I've been sitting on the new version of WOT for a little while now, after having been invited to the beta-test team (thanks guys!) on April 15. Almost a week has gone by (well, five days), and I feel I have played around with it enough to form a reasonably complete opinion.

The Good

First of all, I'd like to say that the new rating icon is wonderful and much better than the one in the previous version. That little bust (it was head and shoulders, to be precise) was really difficult to use, since there was no centerline to judge from. The dot is much easier to use!

The rating bar now changes from appearing convex to appearing concave when you rate that particular component. (One could also say it dims, but either description works, in my opinion.) It makes a good at-a-glance indicator of whether or not a particular category will carry your input. There is also a message displayed beneath each component's bar if your rating differs from the averaged value from other WOT users, enticing you to leave a comment on the site.

That brings me to a little sidebar here. The WOT site has undergone a major overhaul, now appearing much more like McAfee SiteAdvisor's (rel="nofollow"; sorry, McAfee) in the information provided. The new website scorecard feature is what I'm talking about. There is data on popularity, a link to the WHOIS entry for that domain, detailed rating information with graphics that mirror the add-on's rating popup, and a section for comments and (something SiteAdvisor doesn't do) references.

This new "references" feature is particularly interesting. It takes mentions of a site from Digg, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, and a multitude of other places and displays a summary of that activity right on the domain's scorecard. Sites mentioned in Wikipedia, for example, are rather unlikely to be bad; domains bookmarked on del.icio.us or submitted to Digg are much less likely to be spam. I think it's an especially good new feature.

Besides the "references", the comments provide a space for users to provide free-form feedback about the site. There are a bunch of categories to place your comment in, ranging from "Useful, informative" and "Entertaining" to "Spam" and "Browser exploit". The categories of comments are summarized and graphed (!) above the comment display area to give a general idea of the overall user feel for the site.

The Not-Quite-Perfect

With all these improvements, it's hard to imagine that there could be things missing, but there are. (Hey, I'm not paid to write this. I can say whatever I want!

Most importantly, I would like to see a way for webmasters such as myself to claim their sites. That is one thing I think McAfee SiteAdvisor does well. In fact, it would be doubly useful if WOT allowed verification via <meta /> tags in the site header as an alternative to file upload. Google Webmaster Tools (or Google Sitemaps, as it was called before) has both options, and for free hosts that don't allow file uploads (<cough>Blogger</cough>) the meta tag option is very useful.

Now that I think more about it, the only other thing I can think of is a minor interface change. In the old version of WOT, clicking in the border to the side of a rating bar caused a rating of 100 or 0, but now those ratings are difficult to enter as the borders are no longer clickable areas. If there's still time, I'd love to have that back. For some sites, a rating of 97 or 4 is insufficient.

The Optimistic Conclusion

All told, the WOT 3.0 upgrade is definitely worthwhile. You can grab the update from the beta page if you don't want to wait for the release. With the last two updates, I'm looking forward to WOT 4.0 coming out, whenever that happens. What will they think of next?

Update (04/23): Sami Tolvanen, one of the WOT founders, comments below that the clickable borders have been restored in the latest version of WOT 3.0, which is also now out of beta. Thanks for letting me know, Sami; and you're quite welcome for the review.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2012 by dgw / voyagerfan5761

WOT 3.0 will include comments and a plethora of details on sites rated using the add-on, including categorization, popularity, server location (country), and a direct WHOIS lookup link. It sounds even more impressive than the last upgrade. I'm excited!

I'm not sure how I found the WOT site, but when I first started using the extension, all it did was rate sites on four different categories (trustworthiness, privacy, child safety, and vendor reliability). Since then, it has expanded exponentially. The features introduced in the upcoming upgrade appear to rival, and may even surpass, McAfee SiteAdvisor, which is the extension I used before WOT (and dropped in large part because of the increased marketing after the McAfee acquisition).

I'm going to have to start rating sites some more; they say the top 500 most active users will be given the opportunity to test a pre-release version of the new WOT in the next few weeks. My site-rating activity has dropped recently, partly because I'm not visiting as many new sites and partly because I'm usually focused on something besides website ratings. I need to change that mindset.

Update (04/20): I was invited to beta-test on April 15, and I've just published my review of the new WOT 3.0 today.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2012 by dgw / voyagerfan5761

So, as promised, here's my run-down of new features and changes in the latest WOT release.

