In reply to Jeff Chandler.

I generally don't trust any recomendations/reviews, how do you know they are genuine?

When you go to Plugins > Add New, the first 3/4 (wp super cache, jetpack and Akismet) are all Automattic plugins, the first one is BBPress, it shows as the bbpress community (not automattic) as author.

Those 4 are ALWAYS showing as the first 4 when you go add a new plugins (on your site's admin dashboard).

5th is buddypress, 6th is themecheck (an otto42 plugin).

Nothing against otto or anyone at automattic.

I think the recomendations should be by most active/downloaded or something like that. Not by someone from the greater Automattic family.

I would say the same thing if we were talking about Drupal, phpbb, joomla and so forth, just change automattc to whatever they have running them.

However the whole most active/downloaded recomendations could be "biased" since Hello Dolly and Akismet are automatically downloaded. I delete Hello Dolly and install Hello Spock, I use antispam bee too.

What's to stop from a "friend" of Automattic plugin from sneaking on the list of recomendations.

Would Akismet always be in the recomendations for spam? What about others like antispam bee? I like options.