Scorecard
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The scorecard contains everything you need to know about a website, domain name, or IP.
Scorecard colors
To help bridge across language barriers, colors are used for immediate identification of the overall Trustworthiness (reputation) of a website. The color range is:
| Reputation | Color and symbol | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Excellent |  = dark green
|
This site has an excellent reputation and the community considers it a safe and pleasant experience. |
| Good |  = light green
|
This site has a good reputation. Sites in this category may contain adult content, mass advertising, or other advertising/adult content. |
| Unsatisfactory |  = yellow
|
Cautionary advisory, unsatisfactory or mixed ratings. |
| Poor |  = orange
|
This site has a poor reputation. Use sites in this category with caution. Avoid downloading untrusted files. |
| Very poor |  = red
|
This site has a very poor reputation. Unless you trust the site owner, don't click links or enter personal or financial information. The add-on will bring up the warning screen, or blocking screen, when settings are at their default values. |
| Unrated |  = grey
|
There are not enough ratings to compute a reputation for this website, as referenced by the example scorecard provided.
|
Though we see colors to make our testimonial easier, WOT translates these colors to numbers and with using statistical analysis to compute the individual reputation values that, when combined, generate the website's overall Trustworthiness.
Scorecard components
The scorecard consists of several components that dynamically retrieves the information presented to you. A quick list of these components are as follows:
- Thumbnail
- Site name
- Popularity
- Owner
- Server location
- Description
- Tags
- Reputation rating:
- The Rating Categories:
- Comments:
- Add / Request
- Comment categories
- Comment listing
- Share with a friend
Thumbnail
The thumbnail is a captured image of the index page of a website. The purpose is to help visually identify the site in revue.
The image may be clear or it may be blurred depending upon the rating level of the Child Safety indicator. When there are poor to very poor ratings for child safety, the image is blurred to prevent viewing of possible pornographic material. The provided image displays both clear and blurred areas for example.
note: some images may not be blurred even though Child Safety ratings are poor, this is because the image was manually approved by WOT Staff
This image is updated every 60 days, although for less popular sites it might take longer for the image to be updated. If you've changed your site design and notice a conflict, don't worry WOT will catch up in due time.
Site name
Self-explanatory, the Site Name is the domain name or IP address of the website being rated. This also includes sub domains, for example: subdomain.example.com.
The Scorecard URL generally incorporates the site name, but in certain cases it does not.
Twitter profiles may be rated in WOT and are given special names for URLs, while the site name remains for scorecard display. For example: twitter.com/Web_of_Trust scorecard's URL is:
http://www.mywot.com/scorecard/_p_k5swex3pmzpvi4tvon2a.twitter.com.
Owner
The owner information is provided with a whois (Wikipedia) courtesy link. Currently, the service of choice is with whois.domaintools.com.
Server location
For easy visual reference, mini country flags are displayed along with the country name to give you an idea of the location of the web server that the website is hosted on. The example image shows mywot.com which is hosted in Finland.
Domains sitting on multiple IP's will display the country image when all IP's share the same country as location. When multiple IP's are referenced and are located in more than one country, the Global icon is used. 
Example
Description
The scorecard obtains the website's description dynamically through the information supplied by the meta tag from within the site's index page. In the event that no description meta tag exists, nothing is displayed. This information is updated every 60 days.
An example of a description meta tag:
<meta name="description" content="WOT is a Free Internet Security addon for Firefox and IE that warns you about online scams and risky websites that try to deliver malware or send spam." />
To manually edit a site's description that displays on the site's scorecard, the site owner must be a registered user where they can submit the site into their user profile via the My Sites section. The site then requires verification, proving that you have root access (owner / administrator), after which the description may be changed, overriding the current META tag information.
Tags
Just like Description, tags are dynamically retrieved information through the value supplied to the meta tag keywords. This information is also updated every 60 days.
An example of a keyword meta tag:
<meta name="keywords" content="spam, online scams, malware, ie addon, firefox addon, online security, free internet security, web of trust, mywot, wot" />
Reputation rating
Herein lies the heart of WOT where website reputations are entered and the website is deemed to be safe or trusted, cautionary, unsafe or not trustful.
