WordPress.org is changing the guidelines for reviews of pro plugins and themes in the Repository. This change will mostly affect developers/authors of freemium products.   

The Current Guidelines

The current guidelines for WordPress.org reviews restrict discussions about commercial products. Specifically, it says,

“Do not post about commercial products. Commercial plugins and themes are not sold on WordPress.org, therefore please use their respective websites for support and reviews.”

Thus, any mention of commercial versions, payment disputes, or support issues is most often removed by moderators. Sadly, most of the commercial reviews are one-star rated and are noticed only when pointed out via the report topic tool.

This has a real chance of messing with the overall rating of the plugins/themes in the Repository and a lower rating will create a negative impression. “The majority of 1-stars are from people angry about something else” tweeted  Maarten Belmans, co-founder of Studio Wombat. 

Cristian Raiber, CEO of WPChill, and Maarten Belmans had shared in X, their experiences with unreasonable users. 

The Proposed Change

The plugins document will be updated in the near future with the following:

“Reviews of commercial plugins/themes are acceptable on wordpress.org when such reviews discuss functionality or user-facing features. Reviews that are essentially payment disputes or are used to leverage support will be archived, with a reply that such disputes should be handled via private email.”

Steven Stern, a Forum Moderator, made the proposal to revise the guidelines. He suggested that “reviews of commercial plugins/themes are acceptable on wordpress.org when such reviews discuss functionality or user-facing features. Reviews that are essentially payment disputes or support extortion would continue to be archived, with a reply that such disputes should be handled via private email.”

In short, reviews are acceptable if they pertain to WordPress itself. However, if it’s about purchasing, subscribing, or supporting processes of the paid plugin, then the review is deemed inappropriate.

The forums team met on Slack on February 08 and agreed to change the guidelines. James Huff, a Support Team member at WordPress, has clarified that guideline changes are not retroactive, as it would cause a huge burden on the volunteer moderators. 

He also answered Matt Cromwell, the co-founder of GiveWP, that “Right now, reviews mentioning support quality in the free forums are absolutely allowed…What we don’t want are reviews of support earned by purchasing the commercial version of the plugin/theme, as that would be irrelevant to the user’s experience with the free plugin/theme. The difficulty often comes in users simply mentioning “support,” and not clarifying if it was free support or paid support. Those will need to be handled on a case-by-case basis.”

Community Response

Lesley Sim of Newsletter Glue tweeted “This is great.” and wondered “if it’s “functionality or user-facing features” for the features in the free plugin that’s available on the repo. Or does it include features in the separate paid add-on that is not available on the repo?”. 

Ajay D’Souza of WebberZone also supported the change and tweeted “It’s high time this came through. And, it’s also helpful to the community else you have to type out huge responses as you’ve done to defend the 1-star. The question now is how do we see such reviews from users because they can just change their reviews if you have a freemium product.”

Alan Fuller (Fullworks Digital Limited) disagrees with not accepting support reviews of pro plugins/themes. He commented: “It is flawed logic. If it is OK to review up-sold functionality (which is also “irrelevant to the user’s experience with the free plugin”) then it is OK to review up-sold support. You really can only have both or neither IMHO.” 

James replied “The issue is the difficulty in disentangling functionality of the free plugin/theme vs. the commercial plugin/theme. At this time, there are not enough volunteer moderators to manage that distinction, so if the review covers functionality, then the review stands. Support is a bit different. Either they don’t clarify where the support came from and it stands, or they do clarify it’s commercial support and we remove it.” 

Anh Tran, author of Meta Box and Slim SEO tweeted “that’s a big change. Allowing reviews of pro plugins on .org for their features is a big deal!”

James Welbes of RoadMapWP was not impressed and tweeted “Being on the .org repo is already looked at by many as a necessary evil, not sure why they wanna make it worse”