Just reading through the comments on this. In fairness what Dan did is wrong in many peoples eyes mine included.

Whilst I do not condone what Dan did, I understand why he did it.

Reading reviews on WordPress.org can be like pulling teeth.

By that I mean some of the reviews are quite frankly spammy crap.

For this let's take a look at Yoast

https://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/wordpress-seo?filter=5

Notice that a few on the front page have two words and a five star rating, some are nonsensical.

Follow the pages through and what you have are some in-depth ones and a lot more single sentence reviews.

The one star reviews of course are more in-depth as people love to moan, people love to stress how bad things are, let the world know it so to speak.

The easiest way to cut down on the 5 star reviews that are misleading (been written by friends or family etc) is to impose a character limit.

Sure you can leave a review but it must be over 300 characters. Perhaps with a criteria on rating with dropdowns or sliders giving more of an overview of the plugin. What will happen then?

Reviews will slow down, you will see less that's for sure.

What you will be left with however for those who do like to leave constructive feedback, is genuine honest opinions.

I hardly ever bother reading others feedback on plugins on WordPress.org, for the simple reason half of them are junk.

I make my own mind up and write a review on my website.

Just my own thoughts.