First, the interface has undergone a major overhaul (sound familiar?). The rating bars are bigger, and now have distinctly colored rating blocks instead of a full-length gradient. I do like that; it makes ratings easier to figure out. What I don't like is the fact that the indicator of your own current rating is about 40 pixels wide, plus arrows on both sides, with no indication of where, exactly, it's pointing. A comment from a WOT developer on the original "just around the corner" post on the WOT Blog says they might change the rating icon later now that they've thought more about it, but it's too late to change the new release. I can live with the icon for a while, I think; it's not too bad.

I notice that the settings and guide links from the WOT rating popup now open in a new tab, as I suggested. Thanks, guys!

Let's see... I covered the category renaming in my last post, so all that remains are the settings.

The settings, as you may have gathered, don't open in a window, as is typical of most Firefox add-ons. They are their own page, located at (for now, at any rate) chrome://wot/locale/settings.html (only try in Firefox with the add-on installed). An interesting approach, but not entirely unheard of. Since the URL is part of Firefox's chrome, it can issue commands to the browser, changing the settings of the add-on.

There are several sections to the settings, including a Guide tab, which provides a basic explanation of what the functions are and how to use them. Next is Ratings, which allows the user to disable any of the three subordinate categories if they choose to ignore them. Warnings are, for now, limited to pre-configured levels, and blocking is not available for the moment (it was in the old version, but will not be re-launched until the WOT website revamping is complete). Component warning thresholds can be changed only simultaneously.

The Searching tab configures what sites WOT should display ratings icons on; and the Pop-up tab, whether to include popup details. There is no custom site function for inline ratings display yet, but I do not even utilize all the default sites, much less have a current need for such a feature. It is likely on the long-term development list.

The Advanced tab configures Automatic Updates (on/off), automatic login to mywot.com, and an option to automatically recreate the toolbar button if it is somehow removed. All options default to on. Additionally, a list of hostnames to ignore can be specified on this tab, defaulting to "localhost, 127.0.0.1", for which ratings would be unreliable as they refer to the local machine. All in all, it's a very impressive development, and I look forward to the release of the revamped MyWOT.com website, which will undoubtedly feature more additions and enhancements.

Update (2009-12-10): Thanks to a plugin on my new WordPress site, I noticed that the blog links in this and the previous post were broken, as were the redirects put in place by MyWOT.com. I emailed them and got the updated links; finally, they work again.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2012 by dgw / voyagerfan5761

WOT (identified in about:config parameters as "weboftrust") is a browser add-on (currently for Firefox only, but an Internet Explorer version is coming soon [scroll down]) that provides ratings for websites you visit. Think of it as an entirely user-driven McAfee SiteAdvisor (don't bother asking about them, please; not worth the time because of all that marketing).

Sites are rated in four categories: Trustworthiness, Vendor Reliability, Privacy, and Child Safety. I'll cover the old and new interfaces once I manage to get my hands on the final version of the new release -- the server is currently returning a 404 for the file not a 404; it was a Firefox cache issue -- but this gives a very comprehensive rating of the sites you visit.

The categories are pretty self-explanatory, but I'll briefly summarize. Trustworthiness is pretty much an overall rating. Vendor Reliability gives you an opportunity to rate how well the site conducts business. Privacy shows how well the site keeps your information secret. Finally, Child Safety gives a filter for adult content. These categories translate to the old "How trustworthy is domain.tld? As a business partner? As a keeper of personal information? As a safe destination for children?" categories, and the ratings from those days have of course been saved; the renamings are purely cosmetics- and usability-related.

I've been holding a preview release of WOT under my keyboard for a few days now, and I gave some feedback to the developers, which was hopefully acted upon. I saw one other user in the comments to the "just around the corner" post who mentioned the preview, leading me to believe the pre-release community was very small. As a personal shout-out to Sami and the rest of the WOT team, I am honored that they chose me as a tester.

Stay tuned for another post on the changes and enhancements in the new WOT, plus some additional feedback (hope you've got your eyes peeled, WOT Team) and a run-down of the last few days' discussion in the WOT Blog comments.

Update (2008-03-19): I definitely dropped the ball on this. WOT for Internet Explorer has been available since December. Whoops...

Update (2009-12-10): Thanks to a plugin on my new WordPress site, I noticed that the blog links in this and the next post were broken, as were the redirects put in place by MyWOT.com. I emailed them and got the updated links; finally, they work again.

Originally published at Technobabbles
Content copyright © 2006-2012 by dgw / voyagerfan5761