Review excerpts now available for older reviews — Some competitor reviews were missing their text because of a data gap in older RSS entries. Rivale now fetches the full review from WordPress.org when needed, so playbooks and sentiment tags always have the actual content to work with.
Self-healing data freshness checks — If a competitor’s readme or changelog update slips past the normal change detection, Rivale now catches it by cross-checking against the WordPress API and backfills the missing history automatically. Your ops report now includes a data consistency section so you can see if anything was recovered.
Improved
Review Sentiment is more accurate — The Review Sentiment card now focuses on the last 12 months of reviews instead of pulling in everything since 2016. Patterns reflect what’s happening now, not years ago.
Fixed
Billing errors in the customer portal now show real messages — If something went wrong during a plan change, you previously saw a generic error. Now you see exactly what happened.
Review categories no longer default to “Other” — A bug in the fallback classifier was tagging every review as “Other” instead of a real category. Review sentiment across your dashboard, digests, and playbooks is now correctly categorized.
Readme and changelog changes no longer go undetected after a sync hiccup — If a previous sync failed partway through, the next successful sync could silently skip the update. That gap is closed.
Fewer missed updates when WordPress.org is slow — SVN fetches now retry once on server errors or timeouts instead of failing immediately.
