Version 9.4.1 - About those recipe ratings

On Monday April 29 we released version 9.4.0 which suddenly required a comment, name and email alongside every rating. This change was made because of signals we received that Google did not consider anonymous ratings to be trustworthy anymore. We also felt like this would increase the integrity or recipe ratings overall, as explained in our 9.4.0 release blog post.

This decision was made with the best intentions, but immediate feedback from our users made it clear that we jumped the gun with this change. Today, there is no clear statement from Google that anonymous ratings are actually a problem. Therefore it was not up to us to force this change onto site owners.

After hearing your feedback I decided to introduce new settings in version 9.4.1, released just a day later on Tuesday April 30, that allow you to disable the requirement for a comment, name and or email as you see fit for your own site. They can be found on the WP Recipe Maker > Settings > Star Ratings page.

I do still strongly believe in needing to increase the integrity of recipe ratings (both from what we expect will come from Google and as a frequent visitor of various food blogs myself). Because of that, ratings will now always show up in the comment section, with or without comment text. This allows visitors to see when a rating was given and by whom (although this could be "Anonymous", just like regular comments).

Take note that both the free and Premium/Pro/Elite Bundle will need to be on version 9.4.1 for this change to work.