In reply to Laura Brown.

I agree that flaming / revenge ratings would be a problem and this is the reason why I only suggested a positive feedback.

Rating reviewers would be tricky, though. I believe that a review's value should be independent from its author. The same person that gives a valuable, detailed review on one plugin could give a simple rating with no review on another. Those two reviews shouldn't count as equally important (or unimportant), just because they come from the same person.

Perhaps when someone gives a very low rating, it would be useful to elaborate more on that by choosing a reason from a predefined list like for example "- has security vulnerabilities, - I couldn't find how to use it, - Broke my site, - incompatible with some other plugin - Other". This might be useful especially for security vulnerabilities, since it could automatically alert the plugin's author or the moderators to take a look.

Rating plugin authors, on the other hand, seems more interesting. In that case, though, revenge ratings would be even more common. Perhaps it would be interesting if the author's rating could be measured somehow automatically - e.g. based on the average rating of his/her plugins, the responsiveness (how often he/she replies to the support tickets) and how well the plugins are maintained.