You are wrong, I bash WOT and understand the reasoning. I'm sure WOT works quite well at blocking harmful sites (I've never used it or any other site/link scanner, but have often looked at website ratings on the mywot website). However there are a lot of safe sites which are given red ratings. Sadly a lot of people who contribute to wot and SiteAdvisor have absolutely no idea what they are talking about, and will quite happily give a website a bad rating because they think it contains malicious downloads, without being able to provide any proof to support their claims. It would be useful if the ratings were accurate.
THANK YOU...........................If people actually started to read the WOT user comments then everyone else could realize what we are talking about. I actually tried WOT many years ago. A site came up red so I went to see what people had to say about it. One lady wrote 'They asked me for my personal information". Or "The software I downloaded from this site is horrible". A site adviors job should be to tell someone that this particular site contains malware which could harm your pc if downloaded. Just because some moron got scammed into buying some screensaver does not mean the site is actually harmful. They are made at feel cheated so they blame the site rather then themselves. WOT is a community based site advisor. Norton,McAfee,AVG and Bitdefender are all professional companies which have highly trained people to warn you if a site actually contains malicious content. I also did not care to see ratings on every email which had a web site link. I don't need that in my email.
What a site adviser or link scanner should do is what it claims. Some people want to know about shopping experiences of others on store sites or whether a site engages in spamming, has pornography, etc. WOT has warning categories which can be selected...so if a person does not want to know about vendor reliability or child safety they can simply uncheck those categories. Should WOT have more categories? Probably so. For a link checker/site rater to only report if a site is potentially malicious may be the type you want but not necessarily what info everyone wants. Others may want more or different information. I've used the site raters offered by McAfee, AVG, BitDefender and Norton. I didn't like any of them and went back to WOT. WOT is far from perfect but seems less annoying than the others, so I use it for now. All the site rating tools have some flaws or another, including WOT. If I want to be secure on the web and not fall prey to some malicious site then I will surely use something more secure than some site rater, real time scan or not. Disabling js, using noscript, sandboxie, etc (or a combo of those) is far more secure than some flavor of the day site rater.
Not a favorite per-se but I do use WOT simply for the human input. I've posted this earlier here but if you don't mind, I'll quote myself. P.S. Didn't vote.
How many raters in WOT rate in accordance with these guide lines? http://www.mywot.com/en/faq/add-on/new-to-wot#rating-criteria Many raters apparently rate on like or dislike, disagree or agree with, not by the above criteria. Wilder's is highly rated as a vendor.
You are absolutely correct. Not solely based on opinion. There are, I am sure, a few good ratings in the mix somewhere.
their all walware in my mind, i do security research every so often and that means surfing the dark-net and im not big on the your not allowed to go to that internet page link jammer spy-ware that phones home and records all your surfing habits vomit topic. if anything just disable java and flash with a good browser with maybe some additions along the lines of a anti hacking addon or something and its all green on my screen
I'd never head of that until now. It's of little use to me, as I like to make my own mind up about websites instead of going by others opinions. I don't care if others think a site is unsafe, all that matters to me is my opinion on a site, which I reach by actually visiting the site. What I really like about this however is there a 6 services othen than the WOT which are checked. This is good as unlike WOT (a nice idea, but its ratings are so innacurate it's laughable), at least the other services seem to have failry accurate ratings based on several sites I have checked so far.
What I don't like about WOT is that it penalizes any site not considered child-safe, so even the safest site with adult content would get a poor rating. I do find WOT useful, however, for evaluating business sites, since it often flags those that advertise by spam or otherwise have honesty problems.
