I have been having the worst of luck with the Downloads plugin. You can read my review on it at:
http://mods.mybb.com/reviews/downloads and the thread I tried to get going for support at:
http://community.mybb.com/thread-114188.html
Basically, I keep running up against SQL errors because the author did not check his code.
It is obvious from the errors I am getting that the plugin author did not properly and fully test his plugin against a clean install of the latest MyBB. It is even more obvious that plugins are not tested before they are approved for download on the MyBB site. Version 2.0 of the downloads plugin went broken for several weeks before finally being pulled. I had hope that version 2.0.1 would have fixed all the errors, but I quickly found yet another SQL error.
well, the author can not make reviews, so you will never get a reply that way. no support in the thread is another issue.
(2012-03-27, 10:24 PM)KDulcimer Wrote: [ -> ]It is even more obvious that plugins are not tested before they are approved for download on the MyBB site.
That's a false statement. I check every plugin before I approve it. If you want to pay us to check every single plugin extensively and line by line, then feel free, but we're all volunteers. Real life comes before the internet.
It's not our job to maintain plugins. That's the authors job.
(2012-03-27, 11:12 PM)Nathan Malcolm Wrote: [ -> ]That's a false statement. I check every plugin before I approve it. If you want to pay us to check every single plugin extensively and line by line, then feel free, but we're all volunteers. Real life comes before the internet.
It's not our job to maintain plugins. That's the authors job.
Pray tell, what does this "check" entail?
(2012-03-27, 11:41 PM)KDulcimer Wrote: [ -> ] (2012-03-27, 11:12 PM)Nathan Malcolm Wrote: [ -> ]That's a false statement. I check every plugin before I approve it. If you want to pay us to check every single plugin extensively and line by line, then feel free, but we're all volunteers. Real life comes before the internet.
It's not our job to maintain plugins. That's the authors job.
Pray tell, what does this "check" entail?
Checking for potential vulnerabilities would be the main task. I also test for functionality when I can.
But that's me. I have no idea what other staff members do regarding the validation process. If there are bugs within a plugin then it's not up to us to check or notify the author. People don't expect to have to fix bugs within MyBB, they expect us to fix bugs within MyBB. That's exactly what we do.
The author of the plugin maintains the plugin, the author of the software maintains the software.
The check is primarily to make sure it's nothing malicious, there is no warranty that because it's been approved it'll be 100% flawless, it's not our job to quality check 3rd party plugins. Trying to test every single feature of every single plugin, when we often don't know of everything it can do, and trying to go over every single one line by line to make sure everything is sanitised where it should be is not feasible. We may as well just write people's plugins ourselves.
If a plugin is seriously broken then the reviews section is probably not the best place to mention it as we don't look at the reviews for every single plugin that's there and he authors often don't check them either, contacting a team member via the Private Inquiries forum or contacting the author directly would be a better plan of action.
Okay, thanks for your feedback and I think I better understand now. Would there be a place for someone who would want to check plugins for advertised functionality?
I'm just someone who is getting a little tired of the gamma testing going on with the downloads plugin.
If you would be happy to test plugins fully then it might be something we could take further, drop Tim B a PM about it and see what he says.