Ask HN: How the hell do you get a Mozilla add-on published?
I belong to some specific subreddits around Old School Roleplaying games (if you're not familiar, think like ... Basic Dungeons and Dragons, Traveller, etc.) At the start of the reddit fiasco, I posted that I was curious where everyone would go if we weren't on reddit. The death of Google+ was kind of a body blow to the hobby, and Twitter became ... something else, so we had come to reddit and now that community felt like it was in jeopardy. So I posted the question and folks weighed in, and something that kept popping up was among grognards who missed the "web rings" of yore.
So I started thinking about that a bit and decided - what the hell, I'll make a web ring for OSR content. The code is here: https://github.com/totalityofygg/osr-webring-firefox It's really nothing fancy, a side menu opens up where you can page through a list of OSR sites. I'm not a professional javascript developer. I'm literally just posting links, no images, no revenue grab, nothing. I'm just trying to surface something for the hobby.
I submitted to Mozilla, waited a day, got approved. Yay! I put that up on reddit and was really proud of myself.
That lasted 12 hours, give or take. The Add-On got pulled back by Mozilla for "objectionable content." I felt humiliated as I had to tell people who were excited by it to forget what I said, but I also felt that I must have fucked up, and there must be some site in that json feed that they didn't like. Bummer but whatever, I can clean that up. So I asked what the objectionable content was. Waited a few days, no answer. I incremented the version and resubmitted. This time I got rejected, but the reason changed to the fact that my website didn't provide any support for my Add-On. OK ... So I cleared up anywhere that my website was mentioned, just deleted it because it didn't ultimately matter. I resubmitted and got denied again for the same issue. Each time I write to say "... hey, can you tell me what I'm doing wrong so I can fix it?", I get no response.
I'm not trying to make a cent. I'm not trying to market content. I'm not trying to fucking do anything but contribute in the way I thought we were supposed to? For the first time in my career working on the web - a career which began in late 80s / early 90s - I feel completely out of place and unable to understand what's happening.
I'm hoping someone will just tell me what I'm doing wrong. I want to improve. I want to contribute. But if no one can tell me what I'm doing wrong, I'm finding this impossible.