Review resources before approving them (XF Community)

[Alpha1]

I think that is up to you. Currently there is no line.
I would be happy even if some of the code would be quickly browsed through and the most obvious mess would be rejected. A review that basic would be better than nothing.

 

[Jake B.]

I think that is up to you. Currently there is no line.

I mean techically there is a line, but AFAIK that line is when security issues are involved

I would be happy even if some of the code would be quickly browsed through and the most obvious mess would be rejected. A review that basic would be better than nothing.

Honestly wouldn't be a terrible idea, even if you don't guarantee it's safe blocking obvious issues (random queries in controllers, etc) would be a huge step, even if it was only for the first few add-ons someone releases

 

[Dadparvar]

The goal is not to go deep into all details and have a strict approach and then reject any resource that doesn't respect it. The goal is to have a standard.

So, I don't say "Let's reject any resource that doesn't have the best approach to get something" but I mean "reject those that have the worst or totally wrong approach".

Some people say add-ons are built to do what you need. Yes, that's right. But in what cost? Yes, a query to the database can provide you the info you want, but a raw query everywhere is good? safe? If you are thirsty, it's not a good idea to drink a bottle of alcohol or poison. Yes, they are liquid and will Fix thirst, but soon or late will kill you. (there is no other choice out there? ask, pay, wait, and then get and use and enjoy and sleep the night calm and don't think about if your site will be up when you wake up next morning!)

 

[Aayush]

Some people say add-ons are built to do what you need. Yes, that's right. But in what cost? Yes, a query to the database can provide you the info you want, but a raw query everywhere is good? safe? If you are thirsty, it's not a good idea to drink a bottle of alcohol or poison. Yes, they are liquid and will Fix thirst, but soon or late will kill you. (there is no other choice out there? ask, pay, wait, and then get and use and enjoy and sleep the night calm and don't think about if your site will be up when you wake up next morning!)

Try to understand it from an economics perspective.
Good architected code takes time and resources to develop. Most of the addons that I see here are somewhere in the range of $20-$45 for a years license. I'm in the awe of number of features they provide for that price point.
At peak, there are 100 members logged in the site per day(Don't know about DAU). Approx 50% are daily browsers who contribute to the content of the forum and engage in discussions here. Not all of them need the same addon, so this puts pressure on the developer to create more addons. Now you yourself estimate how much a developer would make on a "yearly license" and how much of his time goes into providing support for the same. The demand and price point needs to increase to make it worth while for quality players to enter the market and provide solutions.
We've launched a free product and it took us somewhere in the high hundreds of dollars to develop it. People ignore the market research, iterations, customer support that went into making the product. I've talked with a lot of developers here and most of them have the opinion that the market is too small, even if 50% of the existing XF customers buy their products, it is hard for them to add new features and provide support at the same time.
Summarizing this, if you want top performers to architect quality solutions for you, it would be better if you'd be willing to pay higher price for it.

Like a person extracting user details from his addons was banned, sooner or later some people will develop a reputation for providing bad quality code. This difference will be developed the members of the community and should be 100% based on the effort of a community here and not on a quality inspection by XF team.
XF team is investing their time in providing us with a good quality and stable forum platform. If people want to compare it with X software where they review each and every addon, isn't it the right time to make the switch

@Dadparvar Give me an example of the poison you recently drank. I'll tell you why the economics didn't make sense for the developer.

XenForo clearly states that they have no affiliation with any of the addon released there. Imagine if the resources directory didn't exist. You would have to scourge through 15-20 sites daily/weekly to find the addons you need. Makes sense? No. Thats why resource directory was created. The resource directory is simply there to make finding resources easier for the customers.

 

[Mike Edge]

I think there needs to be a rule about developers returning that abanded or sold off XF1 addons now returning like everything is peachy for another money grab at XF2 addons. A good amount was just simply abanded as where others were sold off to another developer which most were then abanded because the code was too buggy or that developer walked away from the community as well.

 

[Dadparvar]

@Dadparvar Give me an example of the poison you recently drank. I'll tell you why the economics didn't make sense for the developer.

I stopped drinking poison for a while now but still suffering from the drops that I drank in that time, and going to spend time and money to finally survive!
(at this time, using 77 add-ons, 71 paid or custom (that one day were those customs were free poisons, but then I paid and someone developed something for me or I created by myself), 6 free. And 4 out of those 6 are from developers of those paid add-ons, so they are pro. And 2 from medium level developer. All 6 will be removed in near future though)

-----------------------
Let me clarify something here: This topic is not meant to say XF team is responsible, or XF should spend lots of time and money bringing some advanced checker and tracker and they also manually check every single resource all at once. Nor the topic is meant to say that any resource should be coded in the same quality that a pro coder does. But at least:

• We can expect some stricter and more serious rules about resources and reviews
• A very basic (at first step) check on quality (this can be done based on reviews or discussions or reports) and then unapproving until the resource respects the standards

Yes, you are right. It is time-consuming and the market is so small. You can design a style for wordpress and get the same money in a couple of days that you can get in a year by designing for Xenforo (If you are good though), but when someone decides to enter this small market, they should accept some facts and then enter appropriately and professionally.