The entries made in this section should be done so in an unbiased way, offering genuinely honest ratings. Ratings are cast by secret ballot assuring your anonymity and maintaining your privacy. Of course, if you decide to make a publicly viewable comment, then people may associate the chosen comment category (green or red) as to how you rated.
Those who try to abuse the rating system eventually get "caught" because their selected ratings differ from the majority of the votes cast; remember WOT is a meritocracy. For more information about how reputational trust is computed, please refer to this blog post on Confidence.
The Reputation Rating section of the website scorecard consists of four rating categories, each consisting of four elements.
The Rating Elements
- The WOT Symbol
displays the current reputation from the aggregated result of all prior ratings.
For more information, please refer to the website support section for WOT symbols - The Rating Description simply identifies the category of the website's reputation that you are rating.
This is a text label that is translated into the language that you have your preferences set to. - The Rating Bar
is how you transfer your experiences with, or opinions of, the website you are rating into the WOT reputation system.
A small white bullet • appears when you choose to edit and hover your mouse over any of the rating bars.
If you have previously rated the site, the bullet is positioned at your last value upon viewing the scorecard.
The rating bar consists of five colorized sections, each represents a group of values that determine the score for the category being rated. These five sections are textually labeled as (from left to right):- Very Poor
- Poor
- Unsatisfactory
- Good
- Excellent
- The Confidence Indicator
Confidence tells you how reliable the rating system considers the reputation. The more small human figures there are next to the reputation, the more reliable it's considered. The add-on uses confidence values as thresholds for warnings. If the confidence is not high enough, you won't see a warning even if the reputation is poor. Also, if the confidence is very low, the site appears as unrated until the confidence reaches the minimum threshold.- See also:
- API::Reputation and confidence
The Rating Categories
— officially explained on the support section of the website and consist of:
Trustworthiness
Can you trust this site? Would you share it with family or friends? Have you had a pleasant experience? Is it worth returning to? If you can answer "yes" to all of these questions, then it is worth rating as Excellent. If you answer "no" to one of these questions, then it is worth rating Good. The lower amount of "yes" answers to these questions, the lower the rating becomes.
Child Safety
Is the website safe for young children? Does it consist of adult related material such as a political forum where participants are engaged in swearing? Is it a gaming site whose age group is for 15 year olds or older? What about a musician's site where the music (and lyrics) are recommended for mature audiences? Does the site contain pornographic material? Base your ratings for this category by asking yourself, "Would I allow my child to access this website?"
Comments
Comments provide more information, but do not affect ratings.
Currently a maximum of one comment using different categories is allowed per scorecard per user, including comments made via the mass rating tool.
Comments were not originally intended to exist and were included based upon user feedback in the early stages of WOT testing. For more detailed commentary concerning comments, please refer to this blog post:
Against textual comments.
Add a comment
Add a comment is displayed on the left side of the Scorecard at the top of the Comment section. Clicking it toggles the opening or closing of the Add Comment subsection.
When entering a comment for a website you are presented with two elements both of which are required to save your comment. These are the comment category and the comment text.
The comment category is a menu where you decide which classification you would like your comment associated with. The current selections available are:
Good site
Online tracking
Misleading claims or unethical
Malware or viruses
When writing your comments, please consider the following:
- Be objective and truthful. Useful comments include not only whether you liked or disliked a site, service or product, but also why.
- Differentiate between the technical safety of the site and the content
- Support your assertions or statements
- Try to keep it short, but focused
- Tue 18 Feb 2014
- Introducing the incorporation of hashtags in comments
Comment listing
As comments are made they appear in list form displayed as single line entries. Clicking on the comment opens its entirety. As the author of the comment, you have the options of editing or deleting your comment.
Locked scorecards
Scorecards are a component of the WOT website and may be locked when certain abuse is detected (through the website). When a scorecard is locked, you'll see a notification stating:
Comment votes have been disabled for this site
and/or
Commenting has been temporarily disabled due to unusual behavior or unwanted activity.
Though rating via the scorecard has been disabled, comments are allowed unless otherwise notified.
You may still rate domains having a locked scorecard through the add-on by using the toolbar pop-up rating window.
