General discussion

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WOT security

Wed Mar 5 23:18:22 2008 — Blast

To be very honest with everyone, WOT is far too easily abused. A bunch of mean-spirited people, either out for some political or moral crusade, or just to screw with things, can easily gum up the works for a website's rating (and I'm sure I'm not the only one to say this—actually, I know I'm not). Worse, they seem to be entirely anonymous, despite having an account here; to my knowledge there is no way to track ratings on a particular site (ie who voted what on what).

What I'd like to see is, for a start, a record of ratings, and the ability to nullify a user's ratings if they can be shown to be acting in bad taste. Maybe there might even be a public record, so the userbase can examine things alongside administrators.

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Re: WOT security

Thu Mar 6 05:41:00 2008 — Sami

Actually, ratings aren't quite as easily abused as you might think. I've gone through this before (browse through our older blog posts), but here goes:

  • Our system knows how you have rated and uses a bunch of algorithms to decide how much your ratings can be trusted. So unlike it might seem, this isn't a democracy where everyone has one vote, this is a meritocracy where those who have proven themselves are taken more seriously than those who haven't. If you act goofy, we might even ignore you entirely.
  • There are automated systems in place that monitor strange behavior. If a user is believed to be manipulating ratings or has otherwise been acting maliciously, her ratings are automatically ignored when ratings are computed. Of course, the system also looks at all the ratings for a website to detect abuse attempts.
  • We are very much aware that there is currently not much information available on how a website's rating was determined. We are working on this and hopefully have something ready for you in few weeks.

Of course, in the mean while, if you notice abuse, you can always report it and we'd be happy to take a look.

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Record

Thu Mar 6 14:39:52 2008 — wehaveitall

I know wot is usually able to determine when someone is manipulating their system, but there are always ways to bypass it. Thats why I think what you should do is pick a random person rating sites every day, and check the sites they rate and what their rating is. You can make this a public record if you want, or just keep it to yourselves. Just a suggestion.

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I'm a Googler

Thu Mar 6 20:57:27 2008 — Antkin

Hi

I am a big fan of Google. Google UK is set as my home page. Since I down loaded the Firefox plug in I have found that Google displays the WOT rating on every page. It's great just like a traffic light, Red for Stop, Yellow for caution and Green for go. I have two web sites of my own one has been rated as a good site (Green) and the other has a question mark against it as unrated, I do hope that this will also change to a Green for good web site in the near future. My partner In North Yorkshire has a web design web site that has a question mark against it so I have introduced him to Firefox and the WOT plug in.

Antony
A Perkin Web Design

A WOT user for three weeks.