The reputations tell you how much people trust websites. While websites that contain malware often have a poor reputation, we only rate hostnames and don't have any intention of trying to replace the protection provided by antivirus software. It's certainly possible for a file hosting service, for example, to contain malicious files but still have a good reputation should people find the service itself trustworthy.

Comments can easily appear to conflict with the reputation, because leaving comments is optional and in our experience, people who disagree with the reputation are far more likely to write a comment than others. This means that comments often give you a very biased or at least polarized view of people's opinions. We use only ratings to determine whether the reputation is controversial, because it's usually impossible to determine this from comments. For example, while the comments for facebook.com appear to be mostly negative, the site's reputation is not even close to being controversial as the vast majority of the ~200k unique ratings we have for the site are positive. As a result, we don't have plans to add a separate indicator for comments, because we feel it wouldn't provide the user reliable information.

The add-on shows our users a confidence indicator, which tells them how reliable a reputation is, and shows warnings only when we consider the reputation to be reliable enough. Typically when a website's reputation is poor and its confidence has reached the warning threshold, there are also comments in the scorecard that provide additional information about the reasons behind the ratings. Of course, it's quite possible for a site to have a poor reputation without anyone explaining why they rated it poorly. Since we cannot force anyone to reveal the reasons why they don't trust a website, there's very little we can do to dig up more information. Should you come across a website that you feel is poorly rated for a reason you cannot fathom, it's best to post about it on our forum and have other people to review the site again. Most often in these cases the site has been blacklisted by a third-party source and there haven't been enough new ratings to significantly change the reputation.

We are continuously analyzing and improving our algorithms and other systems to improve reputation quality. We are confident that our approach for measuring trust instead of technical safety alone is something that will become even more important in future.

Commenting is not disabled, only comment voting. This is done automatically when the reputation is controversial to prevent one side of an argument from suppressing other opinions. You can still write comments, but not vote for them. This doesn't prevent anyone from having their say, if they so choose, it only prevents them from silencing others.

We're often compared to services that use automated scanning, but we are not directly competing with them. Computers are good and impartial at detecting technical threats, but are also happy to let you fall for scams. They don't warn you about unreliable web shops, rogue pharmacies that sell you counterfeit drugs, pyramid schemes, or countless other scams that are promoted on the web as we speak. Seeing how much other people trust websites can be extremely helpful when you are trying to decide whether to interact with a site you don't know.