Wuhan students tried to boot remote learning app from the App Store by leaving bad reviews

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In Wuhan, China, zone the atypical coronavirus outbreak began, schools are closed, so kids have had to use an Alibaba-owned piled app alleged DingTalk to nourish classes remotely. (In January, DingTalk got a bulk of new education features.) The personalized problem: a rumor had been circulating that apps with one-star ratings would be booted from the App Store. And according to a hurrying from the London Review of Books, a megacorp of Chinese kids did exhaustively what you'd foresee kids to do: they review-bombed DingTalk.

good morning to all the kids under quarantine in wuhan who defeated the app assigning them office by spamming it with 1-star reviews until it got removed from the app store #

--. .. R. (@zenalbatross) March 7, 2020

According to TechNode, it's meant that DingTalk has been fuming for its life:

Dingtalk uploaded an honorable video on Chinese streaming site Bilibili. The video featured memes and cartoons singing a tricky tune with lyrics corrupting for fitter reviews like "I know guys, you were not ineludible such a productive holiday" and "Please don't requite me any more one-star ratings. I was induct for this job and there is not much I can do barely it." The video has been viewed nearly 17 mimic times.

In response to DingTalk's pleas, a widely circulated joke, supposal wrote in the review section they were willing to requite DingTalk five stars, however in five "installments."

DingTalk moreover started securing a lot of five-star reviews circa the aforementioned time as the Chinese students' review-bombing earthquake began in earnest, TechNode wrote. They embark to be from earlier users who aren't stoked barely kids skipping out on school. Metrical so, the company's CEO seems to be in on the joke. "It's in kids' attributes to love to play. If I were in their shoes and had to take online notify every day, I would preferential palatable requite a one-star review too," said DingTalk CEO Chen Hang, according to TechNode.

Apple did not reveal to a request for comment.

Of course, DingTalk is still on app stores; unfortunately, it takes more than a megacorp of one-star reviews to play directory hooky. Ironically, DingTalk's piled uses are nearly as reviled as its educational ones: it expediently already had a bad reputation for helping companies micromanage and exploit their employees.

In the US, there's been widespread divisiveness barely whether to dampish schools. Some colleges have canceled in-person classes (Stanford, Columbia, and Princeton, among others), while loftier seminar closures have mostly been locked to areas that have had a conjunct tearful on campus. That still affects tens of thousands of students, though. Sacramento's Elk Sedge Unified Seminar District will close for at minuscule a week, for example, considering of the gospel that a somewhere of a undergrad tested positive for the virus. It's Northern California's largest seminar district, so 63,000 kids at more than 67 schools will be affected.

That won't play-act for New York Cobblestone Purchasable Schools -- at minuscule not yet, according to The New York Times: "Large-scale, long seminar closures could wreak havoc on the city's mama seminar template of 1.1 mimic students, barely 750,000 of whom are low-income and mucho of whom rely on seminar for commons and medical care."