Roku Developer Program

[EnTerr]

Today i noticed something - four days ago my app had 66 ratings, now it has 65. How is that possible?

I know "accounts installed" can vary up and down based on how many people are retaining a channel in their lineup. But ratings? I have looked for a way to "retract" my vote before and there isn't any. Thus it seems to me the number of votes should be a strictly non-decreasing (or "monotonically increasing") function. What could cause a decrement?

[JeffHaas]

I've observed the same thing. My assumption is someone gave your channel a rating, then later deletes the channel thus taking the rating with it.

Anyone care to confirm my guess?

[EnTerr]

"JeffHaas" wrote:
I've observed the same thing. My assumption is someone gave your channel a rating, then later deletes the channel thus taking the rating with it.

Anyone care to confirm my guess?

Possibly - albeit strange behavior, isn't it?
Besides the technical difficulty of back-pedaling ratings, that would be like Netflix removing ratings for a movie I haven't watched recently. And if I hated a movie, why should I watch it again to rate it?

I'll try testing this hypothesis now by rating my channel, taking count - then deleting channel from account and taking count again, then maybe adding again etc. Will likely have to wait half a day between each step for count updates

[sjb64]

Roku has a pretty strongly worded rule against storing box serial numbers, so if a user deletes a channel, all information is deleted permanently from any storage, anywhere. If they are following that same rule deleting all information, and delete their account/app record, which it looks by the count decrementing they might just do, and if they store our ratings in that same account/app record, which would make sense datawise, the ratings would drop just like you both saw. My two cents...

[EnTerr]

"sjb64" wrote:
Roku has a pretty strongly worded rule against storing box serial numbers, so if a user deletes a channel, all information is deleted permanently from any storage, anywhere. If they are following that same rule deleting all information, and delete their account/app record, which it looks by the count decrementing they might just do, and if they store our ratings in that same account/app record, which would make sense datawise, the ratings would drop just like you both saw. My two cents...

Of course they don't follow the same policy... "Do what I say, not what I do". A tad more seriously, there are reasons for not wanting to tie to hardware id (like switching accounts/owners or progress portability).

In practical terms, Roku do not delete one's voting record on channel removal. Which I know by voting, deleting, re-adding - and channel info shows my vote again (whether counted is TBD, per above)

[TheEndless]

"sjb64" wrote:
Roku has a pretty strongly worded rule against storing box serial numbers, so if a user deletes a channel, all information is deleted permanently from any storage, anywhere. If they are following that same rule deleting all information, and delete their account/app record, which it looks by the count decrementing they might just do, and if they store our ratings in that same account/app record, which would make sense datawise, the ratings would drop just like you both saw. My two cents...

Channels are tied to an account, not a specific box, so the serial number would never come into play.

[EnTerr]

"EnTerr" wrote:

"JeffHaas" wrote:
... My assumption is someone gave your channel a rating, then later deletes the channel thus taking the rating with it. Anyone care to confirm my guess?

... I'll try testing this hypothesis now

Yes - seems your guess was right and removing a channel removes one's opinion on it.

[TheEndless]

"EnTerr" wrote:

"EnTerr" wrote:

"JeffHaas" wrote:
... My assumption is someone gave your channel a rating, then later deletes the channel thus taking the rating with it. Anyone care to confirm my guess?

... I'll try testing this hypothesis now

Yes - seems your guess was right and removing a channel removes one's opinion on it.

That sounds like a bug to me. If that's intentional, it would mean the ratings would be skewed toward the higher end, since I can't imagine too many people will keep channels installed that they've given a low rating.

[sjb64]

"TheEndless" wrote:
Channels are tied to an account, not a specific box, so the serial number would never come into play.

I know, I was using that just as a reference to their deletion policy, that if they followed the same mindset with channel deletion from an account, ratings would vanish. Could have worded it better, but regardless was only a guess.

[EnTerr]

"TheEndless" wrote:
That sounds like a bug to me. If that's intentional, it would mean the ratings would be skewed toward the higher end, since I can't imagine too many people will keep channels installed that they've given a low rating.

It stacks the card deck, yes. But can't imagine it being a bug - subtracting a vote is an extra step to do and very unlikely to happen as unintended side effect. I suspect is an intentional "feature".