I recently noticed that the option to flag extremely poor ratings without no review or explanation had disappeared:
Personally, I find that it’s rather nasty of Mozilla towards the addons developer community. We spend lots of time and effort to try and improve the Firefox experience and haters are just given clearance to discredit our work.
Not nice!
And even reviews with insults in it won’t be removed - not even after 2 weeks.
For those reasons I disabled my extension (a featured one).
Still reflecting on how to proceed without letting down all the users…
I agree that Mozilla should take a more developer friendly approach. It’s not too much to ask having a bit more control over the review section. We don’t sell a product, but are developing free software. Anyone who doesn’t like it can either contact the devs via the channels they offer or just don’t use it.
Besides insults and false statements I’m also not fond of those reviewers who think that they would motivate the dev to implement a new feature in giving the extension a bad or average rating.
Five years and this is still happening: users giving bad ratings for no apparent reason!
No comments and no possibility to flag it as inappropriate. Is it Mozilla’s policy to encourage this kind of behavior. Some developers have spent hundreds of hours to create a web extension for the community.
Why isn’t Mozilla more understanding and supportive of the dev community?
@dotproto Hi Simeon, I have lately received half a dozen poor ratings (mostly 1-star) because of a bug that slipped through the cracks. I fixed the issue as soon as I was made aware of the bug. I believe that it is Mozilla’s policy that ratings and reviews shouldn’t be used to complain about bugs or seek assistance. This is only fair towards developers who have sometimes spent hundreds of hours to provide the community with a free extension based on best efforts. Bugs do occasionally happen. I have flagged the ratings and reviews from frustrated users reporting a bug, but my flagged items are being ignored by Mozilla’s moderation team. Could you please look into this and let me know why my requests are being ignored. I find it quite unfriendly and discouraging of the moderators. Thank you in advance. Here is the link to the reviews so that you can judge for yourself.
I’m glad to see that I’m not the only developer feeling this way. I’m seriously considering removing my extension from AMO.
@dotproto @juraj.masiar Dear both, it’s been a long journey (almost ten years I believe since the very first release of Context Search). I decided to pull the plug, because debugging was really hard and took a lot of time on the one hand, and also because I felt that my hard work didn’t deserve all the disrespectful reviews I got on the other hand (in addition to other users on GitHub telling me what the extension should or shouldn’t do whilst they haven’t donated a single penny).
The experience hasn’t been the most rewarding. Being unemployed I had hoped that this would eventually offer me a modest revenue stream. In any case, I wanted to thank you both for the support you have given me.
I don’t know yet if I’ll try to bring my extension to Chrome and monetize it, because it also means migrating to manifest v3 and that willl require a huge effort and I’m not certain to have the competencies!
Best wishes for your future.
Olivier, you shouldn’t get discouraged by bad reviews.
I know it can be very hard, good reviews were the reason I kept working on my addons for years even though I had basically no income.
Let’s be honest, world is full of stupid people 
. And you can’t please everyone.
The best you can do is stay positive, and hope for the best. Don’t let those few bad apples to ruin your day.
In the “grand scheme of things” it’s likely meaningless anyway. For reference, look at my favorite photo of galaxies taken by the Webb telescope 
This image represents a part of the sky that’s so small that it could fit behind a grain of sand on the tip of your finger held at arm’s length.
Hi @juraj.masiar , you’re a nice person! Thank you for your kind words and beautiful images. Maybe I’m too susceptible, but I have another issue at present and that’s my eye health so I’m not certain to be able to code as much in the future. This leads me to the next question: I would very much like to port the extension to Chromium browsers and monetize it for a very modest fee. Because I don’t know how my eye health will evolve, would you be interested in co-authoring Context Search to bring it to Chromium. Maybe the extension would remain free for Firefox users to help the browser keep or gain some market share. Naturally, we would share any proceeds 50-50. Don’t feel obliged if you don’t have the time. I look forward to hear from you.
P.S. This one is also pretty amazing: https://www.planetary.org/space-images/jwst-pillars-of-creation
Hello Olivier,
Sadly, I have absolutely no free time for extra projects 
.
I’m actually feeling like I’m reaching my limits and I’m burning out.
I wish I could help more.
Also, monetizing is not easy, I’ve managed to do it successfully on ONE of my 15 addons, so not exactly great result. And I would love to monetize also my other addons, but I don’t see how. Implementing it is hard, taxing it feels impossible, and most of all, people just don’t want to pay for anything 
, unless you are bringing some super extra features nobody else has.
I wish I had some better news…
I can 100% not recommend being a full time extension developer 
, that’s for sure!
Hey Folks.
@odebroqueville2 - First off, I am sorry that you had that experience with the ratings on your add-on.
One of the main challenges with ratings is that they are subjective. And the problem with flagging a bad rating that includes no additional commentary as abuse is that there is nothing to evaluate on our side to determine if it is actually abuse or not.
To address the above, we could require that a user include a comment when submitting a rating, but that will inevitably lead to users just hitting their keyboard a few times to type in some random characters just to be able to submit their rating.
Then there’s the question of how to handle positive ratings with no comment included. Do we assume those ratings are abuse as well?
I’m not sure there is a perfect solution here, but I’ll do some research on how other ratings/review sites handle their ratings system to see if there are any improvements we could “borrow” . That said, please feel free to suggest any ideas as well!
