Bug in sorting of themes and templates (date added)

Hi

I released a theme last week(https://www.nopcommerce.com/p/1182/wero-fashion-theme.aspx) and ended up on page 2 position 18 eventhough it was the newest released theme.

Yesterday nop-templates.com releases a new template and it´s on page 1 and position 1.

There must be a bug somewhere or how is it possible?

Hi Tommy,

There is no any bug. Several months ago a default sorting was changed. There were too many themes with bad or some average quality on the first pages. But some really great themes were on pages 7 or 10. The community should see the most quality and popular themes on the first two pages. That's why all themes were manually resorted based on quality, ratings, popularity. Now some of latest themes could appear even on the pages 5-6 if it's quality is not as great as the themes on the first two pages. Also a lot of existing themes were just deleted (didn't meet minimum quality requirements - just basic color changes and new slider images).

The same happened with Wero fashion theme. It moved to the page 2. And I can surely say that it's a good result.

P.S. The same periodically happens with other extension categories
P.P.S. Maybe, it's better to rename "sort by position (date added) to just "sort by position". So it won't confuse some users or extension/theme developers

Hi Andrei

Thanks for the explanation.

I will recommend you concider that some small developers can be caught here, I have seen good themes get a very low rating after few hours in public. I think a rating should not be anonymous because it´s so easy to give low ratings without any comments to the developer. I can´t use a rating of 1 star if I don´t get any feedback why it´s rated like this, is it because the colors are wrong the Pictures are ugly or ??

Mandatory feedback when rating will lift the quality and that will be a benefit for developers and users :-)

I've just also created a work item. Please find and for for it here (Track number of installations of third-party plugins. It can be used for "sort by downloads" option on the official site)

Good intentions, but could be considered a bit intrusive (big brother :))  Only you will know specifically which ip/url/store/etc. has which plugins running.

Do trials count?  What happens if plugin gets uninstalled; does that decrement the count?  Will a store owner be able to turn it off?


(P.S.  most don't even realize you're watching now ... every time store owner uses the Admin page the "NopCommerce News" on the right hand side will hit nopCommerce.com with your ip/url/version)

New York wrote:
We won't publicly share what URL/IP/Store has some particular plugin installed. Furthermore, please note that I'm trying to find a way to don't store URL or IP. Each nopCommerce installation should have its own GUID which cannot be edited. So no sensitive data will be sent to the official site. It’ll be just the plugin system name and some application installation GUID. No site URL or IP will be sent. I’m just thinking about how it could be implemented (no idea yet).

New York wrote:
Yes, any plugin installation will count.
No decrements will be.
Sure, let a store owner to disable this counting

New York wrote:


P.S. I also don't like this idea or association of "big brother". But how else can we properly sort themes and plugins by its popularity? I mean not just reviews. There should be a way to gather my statistics about number of plugin installations. Just a plugin name and number of installations. A store URL is not required at all, but it allows to ensure that no "fake" installation data will be sent to the official site in order to "pop up" some plugins. Any ideas?

Hi Guys,

Except for the big brother effect, I think that the remote access, the keys management and the open source nature of the system makes this mechanism very much prone to problems and abuse but again I might be wrong.

However I do see one problem with the statistics. Many companies buy extensions, and their websites never go live. They just use them on a test or development server somewhere. And then for all sorts of reasons the website does not go live.
So the question is do these count to the popularity score or not, because the extensions were bought or downloaded after all.

Another problem I see is that the popularity score will map one-to-one with the sales of the extension. It feels wrong for this information to be available outside the vendor company. Or at least it needs to be available to only nopCommerce.

I think that there are two other approaches that could be worth a look.

1. Count the number of the download link clicks on the extension page. This would require a certain mechanism of preventing abuse. IP checks, frequency of clicks, disproportionate scores, etc. Magento use this approach on their Connect market place. Still I could spot a post by Magento themselves saying that they have detected abuse and are working to restore scores of certain extensions. I also read posts by vendors reporting bugs with the popularity score. So it is not something that could be made bullet-proof but with time could be adjusted and improved.

2. Another slightly more sophisticated approach and I believe the mobile app stores use it is to calculate popularity score based on certain Google Analytics or whatever service they are using metrics. This would be unique visits to the extension, unique clicks to the download link, keyword position for the vendor website or the extension page, keywords could be nopCommerce or the name of the extension or nopCommerce plugin\extension, links to the vendor website or the page of the extension, whatever meaningful data there could be in the Analytics API to show if the extension is popular or not.
If customer location is taken into account maybe there could be a popularity score for every country or region and a different sorting of the extensions could be presented based on location. For example if I am from the UK I would like to see UK payment modules and language packs first or extensions that are popular with UK customers of nopCommerce.

This approach also has the added benefit of having the vendors work more on their SEO and thus popularizing nopCommerce more.

I did research if there is a service that offers a general popularity score plugin or if there is a market place similar to nopCommerce that has a good one and I don't think there is a straightforward solution to this.

Just my thoughts, hope you find them useful!

Nop-Templates.com wrote:
My 2 cents:
1) The wording for sorting by "Position" is not very clear, it should be something like "Relevance", "Popularity", etc.

2)In the categories add one "All Extensions" sorted by Date Added so everyone who check whats new in Nop could eassy finde all new extensions/themes:

NOPCOMMERCE EXTENSIONS
Language Packs
Payment Modules
Shipping Modules
Templates and Themes
Other
All Extensions

3) As well said by Nop-Templates any mechanism or, specially if it is made public, is very much prone to problems and abuse. Another formula to define the relevance is to use Google search. They are the experts in finding the relevance of things and in protecting against cheating and abuse, and they do not publish their formulas, which by the way are changed and improved permanently. Try these focused searches and they seem to give some results for relevance:
"Home > Downloads > Extensions and themes > Language Packs  >" "nopCommerce 3.20" site:nopcommerce.com
"Home > Downloads > Extensions and themes > Payment Modules  >" "nopCommerce 3.20" site:nopcommerce.com
"Home > Downloads > Extensions and themes >  Shipping Modules   >" "nopCommerce 3.20" site:nopcommerce.com
"Home > Downloads > Extensions and themes > Templates and Themes >" "nopCommerce 3.20" site:nopcommerce.com
"Home > Downloads > Extensions and themes > Other >" "nopCommerce 3.20" site:nopcommerce.com