Iv'e noticed that a couple of people are creating sidebar, live and myspace gadgets and spamming other gadget search tags with their own email addresses and gadgets and stuff. These people are also Down rating other live, myspace and sidebar gadgets to get their gadgets to the top of the lists. one person in particular is Bamkee who posted 3 gadgets almost identical and had 5 star average out of 20 ratings before he had even had 20 downloads.
See for yourself:
http://gallery.live.com/Author.aspx a=46ba5aeb-394c-4346-a7dd-e06825791322&l=1
This causes problems for people with genuine ratings. Me and my brother developed a sidebar gadget for ebay which has been downloaded 5100 times since november and had 56 genuine ratings until Bamkee posted his similar gadgets which . Now our gadget has 87 ratings due to Bamkee down-rating as he sees our gadget to be a threat to his. although our gadget has a totally different purpose.
not only this but I suspect he and others have been downrating Sidebar, live and myspace gadgets to get onto the top rated list
These people should not be allowed to post gadgets and should be taught a lesson wouldn't it be funny if all msn users down rated their gadgets to teach them a lesson.
developers down rating other developers to get their stuff to the top not mentioning names (BAMKEE)
DonRajah
I am the creator of the Bamkee gadget, and I can assure you that the spamming of ratings is happing because of the fine people at IntelliGadgets.
When our gadgets were posted we sent out an email to the people that have previously downloaded our gadget from our site http://www.bamkee.com, and asked them to visit the windows live gallery and rate our gadget if they we happy with the gadgets. As soon as good ratings moved Bamkee Super Search moved to the top of the list, the .5 ratings came crashing down. Now I obviously can’t see who is rating our gadget or how they are being rated, but the math of averages is pretty simple. If you would like to see for your “ See for yourself” here are some numbers that may shed some light on the situation with our gadgets. These numbers are over a 24 hour period. By the way the most downloaded sidebar gadget is the Outlook info gadgets with
71422 downloads, Guess how many raters have rated it 28!Thanks for the thoughts,
Bamkee
Yea Bamkee
Ebay Sidebar Tool
Created by: IntelliGadgets
Type: Sidebar gadgets
Category: Search tools 2.5
Average of 71 rating(s):
http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx li=767cde99-a3d1-434a-b43b-db79abcf90b1&l=1
Bamkee Super Search
Created by: Bamkee
Type: Sidebar gadgets
Category: Search tools
Average of 20 rating(s):
Your rating: 3.5
Downloads: 164
http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx li=b064ee95-bc11-4997-9a52-92aced82cf84&l=1
Ebay Sidebar Tool
Created by: IntelliGadgets
Type: Sidebar gadgets
Category: Search tools
Average of 94 rating(s):
Your rating: 3.0
Downloads: 5185
http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx li=767cde99-a3d1-434a-b43b-db79abcf90b1&l=1
Bamkee Super Search
Created by: Bamkee
Type: Sidebar gadgets
Category: Search tools
Average of 51 rating(s):
Your rating: 2.5
Downloads: 266
Reviews: 1
http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx li=b064ee95-bc11-4997-9a52-92aced82cf84&l=1
The funny thing to us is that the eBay Sidebar tool was featured on our website ( http://www.bamkee.com ) until this incident happened. It has since been removed.
graymon
On another note, I strongly believe that as developers we should all be supporting each other, helping out where necessary. I do not wish to compete in any popularity contests, regardless of how much another developer may try and drag me into one.
I use other developer's gadgets and rate them positively when I find ones I like. I hope other developers do the same for me (and my company).
Thanks again,
Andy
M.A.T
Every other Live site uses the display name, it's only these two that use the profile name.
Perhaps someone from MS can speak to whoever runs the site and get this fixed.
Jim Altrichter
Hello
I too have seen the down raiting, and think it is shocking. It nearly made me stop updating the gadets. Thankfully a couple of supportive emails changed my mind
Ross (Creator of GoogleSearcher)
TCS BAJA
"Bamkee",
I don't know how regularly you check your email, but I emailed you before my colleague posted above, enquiring as to why our ratings were going down as yours were going up. After receiving no reply, he posted here to see if any other people had experienced the same problems. We noticed that your ratings were synchronised with our own - ie when you had received 4 "positive" ratings, we had received 4 "negative" ratings (our rating had gone down). This happened on a few occasions as we were monitoring. It was always the same number of ratings hitting ours as hitting yours.
I actually stumbled across your site around 2 weeks ago (actually whilst checking our position for search results on Google). I was rather pleased to see another site had featured our gadget, but noticed just the day after that it was nowhere to be found on your site (much earlier than you're claiming you removed it). As both our gadgets gain commission from eBay, I doubt you would hinder your own earnings by promoting a competing (and superior for the purpose of searching eBay) gadget.
Furthermore, we receive many suggestions per week for the eBay Sidebar Tool (most people suggesting the same things! :)), probably almost 100 suggestions since november, and in our reply we always add "If you enjoy using the eBay Sidebar Tool, please rate it on the Live Gallery website, to help improve it's ranking". Quite often the user replies further indicating that he has rated our gadget, and the majority of feedback we receive is positive and friendly. Obviously by asking people to rate the gadget, you will receive more ratings.
I would also like to add that until your gadget showed up, our gadget had an average of 4/3.5 stars and was very popular. The information you've supplied has obviously been greatly exaggerated. We work very hard on our gadget and it's very disappointing to see developers like yourself kicking other people down to get to the top. It's people like you that ruin the whole sense of achievement real developers get from their work.
If you were honestly not responsible for "down rating" our gadgets, I think you would have replied to my inquiry email in the first place. The fact that you did not reply (and still have not replied, despite your activity online) only gives strength to my case.
Andy Earnshaw
apunater
Very well said Andy.
Let the gadgets speak for themselves anyway. These people will soon find out that no matter what they say or do, they simply will not make a difference to anyones opinions by down-rating. Even with a low rating, people will look at the gadgets and decide for themselves whether they are any good.
It's called independant thinking. It's something all us humans are born with, thankfully.