Goodreads Starry Update

[jacey]

Five stars to Goodreads for their customer service. Yesterday I queried and today got this email.

"We did recently migrate our database to bigger servers, and that change did cause some unexpected problems. One of the errors that we noticed at the time was that some ratings weren't being updated automatically and we had to manually update it. Unfortunately, this did cause some confusion around ratings at the time and I'm sorry if you were affected by this.

"Zero star ratings have never been an option on Goodreads and I'm sorry that it affected you in this way. We have since solved all the problems that was caused by the move, so it definitely shouldn't happen again."

So that should be OK now, right?

Comments

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

That is a very good example of "Wait, what did you say and how does it relate to the issue I raised really?"

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I did check and it is fixed, so that's good.

[maeve-the-red.livejournal.com]

Hmm, if 'zero ratings have never been an option on Goodreads' then why, when I posted all those reviews without putting in a star rating, did Goodreads never once give me an error message?

Rhetorical question. I've starred 'em all now.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I think what they mean is that you can't rate a book with zero stars, but you can choose not to rate a book - and the fact that a non-starred review was manifesting as a zero stars review was a blip in the system due to an error in the migration of a database. Since I have no evidence that this is otherwise I presume the empirical evidence that (for the time that I checked) non-starred = zero-starred must now be regarded as something that has been fixed. The time period over which it happened is unknown.