Suggestion: support section in rating review

JetBrains Marketplace
1

Hi
I wanted to suggest to add along with the existing subjects ratings (Integration with IDE, Documentation…) a Support and Availability subject.

I think it is important and it should be taken in consideration when calculating the overall plugin rate.

Thanks

2

Hi,

Thanks for your suggestion! I have created a feature request for that: MP-7279 Add Support and Availability for sub-rating
I hope to see votes from anyone interested in this as well!

1 Like
3

I think this is an interesting idea, but I’m curious now details about how you are thinking about it @jgafner.

For example, what if as an author of multiple plugins, I want to have different support ‘levels’ for different plugins - maybe one an author wants to fully support with a 2 day SLA for first response to support tickets, but another plug-in is ‘no support SLAs’

  • How would the score be calculated for each?
  • Are you imagining that a plug-in author would have some means to specify their SLAs and a means for JetBrains to verify?
  • Related to above, are you thinking that a “base level of expected support” is ‘mandated’ by JetBrains upon plug-in authors?

Would love to hear your thoughts for curiosity and ideation sake. :grinning_face:

4

Hi Chris,

Looking at the current ratings, there are already categories for various plugin aspects. I’m simply suggesting adding a straightforward “Support and Availability” rating – similar to how we rate documentation or performance, but focusing on the plugin author’s responsiveness and maintenance commitment.

Just a general indicator of support quality, without diving into complex SLA details.

5

Gotcha - yeah that makes sense.

I guess a worry of mine would be if someone were to, for example, rate a plug-in 1 star with a comment of “opened an issue on GitHub and did not hear back within 4 hours. 1 star, awful support” (or, maybe this is just a thought and does not even get typed as a review comment), yet the author makes it clear in their plug-in (description or readme or wherever is obvious to users opening support requests) that users shouldn’t expect a response for 1 week. That would negatively impact the plug-in rating. To my knowledge, the individual categories in plug-in ratings are not exposed to plug-in authors (at least, I don’t see them on any of my plugins, though perhaps it was added after my most recent reviews?).

Fwiw, I’m not opposed to this idea at all, I’d just want to see it be implemented in such a way where plug-in authors would not have ‘dings’ on their plugin(s) when user expectations don’t match up with what the authors are willing to provide (and of course, this is not a unique problem to the ‘support’ aspect of plugins :stuck_out_tongue: ).