Not as advertised – Ratings and Review Module

I have chosen BD Plugin viewing their website and feature list. For any business directory, Reviews are the key element for engaging visitors and establishing authority.

However, when I implemented Business Directory Ratings, I came across significant bugs and missing features as below:

1. When “Require email to unregistered users for Posting reviews” is enabled, The Ratings straightaway got published without email link verification to an unregistered user. This would attract spam reviews with invalid email ids.

Also, there is no recaptcha option for the Ratings Form in recaptcha tab of BD Plugin.

2. Another important feature why I opted BD Directory was “The ratings display in Google search results! Rate on custom options like Service, Food Quality, Atmosphere…whatever you want!” (from their website under Ratings and Reviews Feature Heading)

However, I learned there are errors in some Google Snippet (structured data) Compatibility like Author field has not Type associated with it. It generates error in Google Search Console.

More importantly, Average Ratings for the listing is not displayed on Google as I think the Field is not set for Google Structured Data Snippet.

Lastly, as per your website, there is no option to add custom options in Feedback Forms. The user can only rate on overall basis and not on various aspects which are predefined.

3. For a Large Directory, It would be beneficial to have an interface to list all Ratings posted on the website.

Without the above The Directory Owner would never come to about how many ratings are there in total on the business directory.

Also managing the ratings would be easy if there is an interface in the admin area.

It would be really cumbersome to visit each listing to manage the ratings for that listing. Visualise if the directory has 1,00,000 Listings.

Overall, Ratings and Reviews, the most important feature needs immediate attention to address above shortcomings.