The new Developer Tools and review process were implemented on AMO and announced a little over a month ago. I also expanded the explanation about the new review process, so you should have a look if you haven’t already.
One of the key goals of the new review system was to make AMO a safer place for our users. In the previous system, an add-on could be created, never submitted for code review, and still be permanently visible and searchable within the site. These add-ons had a couple different qualifiers along the years like “In Sandbox” and “Experimental”, and showed warnings indicating that were not safe to install. However, warning messages are prone to be ignored, and the mere fact of being listed on the official Mozilla Add-ons site was enough for some people to trust the code they were downloading and installing regardless of the warnings. We needed something different.
The new system requires all add-ons listed on our site to pass at least a basic security review, which we’re calling Preliminary Review. Add-ons that pass this review will be visible on the site but get lower rankings, and they have the “Experimental” qualifier near their install button. They also have automatic updates enabled, which is an advantage in comparison to the old sandbox system. All updates also have to pass our review process, either preliminary or full depending on what the developer chooses. There’s more info in the overview post.
Moving to the new system, however, requires a massive migration of add-ons that were previously in the sandbox. Since we can’t make decisions for our developers, we provided you with a choice: nominate your add-on for full review or preliminary review in the following weeks, or your add-on will be disabled. We have already processed more than 1500 nominations from add-ons that were previously in the sandbox, but there are over 6000 add-ons that remain to show any activity, even after 2 rounds of email notifications indicating the imminent deactivation of the add-on listings.
So, if you’re an add-on author and still haven’t nominated your previously sandboxed add-on for review, you have until the end of this week. Starting next week, your listing will be disabled. If you submitted a new add-on in the past month, or if you nominated your add-on but haven’t heard back from us, don’t worry. Your add-on should be pending review and we won’t disable any of those. The waiting times for nominations is pretty large these days (at least a couple of weeks) because of the migration to the new system.
If you have doubts about the status of your add-on, you can check it out following these directions:
- Go to your Add-ons Page. It should show an overview of all your add-ons and their status.
- For details about a specific add-on of yours, click on the Edit Listing link.
- On the menu on the left-hand side, choose Manage Status & Versions.
If you’re still unsure, you can send a message to amo-editors AT mozilla DOT org, or visit the #addons IRC channel. We’ll be happy to help.
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