Opened 5 weeks ago
Last modified 5 weeks ago
#7743 new defect (bug)
Plugin review filters by number of stars are incorrect.
| Reported by: |
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Owned by: | |
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| Milestone: | Priority: | normal | |
| Component: | Support Forums | Keywords: | |
| Cc: |
Description
We were investigating/analyzing Jetpack reviews and found multiple cases where we would filter by the number of stars and see reviews that did not match the selection. There are six cases total out of 2120 reviews, so it is fairly rare but could indicate a corner case bug that would cause bigger issues on less popular plugins.
The reviews incorrectly listed as 1 stars are:
- https://wordpress.org/support/topic/too-many-things-i-dont-need-or-want/ (on page of 14 https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/jetpack/reviews/page/14/?filter=1)
- https://wordpress.org/support/topic/fix-the-twitter-widget/ (on page of 17 https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/jetpack/reviews/page/17/?filter=1)
- https://wordpress.org/support/topic/open-graph-6/ (on page of 13 https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/jetpack/reviews/page/13/?filter=1)
The reviews incorrectly listed as 2 stars are:
- https://wordpress.org/support/topic/too-heavy/ (on page 3 https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/jetpack/reviews/page/3/?filter=2)
- https://wordpress.org/support/topic/much-options/ (on page 2 https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/jetpack/reviews/page/2/?filter=2)
- https://wordpress.org/support/topic/it-was-working-but-nownothing/ (on page 3 https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/jetpack/reviews/page/3/?filter=2)
At least one case had the review get modified which makes me suspect that a change to the rating causes doesn't change all of the filtering.
There is a slight difference in the totals of course. From post_meta (matches what is on https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/jetpack/reviews/):
"rating_1": 521,
"rating_2": 94,
"rating_3": 87,
"rating_4": 152,
"rating_5": 1266,
"num_ratings": 2120,
From the scraped data and after correcting for the above differences:
1 Star = 518 (-3)
2 Star = 92 (-2)
3 Star = 91 (+4)
4 Star = 153 (+1)
5 Star = 1266 (0)
Total = 2120
I also wonder if any of this impacts the overall average rating. The rating in the post meta for Jetpack is 3.7. I assume this is rounded off somewhere.
The averages I calculate are either:
- (521 + 2*94 + 3*87 + 4*152 + 5*1266)/2120 = 3.730188679
- (518 + 2*92 + 3*91 + 4*153 + 5*1266)/2120 = 3.734433962
Both of those of course round to the same thing in this case but for a less popular plugin the difference could matter.
Looking at the underlying data, this was a 3 star review in 2016 when posted, but in 2019 the users rating was updated to a 1 star.
It looks like the support forum has cached it as a 3 star still.
Same here, 3 star in 2013, but looks like the users rating was updated in 2023.
This appears to be a purely a display issue; the rating on the individual review is likely the incorrect value, and the value used for the ratings calculations (and filtering) is the correct one.
I suspect this might've been the result of #7730
Looking at the underlying data, it appears that this affects a total of 776 reviews, some are 5 -> 1 star, others are 1->5 stars, 1<->3 stars, 4->5 stars, etc. so it affects a range of things.
The last affected review was updated on
2024-04-02.