Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog
Categories: developers events

AMO Review Queue Burndown a Huge Success

7 responses

As add-on authors quickly realize when submitting their work to AMO, the review process is typically the hardest part to get through mainly due to the immense amount of add-on submissions we receive. Going through the queues can be a daunting task as new add-ons and updates come in daily.

This past weekend we decided to dedicate ourselves to bringing these submissions down to a manageable number and helping the development community get the feedback they so badly craved.

The AMO Review Queue Burndown brought 16 add-on editors & developers together for a weekend of add-on code reviews making for interesting conversations, ideas to improve the review process and hard core code scrutinizing. We’re happy to report it was a great success.

We started with 232 Pending Updates & 353 Nominated Add-ons at 12:47am 6/27/09. As of 9am EST today, we’re at 86 pending updates & 114 nominated add-ons. The editors absolutely kicked ass and worked feverishly through the weekend to help get the queues down. The following were the dedicated crew that participated this weekend:

  • Shivanand Sharma
  • Akira Kurogane
  • Yair Halevi
  • Prasad Sunkari
  • Justin Samuel
  • Jose Bolanos
  • Jorge Villalobos
  • Nate Weiner
  • Ezadkiel Marbella
  • Denis Remondini
  • Andreas Wagner
  • Andrew Williamson
  • Gijs Kruitbosch
  • Oliver Saier
  • Sid Kalra
  • Scott McCammon

In all, considering some authors received feedback and fixed + renominated their add-ons, the editors reviewed about 221 updates and 308 nominated add-ons during the weekend!! Outstanding! Words cannot express how much this effort is appreciated by this dedicated group of volunteers. It shows their love and commitment for the Mozilla community.

We still have a lot of work to do but that’s a massive dent that I’m sure will bring a welcome smile to many add-on authors as we start the week off.

7 comments on “AMO Review Queue Burndown a Huge Success”

  1. clouserw wrote on

    Nice work, everyone.

  2. Kurt (supernova_00) wrote on

    Thank you all very much! The whole community will appreciate this!

  3. Sven Schwarz wrote on

    Yes, these guys did a great job, indeed! Sacrificing a weekend for the mozilla world. Thanks a lot, guys!!!

    However, I am not sure if the whole idea of _moderating_ add-ons really scales—at least not in the way it’s done today. Maybe you should think about either making more layers (1st level moderation “usefull/not usefull and new/not new” and 2nd level moderation “look at the code” or something alike)—or: (maybe even better) think about more automatic or “anarchic” ways.

    I would go for the latter alternative. I recommend to think about an “unmoderated” or at least think about a “late/post-poned moderation” strategy or something alike. Attention: This is just an idea and not a thouroughly thought-over approach! One idea could be to “substitute” the moderation somehow, for example, by using usage statistics and free votes (easy clickable votes for everyone!) _alone_ to generate _quantitative_(!) arguments for an end-user. The question is: How can we really know that a user is actually _using_ the add-on rather than letting it run without him/her knowing it?? Well, I don’t know… But, maybe it would be a good idea to let moderators vote as well—like normal users—but then counting their votes with a factor of 1000 or even greater!?

    My idea might not be the perfect already, but I have the impression that the moderation of a continously increasing number of add-ons will get harder and harder every day and, thus, the moderation process as it is now just can not scale!
    A _conceptional_ improvement has to be done here—tuning is not sufficient.

    Anyway, thanks to all you moderators doing a great job already. I am sure, that you sacrifice a big part of you life for the good, for others! This is a noble thing! Thank you guys!

    Have a nice day!
    Sven

  4. Michael Hagerty wrote on

    Fantastic work. I truly appreciate the dedication and hard work. I am hoping the 3.x revision of CBext made it through as it is a life-saver for those of us colorblind websurfers. Too many webmasters are ignorant of the confusion their choice of colors create for us and this add-on really helps.

  5. Jay Meattle wrote on

    Yay!

  6. AnAddOnDeveloper wrote on

    While this is great work and appreciated by add on developers, I think you’re making more work for yourself by having to review new versions of existing addons. I put in a new version of my add on on July 4 and it still has not been reviewed. It contains a number of bug fixes that users would benefit from. But they can’t receive it until somebody reviews it. This process prevents timely updates from appearing. What if the update was critical and needed to be distributed to users quickly? I would still have to wait months until a reviewer gets to my new version. Why not allow developers to upload a new version without a review and let the reviewers concentrate on new addons?

  7. Rey Bango wrote on

    @AnAddOnDeveloper: Unfortunately we can’t do that. While it certainly would seem easy to do, an update needs to be reviewed to ensure that it doesn’t introduce code or features that would adversely affect Mozilla users. We work with add-on developers daily who have submitted updates that cause problems& it’s important that we troubleshoot as many of these situations as possible before it goes out to a Mozilla user.

    We’re considering new techniques as is being discussed in this thread:

    http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.amo/browse_thread/thread/d8c2bf3f9a0c1997/bfe9e6cc00b9e051