The current guidelines for commercial products state that “Reviews of plugins and themes are to be limited to the functionality of the plugin or theme hosted on WordPress.org”. Therefore, moderators should remove reviews that discuss commercial versions and educate reviewers approrpriately.
Unfortunately, we usually only see commercial reviews when they’re pointed out, via the report topic tool, by developers/authors. More unfortunately, I’ve noticed that such reports occur, in the vast majority, for one star reviews. I have never seen a five star review reported.
As a result, we are removing one-star reviews and leaving the non-reported ones alone. This skews the average rating by limiting the distribution of stars to the higher levels.
I propose that we revise our guideline to say that reviews of commercial plugins/themes are acceptable on wordpress.org when such reviews discuss functionality or user-facing features. Reviews that are essentially payment disputes or support extortion would continue to be archived, with a reply that such disputes should be handled via private email.
