Word of warning, Unity deletes negative feedback on asset store

I am very disappointed to see you have allowed an author of an asset to delete negative feedback. I have twice left feedback against NGUI for a list of problems. Yet the author has repeatedly deleted my feedback and claimed they were a personal attacks. I made no such attack in them, only listing my problems against the asset.

This really unfairly skews the overall rating of the asset and gives a false impression to others. I have spent thousands of dollars at the store at this point. However, this practice really makes me question the continued use of the asset store since any author can freely delete negative feedback. This invalidates the entire point of a feedback system as well.

 

As an asset store provider I certainly can't delete items that were posted by users other than me. The only option as far as I am aware is to report abuse at let Unity assess the review.

 

Maybe the NGUI creator still has elevated privileges since he was employed by Unity for a short time.

 

Please make sure that you click the option to show all reviews as well. I once left positive feedback, only noticed 3 visible comments, and thought my comment wasn't received. I then noticed an option to show all reviews, and was able to view my comment.

 

Just to be clear, there is no option to delete feedback. At most you could write to the asset store staff and ask them to delete a review, but that would obviously be at the discretion of the asset store. Aside from that, authors cannot delete anything; only the person writing the review can delete it.

--Eric

 

I doubt ratings can be deleted. If a rating can be deleted then this is in error and will need to be fixed. Abusive feedback is not warranted, nor is ranting. Constructive direct feedback is best.

 

Nothing can kill sales worse then bad feedback. NGUI is there top grossing item in the asset store, they even hired the same guy to work on there GUI. Wouldnt be hard to imagine hes got higher priority.

 

Just cursorily scanning all the reviews for NGUI there are a number of 1 star reviews, quite a few less than 5 star reviews in point of fact, there are a couple of fairly long list type reviews stating what needs improving etc, so seems strange your review would be removed.

 

I did show all 220+ reviews and mine are no where to be found. When the first one was deleted I posted another also warning that the previous one was deleted. The author then replied that he "assumed it was a personal attack" and it was removed. This second review was there for a bit but when I just checked again it's been removed.

So you tell me, was it the author or unity who was deleting the negative reviews? Regardless, as someone who had paid for the asset and left negative feedback, it shouldn't have been deleted unless it was abusive. Both were very critical, but not abusive or personal attacks as he claimed.

 

As publisher it is not possible to delete reviews. Reviews can be reported by anyone and the Asset Store crew decides what to do with the review.
So far, I have only seen that negative reviews are deleted because of good reasons. It may help to see your actual review. You should still find it here: http://unityassetreview.com/assets/4559

 

If it were my comment that was deleted, and I didn't think it was abusive, I'd post it again, screencapture it, and then post that here. Then if it gets deleted again, there'll be proof.

Unfortunately, none of us can know exactly what you wrote and whether it was abusive or not.

 

As most of the reviews can be found at http://unityassetreview.com/, we just need to get the actual review, then it would be easy for us to check whether it was removed and whether we have the impression that it was appropriate or not.

 

Using Dantus' link I found what looks to be the right review (based on a comment by the author that it was deleted):

Really can't see anything that would be considered a personal attack.

 

Mine appear to be deleted but actually it shows they are posted -240 hours ago.

I complained about a review once that had the word f*ck in it but it wasn't NGUI. It was a good review but I then seriously doubted the quality of the product after seeing that review.

I usually ignore stupid reviews but sometimes I won't and I'll report them although I usually say nothing as an obviously vitriolic attack on a product or the maker of the product is likely to be indicative of higher quality than poor quality or sometime of misguided vendetta.

 

I agree that it is not a personal attack. On the other hand, reviews are supposed to help potential customers to make a decision. I am not sure whether that kind of review is helpful for anyone.
It clearly criticizes the product, but the author doesn't mention whether the bugs were reported or whether the author tried to get in touch with the developer at all. It could be also be that the author made random adjustments which may have lead to random errors. We can't see that and as such it is not a helpful review in my opinion for potential customers.
Everyone who writes a review should be aware that this section is supposed to be helpful for potential customers. It is not for feature requests, it is not there to report bugs and it is not there to help a customer to calm down and let it all out. Critique is highly welcome, but it has to be useful for potential customers. "This product sucks" is not useful for anyone. On the other hand "the publisher didn't reply", "the publisher couldn't help", "be aware that it is very tricky and time consuming to get it right", "the user interface is overly complex", "the documentation is wrong/lacking/misleading" or "the error messages are not understandable", those kind of statements help everyone. It helps potential customers to understand where the weaknesses are and at the same time the publisher may get a better understanding what kind of changes may help the customers.

