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Categories: developers end users

New Contributions launched on AMO

7 responses

The contributions feature was launched over 8 years ago to give developers an easy way to receive compensation for their add-ons on AMO (addons.mozilla.org). This system relied on an integration with the PayPal API, which often caused problems. It didn’t work properly for users with restricted cookie settings, for instance. It also meant PayPal was the only payment provider.

We just launched a new contributions system that is simpler, more reliable, and flexible to use.

New Contributions

With the new system, developers specify a contributions URL in the Developer Hub. The Contribute button on their listing page will point to that URL and open it in a new tab. Initially, we will be supporting Patreon, PayPal, and Micropayment as payment providers. If you’re a developer and would like to propose other services for inclusion, please add your feedback to this forum thread.

7 comments on “New Contributions launched on AMO”

  1. Juraj Mäsiar wrote on

    Nice to see Patreon support!
    Hopefully I will be able to reach more people than just my own brother 🙂

    … rich people, please follow this link 😀
    https://www.patreon.com/fastaddons
    (but seriously now, I love add-ons development and don’t want to get back to work for huge evil corporations)

  2. Larry Atkins wrote on

    The toolbar button for each of my six published extensions opens a drop-down menu with functions. One of those menu items is “About “, and points to the old contributions page. This was reasonable, because that page contained information about the motivation for the extension, and the future plans for it.

    (1) I notice that the information from the old contributions page is apparently not shown on the extension listing page, or anywhere else. Too bad that this informative text was discarded.

    (2) The “About” links in my extensions, that call up the old contributions page, now get a “Page Not Found”. It would have been nice, either to retain the page for informational purposes, or at least to redirect that link to the extension’s listing page. Now I’ll have to update all of my extensions, so the user won’t get a broken “About” link.

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      Yes, we did remove those pages intentionally. But good call on the broken URLs; I didn’t consider that. I’ll get some redirects set up so this doesn’t happen. Sorry about that.

  3. Greg K Nicholson wrote on

    Have you considered supporting Liberapay?

    Liberapay is a registered non-profit, and its code is open source, so it fits with Mozilla’s mission. As far as I’m aware, the services you support are all for-profit and closed source.

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      That looks like an interesting option. Are you a developer and use Liberapay? I wouldn’t want to add a service that no developers are using at present.

  4. Ben Basson wrote on

    Losing the option to present a message to the user prior to (or following) add-on install is going to significantly cut down donations. Yet another signal from Mozilla to add-on authors that they don’t really matter any more. But at least the add-on site (backed by a large well-funded company) is slightly easier to maintain.

  5. S wrote on

    Their is many addons I wish Firefox would put in the browser for safety reasons, I am very dam piss- off of how fire fox has made it hard to make extentions aka addons, too the point I am thinking about leaving fire fox, and changing browsers.