❗️**Announcement** Course ratings suddenly dropped or dissapeared❗️
Comments
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Any update on the same? My courses went to 0 or 1 ratings as well. Some jumped to 5 too.
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is Udemy looking to pay some compensation to the impacted instructors as this has caused much lesser enrolments and leaves a bad impression of the course and instructor ratings
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hi Udemy team , any update on this . multiple courses of mine got impacted AND one course had all its reviews wiped out ! .. this is seriously impacting revenue for instructors. At least provide a timeline for this
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This still isn't fixed after 4 days. Rather than just posting an announcement saying it's being worked on, why not give some timescales?
I'm just waiting for the next development where the 'fix' doesn't restore the previous rating scores but actually causes more problems.
If Udemy can't work out what's wrong with their own ratings system/algorithm (which has never been transparent), they should just run a update over all courses and update the ratings based on the all time average, and maintain this until a longer term 'better' approach is agreed.
They should then engage with the instructor community over a long term approach which is fair to students and instructors, but deals with the review bombing that most if not all instructors have experienced.
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I feel the Current Bug is that if there is a review comment on the course then its considered in Review rating calculation but if there is rating is without comment then its not part of the review rating calculation.
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@AnupD, you may have hit the nail on the head. I have two examples - anecdotal - but that match this.
I've recently launched two courses:
- Public Speaking and Presenting in Finance - multiple reviews between 4.5 and 5 stars. Only one has a comment, which is a 5-star review, and the course went to 5 stars;
- Ultimate Generative Persuasion - has 3 reviews, all of them 4.5 to 5 stars, but none of them has a comment, so if none of them counted, the course would have zero reviews - and it is at 0;
Just my experience, naturally, and a small sample size. But it matches your hypothesis.
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Enrollment gone down drastically since last few days and I am afraid that low rating inturn will invite another low ratings. For example if a user saw a course with low rating then definitely there would be a perception created at the time of enrollment and is very unlikely they would give a higher rating to the course so effectively recent ratings will pull down the actual ratings of the course unnecessarily.
The bug will be resolved eventually but damage is already done since last 5 days. Udemy needs to be transperant as this bug has actually affected the core fundamental pillar (rating & reviews) on which udemy stands tall.
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Even I think what @AnupD has pointed out might hold true, even though it's just a hypothesis but looking at the ratings of some of my courses, seems to be valid.
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I cannot imagine that they’d intentionally include only written comments in average rating calculations. That said, I have zero faith that the company knows what it’s doing at this point.
Makes me even more worried than I was about the whole GenAI implementation coming down the pike.
I guess the org can’t afford a dev environment.
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@ThomasMitchell - I agree with you. I have roughly 40K paid students. One 1 in 5 actually leave a rating. Of those 1 in 5, only 1 in 5 of those leave a review. If my math is correct, about 1 in 25 students leave an actual review. Basing a course rating on that borders on the ridiculous.
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Udemy themselves do not mandate that students should leave written feedback since this will discourage them to provide feedback, so it is a bug, and it is concerning that why they are taking so much time :)
Hope all will be good, many courses became Bestsellers due to this glitch, many others lost the badges and the market is moving!
On personal level, the enrolment trend is the same according to Monday/Tuesday baselines.
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2 of my courses which were 5 stars now show no ratings I have logged 2 tickets with the contact Us and have now sent the screen shots 2 courses showing with no ratings when they should be 5 stars could effect my sales. Any updates yet??
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just saw voider2049 comments that could be what happened to 1 of my courses but the other I only released in July this year and my old ratings have always shown before so not sure why only now they would drop-off also my 4.6 and 4.5 star courses have jumped to 5 stars I'm guessing that will drop down once they fix the issue not complaining about that
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If Anup's theory is true, then is it only valid for written comments within 90 days ?! Because 1 of my slow moving courses has NO rating.
Only written comment ratings within 90 days are counted ... that's a DISASTER !!