Thanks – Ed
If Mozilla say they can’t make decisions themselves, shouldn’t you guys leave that decision up to the developers?
Hey @asamuzaK thanks for joining in.
I am not sure I agree with that suggestion. It’s not that we can’t make a decision, it’s that there is no information to base that decision on except the rating itself.
Thanks – Ed
Then in other words.
No comments and no possibility to flag it as inappropriate.
In such cases, label it something like “Hidden by developer” and make the ratings basically hidden.
And, like in GitHub Off topic, Spam and Abuse etc., it can be displayed again if someone wants to see the original rating.
My point is; let the developer decide.
Hi Edward, thank you for taking the time to answer. I understand what you’re saying, but you have to appreciate that negative ratings can be hurtful whilst positive ratings aren’t. Not allowing developers to flag negative ratings without any comments is like adding insult to injury. I’m repeating my self a lot, but some of us devs have worked very hard to offer the community a set of features we deem can be of value to users. Personally, I never intentionally create bugs that could give users a poor UX or, even worse, crash the entire extension. Yet, several users won’t hesitate to give a poor rating “until the bug is fixed” and then never correct their ratings. Flagging these cases usually is useless! So, what I would have liked to see from review moderators is a bit more understanding for devs who also try to contribute to the success of Firefox and are most often not rewarded for their work. I would like to suggest not allowing any (negative: 1-star or 2-star) rating without a comment. You may also use some AI to detect the language of a comment and determine if it makes sense, or even if the sentiment is positive or negative. You might find this link helpful: https://chatgpt.com/share/66fe9827-ab60-8001-80b6-0c8dd1c1a91e
Quite often now, on social networks like X or YouTube, we have the option to translate comments that are not in English. I’m saying this because I’ve received comments in Russian and had to use Google translate. Finally, although some devs may not have good intentions, I think that seeing the warning: “This add-on is not actively monitored for security by Mozilla. Make sure you trust it before installing.” deters users of trying an extension, so it should be way easier for devs to submit an extension for a security review before publishing it (or an update) on AMO. I had asked in the past and my request wasn’t addressed.
Cheers,
Olivier
I believe that this would only work if all devs were honest! What would prevent devs from hidding all non 5-star ratings?
I appreciate you taking the time to send additional thoughts along.
As I mentioned, I am going to do some research around this and then talk to the team and see what options may be possible.
Oops, I meant to post this yesterday. Adding it now before I forget again 
Hey @odebroqueville2! I’m not aware of this guidance, but to be honest I’m less familiar with Mozilla’s policies regarding add-on review ratings and comments than I’d like. Could you share a link the policy, review guidelines, or other resource that you’re referencing?
I’m sorry that negative reviews and thankless comments have been so frustrating and demoralizing. Software development is hard and doing it in the open rarely makes it easier. Maintainers rarely get the thanks they deserve for all of the time and energy they put into their projects, so if I may; thank you for all of the effort you put into Context Search over the years, for sharing your idea on how to make the web better, and for making that idea available to others.
If working on an MV3 version of Context Search helps rekindle your enjoyment of the project, then I wholeheartedly support that direction. I would just want to share to points of caution.
As you’ve already seen, monetizing an extension can be quite difficult. While Chrome has a larger user base, the same base challenges related to discovery, perceived value, product market fit, and user expectations still apply.
Chrome Web Store reviews will likely be more of the same. CWS does not allow developers to remove or hide the kind of reviews you highlighted in the first post of this thread.
Hey Simeon, it’s good to hear back from you. Thank you for your kind words. Regarding Mozilla’s policies for addon reviews, I don’t know for sure if we can call it a policy but I believe that it is a guideline. Sadly, it’s not always being enforced by the moderation team.
When we click on the “flag” link (to flag a review/comment), we have 3 options, one of them being “Misplaced bug report or support request”. Also, the review guidelines clearly state that users shouldn’t “Post technical issues, support requests, or feature suggestions”. You can read it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/review_guide
Whenever a bug arises, I feel that it’s important that we get a chance to fix things.
By googling, I noticed that I’m far from being the only dev who’s had issues with reviews: https://discourse.allizom.org/t/review-that-violates-amo-rules-approved-by-reviewer/25875
All I can say is that I wish that the moderation team would show more understanding for developers and enforce its guidelines. Because, at the end of the day, we’re in the same boat to make the experience using Firefox more enjoyable.
On a side note, it would be very helpful (both for developers and users) if extension descriptions on AMO would support Markdown and inline images. The reason is that, most often, we have a README.md fille on Github which contains the full description of the extension for Github users along with inline images. However, because Markdown and inline images are not supported in the extension description on AMO and it’s been like that for years. I’ve had users complain that there were no images to explain how to use the extension whilst there were images but they were detached from the text. We also have, upon each added feature, to systematically convert Markdown to a small subset of HTML tags supported by AMO (such as <b> or <li>). Honestly, not great and there’s been no improvement for years! I hope that this can change and that Mozilla is interested in improving things for everyone.
Take care.
Yeah, a little more compassion would be nice. From my experience, almost none of the reviews I flag are removed, no matter the content.
But good to know it’s not just me 
, I was worried I have some enemy there .
Hey Juraj, always nice to hear from you. To be perfectly honest, I’ve had mixed results: sometimes the moderation team does show some understanding, other times my flags end up in the dust bin of history. So yeah, you’re right, at times it feels like the folks from Mozilla don’t like us! 
