Is WOT trustworthy anymore?

An example of WOT's bias:

http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/protectmarriage.com

It's not about security in the least.

And btw take a look at the comments for the GOP's and Democratic Party's website

 

WOTs bias or you making a deal out of nothing? Please don't bring politics or some crap into it. It's the users and their "community rating" that causes problems. Otherwise WOT might still be worth something.

 

What are you all talking about?

WOT has the same credibility as Wikipedia: lots of negative comments but we always go there for a reliable opinion.

User based feedback is one of the best things the web has to offer (in fact, the very best).
Think this: if you're not sure about that torrent what do you do? You read other users experience.

 

I think that you have an important point here. It is difficult to hold moral or ethical opinions that would be universal. This is an aspect of WOT I am a bit concerned about. I think that it is important that 'hate-sites' are properly recognised for what they are, but it is also important to respect free speech. This can often be very subjective.

In this example & bearing in mind, WOT is Finnish & European attitudes towards tendentious homophobia are often somewhat different culturally to American attitudes. After all, the comments on that link are personal opinions.


"ProtectMarriage.com is a broad-based coalition of California families, community leaders, religious leaders, pro-family organizations and individuals from all walks of life who have joined together to defend and restore the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman."


Personally, this statement seems to me to be tendentious thinly veiled homophobia with a definite subtext. But I find it difficult to deny them the right to propagate their views, however distasteful I personally find them, furthermore if the site has no malware I don't see why it shouldn't have a clean rating.

I think WOT should really concentrate on malware prevention.

 

I'm not sure that's really the central aim of WOT...

It's not a censorship tool, either.

 

Probably not, but I'm more interested in the malware security aspect. I think it is the most important aspect of its function.

I didn't mean to imply that it was. I meant that opinions on what is a harmful site or not can be viewed as ontologically very subjective.

 

Actually, I wasn't implying that you was implying.

I was implying that the quoted tenets describing the four rating definitions do not include any space for moral censorship (beyond protecting children).

 

And I wasn't implying that you were implying that I was implying ... LOL

Yes, I agree. It seems to me though, by allowing individual comments on any particular website, it will effectively encourage some form of moral judgement which may be interpreted by some as a form of censure.

 

The problem with WOT is apparently 99% of the raters have not read or don't follow WOT's criteria for rating websites
http://www.mywot.com/en/support/main#the-criteria-for-rating-websites

Take Wilders ratings for example, it's highly rated in Vendor Reliability. It shouldn't even be rated in that category. Most of the folks who rate sites go by like or not like the site and blindly rate everything based on that.

Like the example of bias pointed out earlier regarding that Protect Marriage site. The site is definitely not rated based on the criteria above. The majority of raters apparently have strong personal opinions against the message of this site and just rate it poorly in all categories because the don't like the site. Other rating sites such as McAfee SiteAdvisor, Browser Defender, Norton Safe Web, and Google Safe Browsing all rate the site as OK.

I have a friend who's personal site got hit with a virus a few years ago, it was got rated bad in Trustworthiness, Vendor reliability and Privacy. Those last two categories should not have been even rated. It's still rated bad.

I have never really trusted WOT, it is to opinion based. There also appears to be groups "professional" raters who must feel they are doing the world a service by ratings sites they do not agree with as bad sites. Like the example given above. There are plenty of sites out there that are being rated purely on ethical issues and not the criteria outlined in the above quote.

Having said all of that, I still use it, it does have value. I would still recommend it to others. I just don't take the ratings at face value. I will judge for my self. I have frequently found site ratings that I completely disagreed with, both good and bad.

I've been using the LinkExtend (http://www.linkextend.com/) Firefox extension which combines ratings from several sites for comparisons Most of the time WOT and the others do not agree. WOT rates a lot of sites bad that are not rated as such on other rating sites. It goes the other way too.

 

Nah, just figured an anti-gay website would be an easy target to make my point.

 

WOT does state that ratings and comments are two separate things. The comments do not create the rating although I think what is said there may influence some to vote a particular way, but they shouldn't be doing it like that.

Anyone using WOT should take time to look at the site under review - has it got a privacy policy?, is it safe for children to use?, etc. Some of the trusted sources moonblood mentioned don't work in those areas as they concentrate on malware/phishing/spam. There are dedicated users on their forums who do take time to do this sort of research as evidenced by some of the posts they make. Some use tools like robtex to do further analysis about a domain, and check other sources, especially those that are new and have few ratings or none at all.

It's all well and good to criticise a product here, but if one who uses WOT thinks improvements should be made in whatever aspect because they think it has some merit, they should offer those suggestions for discussion in the WOT forums. That's what it is there for.

 

Are you sure about that? As an even more extreme example, the KKK website gets a crimson red in all categories on WOT, whereas it's green on SafeWeb and SiteAdvisor because well, it's not really malicious nor fraudulent per se.

It seems to me like either comments matter a lot, or WOT is more of a moral advisor than internet safety tool.

 

You can rate without leaving a comment. Infact there are probably many more ratings without comments than ratings with comments, because you can make a rating without comment, anonymously.

 

Reading their FAQs, they say in answer to the question "Do scorecard comments have an effect on a site's rating?":

Even if we may not agree with the methodology, this FAQ section might be worth a read.

I think sbseven is right. There'll be more users rating without signing up just by having the add-on installed with the browser of their choice that WOT supports. I think the problem might be in understanding how the rating system works and if such meritocracy is effective.

 

These technical rules are really not worth much since the real problem is WOT ignore basic know-how of how online people act. Software sites with a review section can also make rules, content will still be fanyboy BS or the opposite. Games can have rules about no cheating and still there is cheating. Google can have anti-manipulation rules for their search engine and most seo guys will break them given the chance. There is no such thing as a wise "community" no matter what WOT dream of. Rules will be broken on purpose, ignored or not understood (in most cases = ignored). Question is how much it matters. Up to users since WOT don't seem to understand this. Result I guess is random, amount of mess depends on the interest of those who will break rules. Or WOT does realize it is wild west but know only solution is to cut the wings of community so not an option for their setup.

 

Or rather if there's any real moderation at all.