 

That is the original feedback that I left. And here is the second, http://unityassetreview.com/assets/4559/comments/27366

And then his reply from author:

First, how in the heck was that a "personal attack?" Second, he even admits I was trying to get support via his forums, but this is misleading. I did indeed post several times on his forums and after several back and forth where again he blamed me or the asset store for the bugs. His next version fixed the problems I had with updating to 3.x. I had encountered a number of bugs and had other posts on his forums.

Finally, at that point I had suffered with NGUI for almost a year. Unity would not have given me a refund.

Regardless, as a customer I should be able to leave my feedback of a very negative experience. By removing my non-abusive feedback it skews the rating and impression to future customers. If Unity indeed deleted it, then it sure seems to be deceptive practice to increase asset sales. I'd start to question how many others get deleted under the guise of "abusive feedback."

 

Seems helpful to me. Even if he *didn't* approach the developer first, the fact that the system consistently had new bugs that he experienced is very telling. That's information worth having for someone who is trying to make a purchasing decision.

This was definitely a helpful review and not a personal attack at all. It should not have been deleted.

Also, if we deleted every review that wasn't helpful, there wouldn't be a lot of reviews out there. The ones that gush about how good it is without details aren't any more useful than this one was.

 

My impression is that the author used the review to calm down and to let it all out. If someone runs into bugs all the time, it may as well be that it is the customers fault. Did that customer use some functionality that is barely used by others that have no significant problems with it? What did the developer say regarding those issues?
Positive reviews are helpful, because they show that a customer didn't find issues. But if someone finds issues, it is essential for potential customers to understand what may not be working.

I have my own background with customers who wrote that my packages were broken, or they even broke their Unity installation and what not. I am clearly biased regarding that topic. As a publisher it is frustrating to get that kind of reviews and knowing that they didn't even try to get in touch with you. I reported those malicious reviews several times and seriously though about removing my freely available packages because of those reviews. I really believe it doesn't harm a reviewer to take the time to write a review that is useful for others.

 

You should not be projecting your issues on me or my review. I did contact the author on his site, many times. After several issues and back and forth and clearly being frustrated, I posted the review. In one case the author said "you found a bug." He also claimed that other things that were causing many people problems were "by design."

Now, if you think that "font atlas broken" was a "barely used" feature then you're smoking something. Fonts are core to any UI. If you want to defend NGUI great. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. But don't try and devalue my legitimate statements or review because of your past experiences.

Edit: The big issue here were the reviews "abusive" or "personal attacks" as claimed by the author? I think people seem to agree they were not. If you agree with my view of NGUI or not is irrelevant. If they did not violate the rules then they should have not been removed. That process of who deleted and why really puts the entire system into question in my eyes.

 

I consciously tried to not project my situation into that. Unfortunately you didn't write that you contacted the developer and that there are issues "by design" in the review. That kind of information is valuable for potential customers! You close your review with a possible Asset Store bug, maybe that was also the reason why it was removed.

 

Maybe you missed this part of the second review that was also deleted:

This both shows I did contact and attempt to seek support with the author and indeed called them "by design" flaws.

 

I indeed missed that part.

 

I'd really like to see Unity give an official statement in regards to this.

Has anyone else noticed their reviews deleted? How widespread is this practice?

 

I also have an existing support issue on this matter but they have failed to reply other than asking for the name of the asset and my comments.

And I see they are pushing this product today on the store. I will not be using the asset store in the future.

 

I don't like this system of top voted ratings/comments being at the top.
So if a 5* rating has 3 of 3 'people found this helpful', that comment will always be at the top.

I've had an issue now where I bought an asset, and received absolutely ZERO support from the provider after 10 days after sending an email, and writing on their forum thread for support. But my review doesn't even show on the first page, it goes right to the bottom of the 2nd page.

They clearly stopped supporting this package and nobody will ever know because only the most helpful reviews will show at the front.

 

It appears that Unity is just going to ignore my support ticket (weeks and no reply now) and hope this thread goes away.


Again, please understand that the issue at hand is not the single asset, but that someone removed reviews twice under a false claim of abuse. At least that's what the asset author claimed in one of his replies.


As a community, I think we should hold the responsible party (Unity or author) accountable for unethical behaviour like this. It is an abuse of trust and bad faith to put a feedback system in place then remove those comments that cast a negative light on assets. It may even be a violation of US FTC or FCC laws as it's misleading consumers.

 

Authors *do not* have the ability to delete negative feedback. Only Unity Asset Store staff can.

Deleted reviews are generally the product of abuse reports. We go over them individually to look for accuracy. Almost always, these are reviews which take personal shots at the publisher, or are vulgar, inaccurate, or grossly distasteful.

Star ratings can *never* be deleted, even if the review text is, the star rating remains.

We leave most abuse-reported reviews intact.

 

That's what has been said multiple times here, yes. The problem is that in this incident, it appears that something fishy is going on. The reviews were read by us users and we don't think they were abusive at all. And yet, they were deleted. Unity Tech has not attempted to address this situation at all, as far as we can tell.