Although I agree with you in most of the things you said, but we shouldn't say "you can't get good money if you provide good service or product in this small market". I'm using some 3rd party add-ons (that are not listed here) that are indeed feature rich and the developer is providing almost 24 hour support, and a couple of updates a week (updates are rarely bug fixes, and are mostly improvements and feature adds. Only one of those add-ons has more features than the whole resources posted here! (can believe? I can invite lots of customers to testify) And the quality of codes are high. and you know what? the price is so low and the support and update period is for 2 years for that low price. He even didn't add copyright link to ask money to let us remove it. I even remember high quailty support by him while he was in hospital. He provide a very detailed and professional report for every single update and answer any even stupid questions by customers in a very detailed and clear way. Yes he has family and managing family needs money, but he never said goodbye to us and never said I'm going to wait for xf2 until I continue fixing bugs or adding new features and even right now, he is still adding lots of big features requested by customers.) I can continue till midnight.... but one last short sentence: he doesn't provide low quality, feature less, weak support, because of money (he doesn't get money by force. He attracts money by his high quality work. He doesn't sell you an add-on for $10 that breaks your site and then asking you +$100/hour to fix it. He doesn't sell $20/function! and Yes he has enough customers in a way that you should stay and wait in line until it becomes your turn to buy his add-ons. He doesn't sell to anyone who shows $)

 

[Freelancer]

@Aayush you are beating up a dead horse here. Where in this thread is a complaint about add-ons costing money and more sophisticated add-ons cost more money? We all know that. This isn’t about little effort and little money. The reason this thread was started was to make the point that we board admins don’t want to waste time and money for stuff that breaks the boards we own or doesn’t even work in the first place. When @Alfa1 said he wasted about 5000 bucks for nothing I can really sense what that means since I wasted money myself not as high but I did. I pay 150.- bucks for a year’s license easily for add-ons from good developers or pay directly to them for custom work. Some are humble, some not. What I don’t want to do is to buy 10 add-ons for 15.- bucks and trash them all after another because in the end none works properly. If there were approved/labeled as premium add-ons that actually give you at least a feeling of safety, consistency and bug-minimization I am sure that the majority would pay triple the prizes. And there are add-ons of that class. And those who only want to ride for free can and do that and should not complain.

 

[Robust]

There’s still no answer to the question I posed here earlier:

What about paid resources that aren’t hosted on this site?

 

[RobParker]

Isn't the addon rating system the best crowd-sourced review that's possible? Ok, people aren't reviewing code but they're still reviewing whether the app works as intended.

 

[Aayush]

@Aayush you are beating up a dead horse here. Where in this thread is a complaint about add-ons costing money and more sophisticated add-ons cost more money? We all know that. This isn’t about little effort and little money. The reason this thread was started was to make the point that we board admins don’t want to waste time and money for stuff that breaks the boards we own or doesn’t even work in the first place. When @Alfa1 said he wasted about 5000 bucks for nothing I can really sense what that means since I wasted money myself not as high but I did. I pay 150.- bucks for a year’s license easily for add-ons from good developers or pay directly to them for custom work. Some are humble, some not. What I don’t want to do is to buy 10 add-ons for 15.- bucks and trash them all after another because in the end none works properly. If there were approved/labeled as premium add-ons that actually give you at least a feeling of safety, consistency and bug-minimization I am sure that the majority would pay triple the prizes. And there are add-ons of that class. And those who only want to ride for free can and do that and should not complain.

The point is, they aren't labeled as premium. It's upto you to buy them and try if it suits your needs. If it doesn't, simply leave a review, that it failed for you or whatever happened.

I want to share something that happened recently.
There was an OneSignal notification addon which was release on TAZ. The code was sloppy and it ended up conflicting with the mobile notification system we had in place for our apps. We looked into the addon for one of our customer and ended up leaving a post on the the resource thread about the issue and the way people could fix it.
My point is that the review process doesn't scale. You are the one who is going to leave a review and educate the others about the pitfalls and maybe give some alternate solutions.

 

[Freelancer]

The point is, they aren't labeled as premium. It's upto you to buy them and try if it suits your needs. If it doesn't, simply leave a review, that it failed for you or whatever happened.

