I dont wanna be pushy, but some of my plugins have been sitting for weeks, months even, with no confirmation or updates on when they will go live. Help?

when the reveiwers have time?

Sorry, we are quite behind on plugin reviews at the moment. It will just be whenever one of our review team finds the time (and motivation) to review them.

Of course, thank you. 

What would it take to be a reviewer? Is that open to the public? 

Hi, can we reduce the review requirements or do a recruitment drive to get more reviewers?

My experience of trying to get my first plugin published to umod has been very discouraging, to say the least.

I initially submitted my plugin over 4 months ago. I followed the docs and thought I was doing the right thing by submitting with Github linked. A few weeks pass and then a reviewer fails my submission because the GitHub linking isn't working and they cannot see my code (Why is this even an option if it doesn't work?). Surely the reviewer could have clicked through the GitHub repo and seen the code there?

I cannot find any way to modify my submission and directly enter my code so I am forced to recreate the submission from scratch. I left a comment on the old submission asking for it to be deleted. My old submission is still there and if I push new code to GitHub it gets updated and I get all the notifications from it. There is no way for me to delete the old submission...

As for the new submission, after 3 months it gets picked up by one of the reviewers, thank you. It fails because there are missing spaces in the name of the plugin inside the plugin file and because I used camelCase in some areas of the plugin for variable names. I felt these are a bit nitpicky but I comply and update the plugin submission as soon as I can. Looking at other plugins on umod many of them have the same issues as my plugin but they are still accepted into the repo. I suspect the reviewer will have to re-review my plugin before it is passed and then I still need a second review from another moderator....

At this point, I have stopped all Rust plugin development I had planned as it looks like getting any plugin accepted into the repo will take at least 6 months or more. and if it is this bad to get a plugin reviewed I hate to think what the update process is like. Do plugins need a review when bug fixes or new versions are deployed? If they do then this setup is just unworkable.

l3rady

Hi, can we reduce the review requirements or do a recruitment drive to get more reviewers?

l3rady

Hi, can we reduce the review requirements or do a recruitment drive to get more reviewers?

We are planning to recruit more reviewers. However, we are currently focusing on other things, such as implementing large new features to the framework and organising some other things so that we can recruit more team members. These are things that take priority, so for now plugin reviews are a little bit neglected for now. On top of this, we do not yet have any real on boarding materials or process for new reviewers (which is also being worked on), and we would like to move away from just giving people access and telling them to review plugins. So until then we won't be able to get more reviewers. Futhermore, there are not actually that many experienced developers willing to be plugin reviewers, and the ones that are often don't stay motivated for long.

A few weeks pass and then a reviewer fails my submission because the GitHub linking isn't working and they cannot see my code (Why is this even an option if it doesn't work?). Surely the reviewer could have clicked through the GitHub repo and seen the code there?

For the most part the GitHub integration works, however sometimes it can be a bit unreliable and break. Yes they could have just used the GitHub repo, however it is easier for the reviewer when the website is able to show them the source code and it is possible the reviewer was worried that the plugin would not be uploaded properly once released.

I felt these are a bit nitpicky but I comply and update the plugin submission as soon as I can. Looking at other plugins on umod many of them have the same issues as my plugin but they are still accepted into the repo.

One of our guidelines is that plugin names should be formatted with spaces. This is so that the plugin name is displayed in a human readable way in the console. There will be other plugins on the site that fail these guidelines because they are plugins that were transferred over from the old oxidemod.org site, from before we had guidelines for plugin reviews.

Do plugins need a review when bug fixes or new versions are deployed? If they do then this setup is just unworkable.

No, it has been discussed in the past, however as you might have guessed, we don't have enough reviewers for that.

Rustic0

But seriously, its insane how its been since 5 months since any word on one of my plugins, its honestly sickening, and highly annoying, especially because we are trying to give out our hard work and time to the public for FREE. Why would we do this when it takes months to even get them out there, let alone get downloads. 

Rediculous

I understand your frustration and we plan to improve this, I have also been frustrated with the review process as a developer too, however, please keep in mind that the plugin review team (and everyone working on Oxide/uMod) is a volunteer and also does this for free. So as you might expect, there is no real incentive for experienced developers to actually do plugin reviews and we can't really force them to do them either. Though we are thinking of ways to resolve this. If you have any ideas, please let us know.