I'm not too sure who is familiar with Web of Trust, so I'll start with a brief description. It's basically a browser app that inserts a circle next to text links in websites. The color of the circle indicates whether or not it's average rating by users rates it as having a "good reputation" (green) or a "bad reputation" (red). There are four criteria: Trustworthiness, Vendor Reliability, Privacy, and Child Safety.
Singularity.org's printout is here. As you may have guessed from the title, Web of Trust lists Singularity.org as "poor" in trustworthiness, vendor reliability, and privacy. There's a comment that, when translated (via Google translate) says "Mass mailing of non-thematic Forums". It's also commented under the category "malicious content/viruses".
I'm not entirely sure how these ratings are generated, (How Ratings Work, related) but I've used it for several years, and this is only the second time I've disagreed with a rating. I've always found WOT to be very reliable, and a decent way of warning me if a site is unsafe so I don't have to think about it. So I was fairly alarmed when I saw the red circle there, since I'd imagine it's turning away people that don't know any better. If LW had a red circle, I never would have come here. I'm not sure what SI or LW can do about it, but there's a "click here if you are the owner of this site" button, although I don't know what that does. I've left my own rating on there, but it didn't seem to change the overall rankings.
Edit: When I made this post, the scorecard read Trustworthiness 30, Vendor Reliability 31, Privacy 31, Child Safety 100.
Day 2: The "singularity.org" rating increased from 30-31 (red) to 45-48 (yellow). Another two days like this, and the problem can be fixed.
Some more details: Ratings are given anonymously (and the site does not even tell how many ratings did it use to calculate the results). It is also possible to add comments to domains -- I am not sure whether they are included in calculation, but either way they may influence other voters. At this moment, "singularity.org" has two negative comments (and two positive ones).
One negative comment by "Ratingmonster1234" is probably written by a mentally ill person, judging by the content of their own homepage, which also has a very low rating. (By the way, it was written on 23rd July, the same day as this article.)
Another negative comment by "arctur" is accusing us of comment spam in unrelated web forums, if I understand it correctly. First I thought this is something a previous owner of "singularity.org" did, but looking at the dates, this explanation seems wrong. SIAI purchased the domain in April 2011, and this comment was written in January 2012, which is later.
Can this be true? I don't know how to check it; googling "link:singularity.org" reveals nothing (but the functionality of "link:" seems broken or something; I'd be glad if someone could explain me how it works). The user added this comment to over thousand domains using some "mass rating tool", but it does not seem like a random voting (to increase the user score): the names of most domains in that list seem kind of spammy.
EDIT: Now I have a feeling that it is relatively easy to ruin a prestige of a less popular site using this tool. You don't even have to create many sockpuppet accounts, because it seems rather easy to gain "trust" of the system -- just give high/low ratings to many sites that already have high/low ratings. Then give someone bad ratings and accuse them of spam or phishing (no proof required), and it's done.
Can this be true? I don't know how to check it; googling "link:singularity.org" reveals nothing (but the functionality of "link:" seems broken or something; I'd be glad if someone could explain me how it works).
Villiam_Bur,
Have you tried visiting www.verify1st.com/justanswers.com. It is like showing a website's resume/CV, except that the data doesn't lie. It will help you identify whether the site is a scam or a fraudulent. I do hope that this could help you somehow.