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Comment by soapdog | Hacker News Reader

Lots of heat in this thread...

So, Addons are mostly reviewed by volunteers. Sometimes people make mistakes. The best course of action is to try to reach out for the AMO team on IRC or their mailing list.

- Addons forum is at https://discourse.mozilla.org/c/add-ons

- All contact info for AMO dev stuff is at: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons#Con...

- Developer Hub for addons is at: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/

There is no need for FUD or conspiracy theories. We can just talk to people and find out what happened and maybe revert it if possible.

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My experience with firefox add-on reviewers has been hit or miss - One of the most frustrating things is that reviews often happen long after your add-on has been published. I'd rather have a longer waiting time, but once an add-on is published then it means it's been approved. From the developer point of view it means that it's very hard to communicate on releases, because you never know when your addon is going to be reviewed. From the end user, it means that if someone maliciouly changes one of your addons, you may already have updated to that version before the review. I also feel that the guidelines around reviews aren't well explained, and the reviewers comments are often terse, bordering on the incomprehensible : at least with Apple, you get pointed to which part of the rules they think you didn't respect - with firefox, we often get broad comments that require a bit of back and forth to figure out what it is they're actually thinking is wrong.

This was the old model and it put a lot of pressure on the volunteer add-on reviewers and their were times where the delays stretched out to several months.

It's not like Mozilla has no funds. Why not hire a couple of people for the reviews?

Or at least hire review coordinators who can manage the program effectively. Our volunteers review 15,000+ loans a month. Happy to share insights with Mozilla on how to run an effective volunteer community and keep the pipeline flowing.

Having funds is not the same as having unallocated funds.

Surely there should be a clear appeal process, and escalation if there is to be an app store like review for addons that can remove something. Particularly if they are assessed by volunteers who may vary significantly.

There seems something off when spyware infested stylish remains an acceptable addon and this gets arbitrarily blocked.

A vague "try and reach out" doesn't, to me, seem to come close to an appeal process.

There is a escalation process. I think the authors already did it and are now waiting. What I mentioned is not the escalation problem, it is a way to reach out for people when things fail.

Usually from your add-on admin dashboard you can reach out to the team and send messages to the reviewers, right from the same tool you use to admin everything.

Is it just me or there’s a lot of these ‘hot’ threads on GitHub lately? I don’t mean the issue at hand—validity is beside the point—but the fact is that these issues unravel on GitHub on a very predictable cadence, and Github Issues is fairly ill equipped to deal with making sense of this. So everyone just shouts at thin ether at the top of their lungs, hoping to attract some attention and answers, then it becomes an arms race.

That’s a design problem - if the voting system made things become more visible, then likely fewer people would feel the need to shout. That has its own drawbacks, though.

It’s a hard problem building anything remotely social. I don’t think they realised what they were putting themselves into when they were building Issues.

What happened is Mozilla got a complaint and pulled multiple pay-wall bypassers.

Source:

https://github.com/nextgens/anti-paywall/issues/109

"It appears that your Add-on violates the Firefox Add-on Distribution Agreement and the Conditions of Use. Both prohibit Add-ons that violate the law. Your Add-on appears to be designed and promoted to allow users to circumvent paywalls, which is illegal.

...

We are responding to a specific complaint that named multiple paywall bypassing add-ons. It did not target only your add-on."

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