comment option": I see your point, you would like to have an additional category for a neutral positive comment. Should this new category be called "No problems" or can we come up with a better description?

Secondly, you wanted to add a new category "Fraudulent spam". Now we already have a category called "Spam". When WOT gets information from our trusted sources such as spam black lists, I am not sure if we always get the information that lets us know what kind of spam it is. On the other hand having two spam categories as such isn't out of question, and we will give it a thought. I would like to hear more opinions on this.

Ok, first of all, when I think about WOT/Child Safety, I feel that the WOT team wanted to make a suite that did the work of both SiteAdvisor and NetNanny/CyberSitter etc all rolled into one. And to be sure, it's not a bad idea, I would even call it innovative!
My problem is that the two functions are bound together *way* too tightly, to the point of not sufficiently differentiating adult content and what WOT presents to be similar flaws, like browser exploits, fraud, spam, viruses etc. To the point of having adult content / child safety presented the same way as other metrics in both ratings and scorecard comments.
It would be much better if child friendliness were clearly defined as being a slightly different issue to fraud and browser exploits which the present form of WOT does not do in any satisfactory way.

Regardintg the catch all "Green" comment category that I suggested, "no problems" would certainly do the job, I don't think the title really matters as long as it gives reviewers the chance to give it a generic Green "OK" without having to give it a descriptively titled comment where such might not really apply.

At least for google searches, you can choose that you always want the worst circle to be displayed instead of the reputation in general. That way you can identify adult sites more easily.