I just reinstalled the WebRep add-on and squashed it to the right to get it mostly out of the way. It does report a rating a visited site and not just alongside search results. However, by the time I visit a site, it’s pretty much pointless to tell me that it’s a bad site after I already loaded it and ran any scripts from there. I don’t know of a bad site in its listing to go visit to see if it blocks or prompts me before letting me load that bad site.

One of the features of the Finjan browser add-on was it would inspect the site for obfuscation code and other “bad” behaviors. I don’t know other than ratings what the WebRep add-ons gives me. Is it just based on a voting scheme? It’d be better if it checked for bad stuff on the site (but then maybe that’s what the Web Shield is supposed to do).

Being new at this (as is just about all other free version users since this wasn’t in the free version before), I have to wonder why the voting window doesn’t disappear when I click on the Vote button. I click on the toolbar icon to open a voting dialog. I select my rating (users must guess red is bad and green is good) and click Vote but nothing happens. The dialog doesn’t disappear to let me know that my vote got accepted and to get the voting dialog out of the way.

Also, if this is just a voting scheme, how is reputation earned by users that make more correct votes (which requires some validation by Avast that a vote was correct)? Some users will be better than others at voting on a site. They vote more often but they must also vote correctly. I believe SiteAdvisor rewards repetitive voters regarding on how correct they are by giving more weight to their votes. Better voters (not just prolific voters) affect the ratings more than occasional or incorrect voters. It’s not like you create a voting account at Avast that gets opened when the add-on loads so your votes get recorded into your account and can be tracked, along with providing your comments to other users. Just letting anyone vote anyway they want without any reputation weighting of their votes seems a hazardous setup. Malicious users that want to malign a site could severely impact the rating of a site with just repeating negative voting.