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Based on the announcement, Udemy admitted it is a bug. As such, it should be a relatively quick fix, not over a week so far. I suspect it is a simple arithmetic problem. This is ridiculous.
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@SivakamiS2017 I checked this theory of only written reviews being counted and it doesn't match the new 'incorrect' ratings for my established courses - whether you look at reviews for the last 90 days, 180 days or all time. Maybe it does for some people .. but not me.
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That's a relief, Rob. I don't plan on calculating anything until Udemy gives us some concrete info.
This is a showstopper bug, and it's been 5 days ...
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Thank goodness I recently found a job. 😂
Depending on Udemy is extremely risky.2 -
It’s ridiculous that we’re not even getting an update on the matter. At this point, I would love to write an open letter to Udemy. It’s just a shame that when they’re losing, we’re losing.
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@ElianaC and @MarinaT (and the Udemy leadership team), you need to be giving us daily updates at this point, and more concrete information about the pathway to a fix. The lack of substantive updates and communication has been astonishing. This is clearly a significant problem for both Udemy and its instructors.
Many instructors have seen a decline in enrollments as a result of the drop in ratings and lost badges. I've personally had paid promotions driving traffic to courses that should have a 4.6 rating, and now show as 3.7. I even (embarrassingly) pulled up one of my courses during a live workshop to encourage enrollment, only to show my audience a poorly rated course (which is how I found out about this issue in the first place).
Over the last few days, I've been hearing similar stories from many other instructors.
On product and fixing the issue…
Why hasn't your tech/product team been able to deploy a hot fix for this? I don't want to hear how the product team is prioritizing this. If it's taking this long they're focused on the wrong issue. If this is a deeply entrenched issue with the product / codebase, they should be seeking near-term solutions that can be quickly deployed, like temporarily hiding course ratings, or showing a modal that tells visitors that there is an issue affecting course ratings. Anything would be better than doing nothing.
On communication and transparency…
Since this issue started, there have been two updates from you… two! Where is the email informing all instructors that this is happening, where are the daily updates to let us know what's happening, where is the update telling us about how this happened and what you will do to prevent it in the future? You have to talk to us. This is a platform-wide bug affecting many of your instructors, and we need more. If your dev team is scrambling and this will take weeks to fix, fine. But tell us. The lack of communication has been unacceptable, and you need to do better.
I know it's tough time for the team a Udemy, given the recent restructuring and layoffs. We want you all to succeed, because when you succeed, so do we. But you have the makings of a complete breakdown in trust given what's happened over the last few weeks. From the email error informing instructors that they're being disenrolled from UFB, to thin communication around your GenAI policy, to the rating debacle, Udemy is now at risk of losing the trust of its own instructor community.
So please, pleassssssse… take this as a learning experience and do better. And please give us an update on the path forward for this issue.
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Well, it's only past 8am in California. I assume that we will get some updates soon
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Whatever is going on with Udemy involves FAR more than just a bug in some code. I did software development for 25+ years and when a software upgrade / update gets deployed and goes bad, you roll it back and you're back where you started. You might be down for a couple hours, maybe a day at the most.
This is just speculation but this almost sounds like one or more people involved in the 20% layoff decided to get even with Udemy and make a mess of their database. Perhaps data was deleted, perhaps it was modified in a malicious way. And, if this is the case, the people who did it could have somehow damaged database backups. I don't know what else cold explain something like this taking so long to fix. And it's possible they won't be able to completely fix it.
It'll be interesting to see if we all get paid in a few weeks and how that turns out.
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@RandyMinder I agree and I've been speculating the same as well. I've been keeping an eye on SEC's website because publicly traded companies have to report significant cyber incidents to the SEC via form 8-K within 4 business days of the incident, which is made public here.
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I don't think this qualifies as "significant cyber incident". It's a bug, that affected ratings. But users still can enroll, take courses, rate them, etc. I don't think incorrect review calculation qualifies as "significant cyber incident".
So I would assume that's why there was no any news or information about this.0