Further, the situation is unique because the asset author worked directly for Unity Tech for a while and had access to thinks that most asset authors do not. So saying that only asset store employees can delete reviews doesn't mean anything here, as the asset author in question worked directly for Unity Tech at the time of the incident.

As loyal paying customers, we'd like to know that this is being investigated and nothing like this will ever be allowed to happen again, regardless of whether it happened this time or not.

 

Only I and a few others on the Asset Store team have the capability to delete asset reviews, so the decision was likely mine. What is considered abusive or vulgar or uncivil is somewhat subjective, I admit, and we might not always agree on a decision. Again, we do this on a case-by-case basis, and if you feel we made an error in judgement, I apologize, but again, we do not arbitrarily delete reviews just because they are bad or brutally honest. If you're talking about NGUI, although the author did work at Unity for a little while, he has never, ever had any role in the decision to remove a review.

We welcome all reviews, including really bad or unfavorable reviews, and again we do not arbitrarily remove them. I often have publishers coming to me complaining about an unfavorable review, and in most cases, we do not respond unless there is truly something wrong. We encourage, instead, that publishers write articulate and thoughtful responses to bad reviews, and adjust their product or service accordingly.

To the folks in the thread who feel they have been wronged, go ahead and post your reviews again, if there's any question about its appropriateness I can contact you.

 

I haven't noticed any deleted reviews but then again how often would you go back to the asset store after you bought it.

 

Please point out what was abusive, vulgar or even uncivil about my reviews?

But this is exactly what has been done here. Not once, but twice.

I have a support ticket that has been open for weeks and still has had no reply. You could have also contacted me upon my second review when I claimed the first was deleted. Even if just to tell me why it was deleted.

I hope you can see how this can clearly be seen as a deliberate attempt to cover up/ignore this issue.

 

Several weeks later I got a reply from Unity Support:

No reason given why the two previous reviews were deleted. And even goes on to say "it doesn't seem like one comment will make a difference." Is that justification for deletion?

I also find it funny that soon after someone posted the only proof we had of all this, the site ( http://www.unityassetreview.com/ ) now says "The site is closed."

 

As far as I know that site was reposting content without permission. Seems to me that there's room for a site that has original reviews of Unity assets, though.

--Eric

 

...What's with the beating around the bush? His reviews were not abusive whatsoever and no one is going to buy that the person whom who deleted them thought he/she was breaking the rules, even subjectively.

Have no fear, I went and got a copy of them for you.
Review 1:

Review 2:

Just another case of abusing the law for immoral reasons.

 

They just keep digging that hole deeper on this. There's clearly no excuse for what happened, and they're just flat refusing to own the problem. At this point, I have to wonder how many other times this has happened (Remember, they've said the asset author had no access to this system, so it must have been done by someone who is supposed to work on it) and we just never heard about it?

How many other assets have had negative reviews deleted off a whim?

Also, it wasn't "1 comment". It was 2. And neither of them should have ever been deleted in the first place.

Unity should get on top of this. This kind of unethical crap erodes everyone's confidence in the system. I know I've seriously considered stopping my asset purchases, and we're not talking just a few dollars here. It's clear I can't actually trust the review system to have the negative reviews that people are leaving, and these "what does it matter?" responses are only making that worse.

 

I have stopped using the asset store over this. And as far as I'm concerned, they have not addressed this issue at all. They side stepped any direct questions and any reply have been "one comment won't make a difference" or "just post it again and we'll make sure it stays." But for the third time?

This then combined with Unity forcing, presumably, a DMCA shutdown of a third party website that was trying to keep them honest on reviews.

 

There's no evidence that any 3rd party website would be honest either though. In fact it could get gamed and doctored a hell of a lot. At least on the asset store, it's 1 review per customer, and it's not fake reviews. If some reviews don't make it in, at least the others are honest. And that's better than a website with a bunch of fake reviews and no chance of verification.

 

The problem is that if we dont know the exact comments that were deleted, we cant say if they were deleted for some reason or for no reason at all.

I am sure there would be many cases where a bad review comes up for whatever reason, and when this reason is addressed or fixed, the review does not change or gets updated.

In this case, as a publisher here, i would definitly like to have the option to have a review removed or marked as no longer relevant or as inaccurate.

 

Yet in this case there is clearly evidence that Unity has deleted my reviews so they are not being honest either. It was claimed they only delete reviews that are "abusive, vulgar or uncivil." And neither of my two were. The asset author also claimed I had made a personal attack on him. This was also untrue, yet you want us to trust them?

Who said the other site had fake reviews? Eric said the whole point to that site being taken down was because it was a mirror of unity's content. I don't know anyone who claimed any reviews were fake here.

