API for reviews etc.

[RikudouSage]

In this comment on the forum I was advised to discuss it here instead, so here I go.

I've created an api that I think works for this, but I don't know the exact requirements, so I'm sending an OpenAPI specification attached. You can paste the content for example into the Swagger Editor, or you can run it locally.

You can also import it to Bruno/Postman etc.

You can test the api using https://chum.rikudou.dev, the api key is test.

openapi.json

[nephros]

Wow, that was quick! Thanks.

[nephros]

Which kind of rating system do we want?

1. Amazon-style: 0 to N "stars"
2. Slashdot-style: one vote, +1 or -1, resulting in bounded -5 to +5 rating, which allows "users" to select which "quality" they want to see/hide
3. Reddit-style: unbounded upvotes and downvotes
4. Facebook-style: one thumbs-up
5. other...

Myself I like the slashdot variant, it prevents "mob" votes in either direction, and avoinds the effect that an app not used by many people appears as low-quality because of a low number of votes.

[RikudouSage]

I myself designed it with 5-star system in mind (with half-stars, so the actual range is 1-10, meaning 0.5-5 stars). But it shouldn't be hard to modify.

[nephros]

As the original forum thread is partially about removing/preventing "bad" packages, how should that be handled?

Do we want a special "request removal" capability for users? (This is probably needed if there is a star system, as there's no clear way to give a negative vote. i.e. Zero stars means "i didn't like this", but not necessarily "this app caused my cat to vomit for a week, and it should be removed")

In rating with a negative score, there could be an automatism where once a treshold is reached, something happens, e.g. an issue is opened here, or emails sent to Chum and package maintainers.

[RikudouSage]

Well, you could do the same except you watch for score of 1 or 2 stars, people do -1 because they didn't like something as well, there's never a good way to determine whether someone just disliked a thing or it doesn't work. But I'm not really opposed to changing it to a capped sum instead of an average.

As for what should happen once some kind of threshold is reached, that would be up to you. Issue in this repository sounds fine to me, but if you'd prefer an email, that's also doable.

[Sefriol]

I have personally thought about this for other projects. I think Steam has a great compromise: Do you recommend this product or app? You can then browse the history of reviews for the app. Rotten Tomatoes uses similar scoring as well. Do you recommend others to watch this movie?

This kind of model has great support for many other features that you can do, while keeping things simple. It is also easy to understand. In different cultures, star-ratings can be completely different from each other.

This kind of history view is really useful. For example, if there is a lot of negative reviews on certain dates (let's say a bad update), you can easily see what people are complaining about by clicking the red bar on that day.

[RikudouSage]

@nephros Any update here? Anything I can do to move this forward?

[nephros]

I hope @piggz and @rinigus could share their thoughts on this as well.

I could start work on the UI side of things but would like some more discussion on what we actually want to do here.

That being said, much appreciated that you took on the API side so quickly and try to move things ahead..

[RikudouSage]

Hope so too!

[RikudouSage]

So, any chance someone's gonna look at it to see if it's okay to implement like this or not? Or shall I stop asking? Currently I don't really know what, if anything, is happening with this.

If you tell me you don't have the time/mood for that, that's fine as well, it's just that currently I have no idea what's next.

[RikudouSage]

Any progress here?

[rinigus]

Sorry for delay - swamped with another project and haven't had much thoughts on it. I personally would like to avoid any extra APIs or any extra places in addition to software repo feedback mechanisms that are in place already. For software at Github, for example: issues and stars awarded there. Places like Jolla Store with the comments written there are basically something that users see, but developers may not. If software is supporting not just SFOS but something else, it just takes too much time to start hunting all rants in different feedback sites.

Hence, Chum Gui supports Github and Gitlab API to pull issues, releases, and ranking from there. I find that it allows developers to focus on one channel that is central for development as well.

Now, if there is a desire to add new ranking system by all the users then its up to ones feeling its a great idea to implement and maintain it. I guess it would require some backend - something we managed to avoid before with Chum. Or almost managed to avoid - have some helper page for Chum install. Just if implementing such extra system, please keep intact github/gitlab integration and keep it as a prominent channel for getting this info in GUI.