Strongly Protesting Against the Ineffective Handling of Malicious and Unjustified Negative Reviews

JetBrains Marketplace
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Dear team,

I am writing to express my utmost outrage and profound disappointment regarding the platform’s continued failure to address the issue of blatantly malicious and unjustified negative reviews targeting my product/service. Despite repeatedly reporting these reviews, no meaningful action has been taken, and the situation is escalating to an intolerable level.

It is absolutely unacceptable that users are allowed to leave destructive ratings for no valid reason whatsoever. For instance, some users have left one-star reviews with explanations such as:

“I drank water today, so one star.”

“You are a paid service, so I’m giving you the lowest rating.”

These reviews are not only irrelevant and irrational but also clearly violate the platform’s policies regarding constructive and good-faith feedback. They serve no purpose other than to sabotage the reputation and credibility of hard-working sellers and service providers.

What is even more infuriating is that despite flagging these reviews multiple times, the reporting system appears to be completely ineffective. The lack of action suggests either a severe flaw in the review moderation process or a blatant disregard for the concerns of those who contribute value to this platform.

This inaction is not just frustrating—it is damaging. Unfair ratings directly impact visibility, customer trust, and ultimately, our livelihoods. By allowing such abusive behavior to continue unchecked, the platform is effectively enabling trolls and undermining the integrity of the entire review system.

I demand that you:

Immediately remove these malicious and irrelevant reviews.

Implement a more rigorous and human-involved review process to evaluate reported content.

Take concrete actions against users who consistently abuse the rating system.

Provide transparency in how reported reviews are handled and what measures are taken.

This is not just a request—it is a strong protest against the injustice and negligence that we are facing. If the platform continues to ignore this issue, it will only reinforce the perception that you are indifferent to the concerns of dedicated sellers and service providers.

I expect a prompt and serious response, along with decisive action to address this long-standing issue.

this is the list:

4 Likes
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Dear Zhihao,

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and concerns regarding the reviews on our platform. We would like to address the specific points you brought up and provide clarification on our approach to content moderation:

Reporting system

When a review is flagged, we evaluate it against this Content Moderation Policy:

  • If the review (or other content) violates these policies, such as containing hate speech, spam, or completely irrelevant comments, we impose measures.

  • However, if the content does not breach our policy, we cannot take action against it, even if you disagree with the user’s opinion. We understand that “no meaningful action has been taken” in such cases. However, this reflects situations where no violations were identified, and a decision was made not to impose any measures.

Anyway, we do believe the reporting system is efficient, and we review/process all the reported content regularly. Specifically, from the “zhihao” account alone, we have processed around 130 reports. Given the fact, that we processed each of your reports, it would not be accurate to describe this as ‘a lack of action.’

Our decision on reported reviews

It is true that we do not remove every review you report to us, as doing so would be complete censorship. However, we do have an ‘Irrelevant’ category in our policy, and reviews that fall into this category are removed accordingly. Some of the reviews you reported have indeed been addressed under this specific category.

As for the linked reviews in your message, some of them are already marked as Resolved. Anyway, we won’t comment on them in bulk, as each review must be evaluated individually within its respective Marketplace Report ticket.

If you believe that our decisions regarding the reported reviews were incorrect, you have the option to object. Details on how to raise an objection can be found here: 5. How You Can Object to Our Decisions

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I think irrelevant reviews like these are simply unacceptable, but they’re still not moderated:

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And they are numerous.

I faced the same issue two times: several toxic reviews (for months) from users who did not accept paid plugins, then a guy harassed me during two months, sending more than 50 fake reviews and insults, day after day.

The moderation team removed these review, but it took a lot of time. Too much time.

The moderation team also banned the harasser, 2 times (or 3 times, I can’t remember, and I don’t want to read these stressful emails again), but it took ages (weeks), simply because the legal team was very, very slow. My feeling was that I had to harass the moderation team.

I think this leads to frustration. Toxic users can send their fake reviews within
a minute, but we cannot defend. At least, this is not fair.

The “no censorship” is a recurring argument from the moderation team, but we never asked for censorship. This is very, very, veryyyy frustrating to hear things like that.

Finally, we proposed some solutions, but we never received any feedback. Per example, the developer of (at least popular?) plugins should be able to hide irrelevant reviews, which should also immediately recalculate the plugin’s rating. Then, the moderation team could take the time to validate or reject what we did.
For now, moderation is slow, it takes time to us (and you, I imagine), and toxic reviewers know that, and they take advantage of this flaw. I think this is not good for the marketplace, as many reviews are irrelevant, fake, insulting…

1 Like
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I think Jonathan’s suggestion is good. Though I receive fewer negative reviews, once received review “beautiful themes” with one star rating before. And during the processing of report review, the rating of the plugin was still affected which is a bit annoying. If the plugin author reports a review, please consider temporarily hide the impact of this rating before moderation team decision.

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I understand the frustration and the impatience, but these “lawyered protests” as I call them are not really effective and oftentimes laughable. It reminds me of the Mattia Astorino’s affair and his promptness to write lengthy accusatory posts with judicial mumbojumbo just to try to prove a point or something.

As I said many times I think the marketplace’s review section is useless and that not many people tend to look at it, and the ones that do, will easily understand that the bad reviews are due to ungrateful freeloaders rather than a genuine concern. Better use the better known channels like GitHub or dev.to or Reddit or, heck, X, to promote your plugin.

But who am I to know what’s best.

2 Likes