 

So Unity did a mistake. What prevents you from writing the review again? Everyone makes mistakes. Having seen the amount of disrespectful or ridiculous reviews for NGUI, it may have happened that they lowered their subjective bar too much.

 

I don't know why it was taken down, I'm just guessing. But ripping content wholesale like that is pretty clearly not cool, regardless of what anyone thinks of Unity's review policy. Again, instead of just scraping Unity's site, I would suggest someone create a legit asset review site, since there's apparently interest.

--Eric

 

So it's bad but it's our only choice? That's almost the definition of biased, the store has a ton of the problems and honestly if there was a competitor for it right now I'd go to it, but alas, I doubt a competitor would get the same market penetration as an asset store that's built with the Unity editor. I don't see why we shouldn't complain and try to get proper management for the store or proper policies put in place with some professionalism?

Being brutally honest; the asset store is run unprofessionally in every regard.

Who said they made a mistake? They never said that, they claimed they only deleted "abusive, vulgar or uncivil" reviews.

Unity can't simply just go back on what they did now that they've been caught out and say "oh yeah, just go and make your review again", that's completely ignoring the problem.

In fact, right here, she claims that if he thinks they did it mistakenly, he's wrong.

So how exactly was the website harming anyone?

 

In my opinion there is no general problem. There were a few situation where the bar may have been set too low. They very likely have to judge hundreds of reviews that are reported and as such it is not surprising that one or the other mistake happens. No one is perfect, S*** happens. I haven't seen that reviews are systematically censored or anything in that direction, nor did someone point it out.
From my point of view, it works in general, but there were and will be cases where reviews are unnecessarily removed.

 

Problem is usually when a mistake is made it's usually a passive response to something negative(ex: skipping a negative review). Something that takes an aggressive response to something that should have had a passive response is less likely and shows something is wrong with their system, especially since they don't seem to have any way of tracking deleted reviews.

It should have been responded to without a disingenuous attitude and not shrugged off while putting the blame onto the customer(a lack of professionalism and experience*), this most likely would have all been avoided if it was responded to in the correct manner.

* Most people learn quickly that blaming the customer will backfire and is typically NOT worth it.

 

Again, this happens very likely in fewer than 1% of the reviews that are reported. Do you have a suggestion of how this could be solved, without having a negative effect on the other reviews?

 

All I can say from my experience as a vendor, the AssetStore management is highly biased and there is always the smell of nepotism around.
Just look who get's the homepage features and sales events on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, I wouldn't be surprised if they delete reviews in favor for one of their peeps.

It's a shame.

 

Keep records of deleted reviews with reasons mandatory for every deletion(I really doubt they get such a huge influx of abusive reviews that makes this "unrealistic", let's not forget they're pocketing most of that 30%) and provide that reason upon request. Start to give people lower priority in their reports if they're sending lots of reports in that don't get deleted etc etc.

Pretty much this, I don't really go to the asset store any more unless I know what I want, the front page doesn't really provide much variety and is typically just cycling through the same old vendors.

I'd love to see an "Up and coming" section with one row of assets on the front page that is regularly updated to give more people an opportunity to get their assets seen.

 

Yeah, having a moderation system with no way to tell if it's being abused is obviously wrong. If you can't tell what was deleted and why, these questions will continue to crop up.

Unity's attitude for this entire conversation has been "Our site, our way. Get over it." This is not acceptable.

 

Good point! Did you consider to make a post for Unity Feedback, such that people can vote for it? I know the value of Unity Feedback is questionable, but the topic should at least be covered there, such that one can refer to an actual practical solution.

 

I agree, I've made more than my share of mistakes in life. However, you're not looking at the entire picture here. One time could easily be a mistake. Twice, might be but unlikely. After issues three, four and five it becomes a repeated behaviour.


So lets recap shall we?

1. After almost a year of frustration trying to get support I post a negative review
2. Author replies blaming me and then the asset store for (some, but not all) issues reported
3. First review is deleted shortly later
4. I notice review was deleted and post another one, including warning the first was deleted
5. Author replies that “personal attacks are cleaned up by unity”
6. Second review is deleted shortly later
7. I submit a support ticket (no response other than asking for the asset name and my review)
8. I post on the forums about the issue

At this point I still have received no official response about the issue. If it was a mistake, this would have been the time to fix it.

9. Caitlyn finally replies after several other users are upset about the issue, claims they don't delete reviews except for abusive, vulgar or uncivil content. (not the case here)
10. Weeks after support request, Oscar from Unity support replies says “it doesn't seem like one comment will make a difference” totally ignores my review was deleted twice.
11. Unity forces third party website to shutdown who had evidence of all this, maybe more?​

At this point, there is little doubt that these were just mistakes. They have been intentionally trying to make this issue go away in the worst possible way. Their responses have done nothing to actually resolve the problem nor address the community's concerns.