Sorry but I haven’t even read past THAT... you totally missed the point – and propose what the topic starter, many others in the thread and me explicitly do not want and have explained why.

 

[Aayush]

Sorry but I haven’t even read past THAT... you totally missed the point – and propose what the topic starter, many others in the thread and me explicitly do not want.

It's a community driven directory as of now. Wouldn't make sense for XenForo team to waste their resources to review individual addons and I wouldn't pay them for something like this.

Business Idea!
I will start an addon curation and review service if 100 people like this post and are willing to pay $100/mo for the service.

 

[Freelancer]

Business Idea!
I will start an addon curation and review service if 100 people like this post and are willing to pay $100/mo for the service.

Read the thread again. There were many ideas how an improvement over the current situation can be achieved in various degrees. And that is community driven. Making fun of that doesn’t suit the contributions so far. The current situation is at level zero. It does not have to be 1000 level up but 1 would be a good start.

 

[Aayush]

Read the thread again. There were many ideas how an improvement over the current situation can be achieved in various degrees. And that is community driven. Making fun of that doesn’t suit the contributions so far. The current situation is at level zero. It does not have to be 1000 level up but 1 would be a good start.

XenForo's brand would be on the line. I've read this quote which said, if you can't make a product 10x better, why bother making it in the first place.

BTW my idea is legit, I'll work on the curation idea if people are actually interested. If a lot more than 100 people are interested, I'd prefer that XenForo open a self-funded division for the same.

 

[Robust]

Isn't the addon rating system the best crowd-sourced review that's possible? Ok, people aren't reviewing code but they're still reviewing whether the app works as intended.

People are more likely to use the system to complain rather than to provide feedback both ways. We’ve had lots of customers, most are satisfied, the ones that aren’t leave negative reviews - our specific audience doesn’t tend to leave reviews for a positive experience so ratings aren’t really the best metric for functionality.

 

[Aayush]

People are more likely to use the system to complain rather than to provide feedback both ways. We’ve had lots of customers, most are satisfied, the ones that aren’t leave negative reviews - our specific audience doesn’t tend to leave reviews for a positive experience so ratings aren’t really the best metric for functionality.

I firmly believe in this hypothesis that people who have negative experience leave a negative review and that is more likely to occur than a positive review. Can't understand why people are complaining about low quality addons having no negative reviews on them.

 

[RobinHood]

I think once app/plugin updates from within the ACP is enabled as standard, similar to Wordpress and some of the plugin management systems here, then admins will be more likely to review apps positively as they can be solicited at the time of update and have a link to the review page for any app.

Currently the only way to review is consciously decide to head to a thread on a specific website and review it there, so very few people will do that for paid add ons that aren't hosted and distributed on XF.com. There's no central store or update page for all apps, with many devs emailing out updates to then be uploaded and installed manually. That needs to change.

 

[Robust]

I think once app/plugin updates from within the ACP is enabled as standard, similar to Wordpress and some of the plugin management systems here, then admins will be more likely to review apps positively as they can be solicited at the time of update and have a link to the review page for any app.

Currently the only way to review is consciously decide to head to a thread on a specific website and review it there, so very few people will do that for paid add ons that aren't hosted and distributed on XF.com. There's no central store or update page for all apps, with many devs emailing out updates to then be uploaded and installed manually. That needs to change.

Strongly support an update system being implemented by XenForo. It’d mean creating some kind of updating system that add-on developers have to implement for authenticated download of updates.

 

[RobinHood]

I love how Wordpress have implemented it, it works amazingly for both free and commercial plugins.

Here's a screen shot of one of my WP sites, with plugins at a variety of states, highlighted and explained.




Single click update actions the add on install:



And confirmation, all without leaving or reloading the page. I can initiate the update of 10 plugins with 10 clicks in 10 seconds this way.





Viewing the details of any plugin gives you an onsite modal with access to a ton of info, including reviews, documentation, changelogs, screenshots and links to appropriate resources:






On the first image, note the WP Rocket plugin. That's a great example of a paid plugin, where my licence has expired but there are updates available. It reminds me every time I check this page and links me off to where I can buy it. But it still lets me monitor the installed version, and access the changelogs so I can see if there's anything in each new update to see if there's anything that will encourage me to pay to upgrade.

This system is absolutely fantastic. A carbon copy of this would do wonders for the plugin community here and make life a million times easier for admins.

 

[RobinHood]

Also, the ability to search the plugins from within the control panel on your own site is brilliant.

All the search results are designed in a way to display plugins in a format suitable for actually browsing plugins, instead of relying on the same search designed for threads, on a forum on an external site. Complete with one click install.