F-Droid apps ratings and comments

captcha is failure, easily bypassed by bots or paid people, the sad part is by the time you make it hard for bots, users can’t read them either :frowning:

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@Licaon_Kter, even something like Google’s reCaptcha, which monitors movement and previous interactions with websites? Fingerprinting is usually fairly effective, and shouldn’t inhibit anyone with a disability.

If that’s infeasible, then yes, that would be too significant of a barrier to usage.

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So you are saying we should add tracking and analytics to F-Droid? And log user activity? What’s next, proprietary code to detect bad users?

Did everyone forget where they are? :slight_smile:

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@Licaon_Kter, ah, forgot that the default F-Droid repository doesn’t permit trackers. Apologies.

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It’s not about the repo, it’s about not being evil as the others… did they brainwash you to always think in terms of surveillance and centralized control? You need to be hand held at every step? Is your time so precious that you can’t install 4 apps and decide on one? Is the time of others less valuable that they should do the abuse and maintenance of whatever horrific machine needs to be built for “ratings” then?

Just use Fedi to lookup or ask, eg. https://mastodon.social/tags/FDroid or pick any server that allows access to tags, some are $hitty and do not :slight_smile:

@Licaon_Kter, what on Earth is any of that about – especially, who are “they”? To even consider publicly referring to a rating system as “horrific” seems notably immature to me. I seriously doubt that you consider the concept to be horrific.

The mere notion that I am somehow brainwashed is ridiculous. I dare say that the incoherence of much of that paragraph would indicate that some introspection on your part might be due.

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It made a bunch more sense than you’re immediate leap to Capchas and Google Analytics.

@Baggypants, if you’re responding to my comment (remember to use the Reply button if so) then note that I’ve not mentioned Google Analytics.

Irrespective, this is quite a digression.

I have yet to see a rating/comment/review system that is not abused by liars, swindlers, bots, and the like, so I am pleased there is no such thing on F-droid, and hope it remains that way.

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Yeah @cliffcoggin, I agree that it would be fundamentally impossible to design one that wouldn’t be subject to a barrage of spam immediately, some of which would definitely get through.

Not sure what the motivation to spam/ai-bot an open source free software is. Not saying it won’t/cant happen, just it seems to me there’s a lot less motive when nothing is being sold. A lot of other open source projects have ratings and comment systems which appear to be functional, and occasionally even helpful. For example, KDE store (suffers from lack of participation, but is functional), Firefox extensions, and no doubt others. The G-Droid app tried to do interesting rankings for F-Droid apps based on last update date, repo activity, github rankings or possibly other metrics (I can’t remember, it’s been a long time. But I thought it was an interesting and creative attempt though however it was done). Let’s keep an open mind on this, and maybe be creative.

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Yes. And you should consider your time the same as well. Clearly you do not value your time that much, which is why F-Droid has and WILL continue to stay in the dark from the mass public. I understand the mass public needs to put a little more effort into their phone use if they are serious about regaining control of their devices from their zombie apple like products, but serious introspection needs to be done by FOSS community about how to reach the mass public, if it is equally as serious about wanting FOSS to be a sunflower instead of a mushroom.

No, and thats why we donate.
We could donate more, and that is true, but where is the min that needs to be donated in order to bring FOSS to the market level?

edit: FLOSS → FOSS

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A post was split to a new topic: Blocking SMS messages

wat? so we should waste our time on abuse prevention for a rating system instead of maintaining the repo and the apps? Interesting…

/LE: why did you :heart: so many of my posts if you think I’m wrong? :person_shrugging:

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you don’t need to wait for me, you can do this right now with your Fedi account, or Facebook account, or blog, or Twitter or or or or or etc

Be the FLOSS contributor you want others to be!

and thats why we donate

and we thank you, this helps power F-Droid! :saluting_face:

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@Licaon_Kter, what do you refer to by this? Manually spreading that F-Droid exists, perhaps? If so, I imagine most here do when contextually relevant, but that doesn’t help us gain a review system.

you are the review system for your frens and family, for your Fedi followers and Facebook stalkers alike.

this was mentioned before, nobody stops you from making said reviews on your site

we see Fedi users recommend apps from F-Droid all the time, that’s a rating system in my eyes

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@Licaon_Kter, to expect that most would agree seems disingenuous to me. When you want a review of a product you intend to purchase, you look for detailed reviews about it online, I presume. I do. My friends and family generally have not interacted with anything I’m interested in.

Certainly, I shan’t stalk the profiles of the 400+ people I follow to ascertain which may have written a review at some point of the application which appears interesting. I’m merely going to replicate their work by evaluating it myself.

That’s a waste of time when a few reviews on the installation page would generally inform me whether it’s not worth installing whatsoever. When there are 20 options for a given purpose – consider image galleries, file managers, or git clients – this is important.

Social media didn’t help me gain good reviews for my app as a developer who started making FOSS apps as the app hasn’t been popular enough. I see in my github repo traffic page few requests from vk (a Russian social media app) but I need to give my phone number to make an account in order to do any on vk. which I don’t want to do.

I have the idea of making a small pop up in my app to let user type anonymous comments or reviews and they will be sent straight up to me. I wonder if that’s allowed by F-Droid.

sure, depends how that is implemented if it gets anti-features like Tracking and/or NonFreeNet :wink:

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