all pre-existing add-ons restored (made public)

18 responses

Short version: All add-ons that were public in AMO prior to Remora’s launch this weekend should now be publicly available on AMO again. We will be in contact with all add-on authors to provide more detail and clarity on what we’ll be doing going forward to help make the AMO and add-ons experience more polished and accessible for all our users.

Not quite as short version: I made a mistake in choosing how to roll out the sandbox and increased quality standards for AMO, in concert with the Remora software update, and we’re now correcting it. We still believe that the combination of the sandbox system (to provide more transparency and participation in evaluating add-ons before they’re published) and a higher standard for inclusion on the site (especially in terms of polish and author responsiveness) will benefit users and developers alike. But it’s clear from community feedback — often, but not always, quite reasoned and polite — that we didn’t do a good job of communicating what was going on, and as a result both users and developers were hurt by the change.

We’ve now updated the database to make all the pre-existing add-ons public, and we’ll be working with editors and users and developers to make the global improvements that we seek. The new tools and capabilities in Remora should make it much easier to serve the growing add-ons community, and we’re looking forward to even more such improvements in the future.

Thank you to everyone for your feedback, and passion, about AMO and how it affects you. Please know that we share it, and that we want to work with you to make AMO even better.

(In related news, the site performance has been improved dramatically over the weekend, but I’ll let morgamic tell the rest of that story!)

18 responses

  1. Andy wrote on :

    This is great news. Not just the fact that the addons are back, but also (I would say – especially) the fact that the AMO team was prepared to listen to the feedback, admit that a mistake was made (which is never easy and certainly deserves respect), and fix it. I’m normally not a praising type, but I felt the need to say it, especially since I was rather harsh in my earlier comments.
    Back to work now 🙂

  2. docwhat wrote on :

    AMO team: Thank you again for all your hard work. AMO and Mozilla has a great community around it because of your hard work. We all appreciate it.

    I would like to second Andy’s comment. I know that the frustration levels were very high on the side of extdevs and people who use their addons.

    I hope that something in the spirit of the sandbox can be done. But I don’t like removing easy access to things just because they may be harmful.

    It’s a careful balance that has to be followed between helping and harming here.

    Thanks again.

    Ciao!

  3. Mark wrote on :

    If you don’t get as many good comments here as you did bad ones before, know that the AMO community just breathed a sigh of relief.

    Personally I had planned to add new features to my extension over the past weekend but decided to put it off. I was beginning to question whether I would ever add them since it didn’t seem like anyone would ever see them. Seeing users install my extension again tonight has put the wind back in my sails. It is this kind of feedback that extension authors need in order to keep feeling good about developing.

    I hope that the vast majority of extensions will stay public and new versions will be readily available to users.

  4. Seth Wagoner wrote on :

    Tough call, hopefully you made the right choice, and good on you for being willing to change your mind in response to feedback.

    In my opinion, raising the quality bar was the right thing to do, but the process needed to be more transparent and with a bit more warning to the developers (and I don’t know what the deal was with *updates* to existing extensions but it sounded like that was going to be the real deal killer)

    The quality bar can still be slowly raised, by setting criteria that should be met by existing extensions within a certain period of time or the addon is liable to be relegated back to the sandbox. Sounds like that’s roughly what you have in mind, so all good.

  5. John P Baker wrote on :

    It would be very easy to make a case for all, Firefox only, extensions with a maxVersion less than or equal to 1.5.* to be relegated to the sandbox in a month’s time when Firefox 1.5 reaches its End of Life (April 24th)

  6. sneaky wrote on :

    I’d like to re-raise a point that someone made in an earlier post: since the categories are grouped alphabetically by default, there are a lot of “A1 Auto Repairs”-style addons creeping in, in order to get “high up” the list.

    On behalf of developers with extensions starting at the end of the alphabet… can I request a per-session randomisation of the default browse order, so that it’s not strictly alphabetical!

    Or even better: make “popularity” or “rating” the default sort order?

    Anyway, kudos for listening to our feedback, and thanks for all your hard work over the past months!

  7. xeen wrote on :

    Who should I contact if I would like to have one of my extensions moved into the sandbox?

  8. Wil Clouser wrote on :

    xeen: File a bug here and we’ll get it taken care of:
    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=addons.mozilla.org;component=Add-ons;rep_platform=All;op_sys=All;

    (just fill in the summary and description, and click “commit” )

  9. Zed wrote on :

    Dear AMO team,
    Accepting and fixing mistakes is a rare quality nowadays. This shows a high sense of humanness and professionalism. Many and I really appreciate.
    Thanks a lot.

  10. Michael Buckley wrote on :

    That was the only thing I saw in the update, all the junky add-ons falling into the sand box. But I hope that it will work out for the better in the end. I would have really like the quality bar to rise. Make getting in something you have to work for, for just something the happens over night.

    Also as sneaky said, can the default order the add-ons in something other than alphabetical. Rating or popularity would make sure the best are up the top of the list.

  11. David McRitchie wrote on :

    It’s almost a month later and the “Advanced Search” for addons has not be restored in any manner that I can find.

    I was hoping for a big improvement in this area, including a direct url link to the advanced search that could be bookmarked and used by “Add to Search Bar” extension, and an enhanced advanced search form, and instead of being improved it appears to be gone.

    I’ve placed the following page on my site listing several problems.
    http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/firefox/addons_2007.htm
    and kind of working around the problem for now anyway by using the old search engine on the old addons site. Hopefully this will this will get corrected before the workaround and old site is no longer available.

  12. travesti wrote on :

    and kind of working around the problem for now anyway by using the old search engine on the old addons site. Hopefully this will this will get corrected before the workaround and old site is no longer available.

  13. Sohbet wrote on :

    Hopefully this will this will get corrected before the workaround and old site is no longer available.

  14. nakliyat wrote on :

    Hopefully this will this will get corrected before the workaround and old site is no longer available

  15. Akrep wrote on :

    Who should I contact if I would like to have one of my extensions moved into the sandbox?

  16. sohbet odaları wrote on :

    Who should I contact if I would like to have one of my extensions moved into the sandbox?

  17. sohbet wrote on :

    kind of working around the problem for now anyway by using the old search engine on the old addons site:)

  18. aşk sözleri wrote on :

    Who should I contact if I would like to have one of my extensions moved into the sandbox?