The problem is that the ratings don’t have much significance. When packages only have one or two ratings, it may very well be that the person that did the rating didn’t read the documentation), didn’t sincerely try for an adequate time to learn to use the app, expected something else, was mistaken, had a bad day, or any other of a plethora of possible reasons for a bad rating.
The only solution is to get more ratings. But why would people start rating now, after 7 or 8 years of HaikuDepot…
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Is this a sincere question?
Btw.: I still waiting for the “date added” column
^^ It’s still on the radar. I need to get the compile “clean” before I do anything else.
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Having to create an account to rate packages is not really incentive. If people could use the same credentials for Trac, this forum and HaikuDepot, it would certainly help a bit but I doubt that it would make a big difference, people are lazy, me first.
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It is the same Username and Password as in HaikuDepot server. Once used it is stored and you can use it over and over without logging in again!
It’s a rhetorical question. It’s another way of stating the fact that extremely few people rated/commented in the past and they still don’t now.
What you just mentioned has been on the cards for a while now (it’s known as a "single sign-on system), but no one has volunteered to set up such a system - the page below mentions it under the “Infrastructure Maintenance” section:
I don’t know much about this but I’m assuming OAuth or something similar will have to be set up on Trac, HaikuDepot and the Forums to make this happen.
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There was work on single sign on already, but it will probably be done with a single auth db instead, which means you still have to sign in to the different services, but can use the same credentials.
(for my part I am eagerly awaiting to use gerrit)
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Early on there was some discussions about having an SSO solution, but alas nobody had the time to deal with it properly and so the identity systems are fragmented. There was talk recently about deploying KeyClock for this purpose, but again it comes down to somebody having the time. If there were a firm commitment by somebody to own the KeyCloak roll-out then I would start to spend some time figuring out how I could get HDS working with it, but it would probably take quite a while.
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Maybe the User should login to Haiku Depot?
After login the user will gain access to non featured and new Software?
This way the User can vote easy then?
I think that the only thing that could make people more participating in this would be to turn software into voteware. You don’t vote; it stops working. 
More seriously, voting in the installation app isn’t intuitive. If you are on a specific software page, it is because you want to install it or to remove it. Before, you don’t even know if that soft works and after, people have made their mind up and they don’t want to hear of it. It would be better to ask that in the app and add a reminder but it wouldn’t work with non-Haiku apps… I fear that there’s no good solution.
spelled Keycloak 
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KeyCloak seems like a great solution, but as you said we need someone who has the time to set it up and test it etc. Unfortunately I don’t have much technical knowledge regarding Haiku’s web infrastructure so I personally can’t help out much.
What about counting the downloads as a first start?
The requests to download packages’ HPKGs don’t go through HDS so there is no mechanism to count installs of packages. Repositories are designed to be mirrored or distributed on a different media such as DVD and operate “stand alone”.
I feel like counting downloads is a useful metric and it could be done within Haiku by pinging some central service (such as Haiku Depot Service, of course) when packages are downloaded. Or some other simple metrics service could be set up. This way where packages come from doesn’t matter, just that a particular package was downloaded from somewhere within Haiku.
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Where exactly have I as a user agreed to this method of tracking my activity?
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I wondered if someone would object with that sort of argument. I get it, I don’t like tracking and modern operating systems have gotten terrible for that.
But download stats are a very useful metric for various reasons, and can be done completely anonymously, and furthermore if we add something like this, it can be opt-out. In the past I frequently used the BeBits download stats to gauge popularity and given the apparent state of user reviews in HaikuDepot, anonymous download stats could be useful.
Either way someone has to implement this and so far it is just the idea stage. But you are kind of an outlier on this things nephele. All the code for this can be open source to prove nothing is being tracked but overall maybe you should have more trust in the Haiku developers to do this in a way where it also won’t track us?
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There is no tracking that can be done completely anonymously, even if you anonimise the dataset later it is trivial to correlate downloads of less downloaded packages with e.g forum posts about software, that should never be possible.
An opt-out is a user hostile setting Imo, if anything you can add an Opt-in, the popcon of debian is a good example of this, as a user i get asked and if i don’t want it that is the end of it. ( https://popcon.debian.org/ )
If users don’t care enough to review software just replacing that with tracking isn’t a good option in my opinion.
[quote=“leavengood, post:58, topic:10387”]
Either way someone has to implement this and so far it is just the idea stage. But you are kind of an outlier on this things nephele. All the code for this can be open source to prove nothing is being tracked but overall maybe you should have more trust in the Haiku developers to do this in a way where it also won’t track us? [/quote]
This section reads extremely hostile to me, not sure if that was intentional. You seem to imply that i can’t critize an idea that has no implementation yet, also imply that all developers agree that tracking is usefull and wanted. And then that i wouldn’t trust haiku developers generally, and that I am not a part of that group. Not sure why i bother writing patches.
I also don’t see how I can be an outlier about this topic if the discussion barely even started.
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Yeah sorry, I definitely sounded too hostile to you there, that was not my intention.
You are part of the Haiku developers, but don’t have a GitHub account and refuse to get one, even though that makes life quite difficult for you and others who help post your patches. That is your choice but it is more extreme that many people would be willing to go. That was my main point, maybe your perspective is too far on the no tracking side, whereas the nonsense Microsoft or Apple does is way too far to the insane tracking side. I think maybe Haiku could find a better balance.
I think download stats would be useful, other developers can weigh in here when they get a chance.
I suspect by your standards there is already excessive data being tracked just from people using HaikuDepot or any of the package repos. Therefore I don’t see how incrementing some download numbers is any worse.
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