Negative comments on items from authors.

This issue has come up since the comment system was added 3 or so years ago… good luck

There is one simple solution: education and common sense.
If devs decide to put their dirty hands on comment system, i guess hidden URLS for all except author should be a priority. Just saying…

Enabled said

crozer said

Enabled said
Honestly, it would be great if comments would be disabled for authors all together. Basically, if you purchase the file, you can comment on the item, if you don’t, then contact me through my profile. Simple, clean, elegant, no fuss. Item comments – for item purchases. Need help? Use the contact form on my profile!

Not good at all. That would be just another step a buyer would need to take in order to clear his/her pre-purchase doubts off. A buyer wants to purchase something, has questions, asks them, if they’re answered positively the buyer purchases that item. Forcing them to go to our profile-pages and send us an email (which already implies a more sophisticated sort of text, instead of a simple comment) our sales would go down.

I doubt that someone who WANTS to buy a file will be annoyed by this process. If you want something, you go through the necessary steps to get it. If you want to ask everything there is to know about a file, than perfect for me if you don’t buy it, because that person will probably rate it 1 star anyway because they have no idea what a href stands for!

If you ask me, and this is just my personal 0.02$ it would increase the quality of the marketplaces drastically and also, increase the quality and importance of ratings. Because at the moment, there are files rated 3 stars that deserve 5 and the other way around as well.

This method would remove all unnecessary wow’s off the item comments and would strictly leave the BUYERS discussions. If there is anything that needs to be answered or is asked too many times via email, well, we have a FAQ page don’t we? We can add them there!

My humble opinion as an author!

Yeah, but you’re missing the point. Whether a buyer really wants to purchase something, and sacrifice his/her time to do so, is not the problem. The problem is that Envato won’t take the risk of adding another hurdle and lose money.

crozer said
Yeah, but you’re missing the point. Whether a buyer really wants to purchase something, and sacrifice his/her time to do so, is not the problem. The problem is that Envato won’t take the risk of adding another hurdle and lose money.

haha, not only Envato but even for any author here it would be a risky move. For any critical question from buyer, as long as the author’s answer takes care the issue, it will add more credibility.

As pezflash pointed, we are awaiting for solutions that based on dev team’t work to reduce hassles on comment area. We need more usability on that section rather than adding a lock/opaque that area.

Since the amount of files and authors grow, credibility is more important for buyers recently; and more than ratings, comment section is one of the strong evidence for buyers. One or two offtopic critics from competitor doesn’t going to influence buyer’s decision (benefit of common sense), still the only issue I see with such comments is this could become a trend here.

Enabled said
Honestly, it would be great if comments would be disabled for authors all together. Basically, if you purchase the file, you can comment on the item, if you don’t, then contact me through my profile. Simple, clean, elegant, no fuss.

This could be a great solution for half of the problems. If the member is an author (with minimum 1 file), before purchase the only way they can communicate should be through contact form. Problem solved. However can we expect this much deep features from Envato dev team?! They have one canned reply/excuse for everything “photodune and size of marketplaces”. Lets go back and concentrate on our files.

From my personal experience, I receive anonymous comments (without any badge buyer/paw) asking/complaining alien or out of scope features; what to do with that, complain to where? I just left it to the hands of fate!

VF said
Since the amount of files and authors grow, credibility is more important for buyers recently; and more than ratings, comment section is one of the strong evidence for buyers. One or two offtopic critics from competitor doesn’t going to influence buyer’s decision (benefit of common sense), still the only issue I see with such comments is this could become a trend here.

Indeed. I can’t start to count the number of buyers that told me “reading through your item’s comments, I really see how much effort you put into offering support – so I am confident that I will get great support from now on, too”.

Since support is optional here, authors should be able to simply check a box that turns comments on / off for items. Maybe it should even default to “off” (unchecked) so that it has to be specifically enabled per marketplace / per item?

Many authors already provide alternate means of support off site. Without the comments, buyers will have more incentive to use these alternative means or send an email through any given author’s profile. This might result in better support for the buyer / less frustration? IMO , Envato is enabling such behavior by not giving authors the tools to properly train (force) customers. If authors then choose to use the comments facility anyway, so be it.

electronicpakrat said
Since support is optional here, authors should be able to simply check a box that turns comments on / off for items. Maybe it should even default to “off” (unchecked) so that it has to be specifically enabled per marketplace / per item?...

An author with comments turned off is not going to see a dime of my money. Purchasing his theme is also optional.

CLINE123 said
An author with comments turned off is not going to see a dime of my money. Purchasing his theme is also optional.

That’s certainly your option. I don’t know how common that sort of mentality would be though. Can you provide any clear reasoning for such a seemingly outright dismissal?

To be clear, I’m not advocating the “hiding / disabling” of the comments tab where there aren’t any alternative support avenues but rather only when there are. I might agree with your position though if “better” support avenues weren’t available and the comments tab wasn’t such a mess.

digitalscience said
This issue has come up since the comment system was added 3 or so years ago… good luck

“Its in the Pipeline”…