The Proposed New Guidelines Must Be Revised

Following WCEU and in reviewing the number of changes people have brought up regarding the proposed new guidelines, I have determined that they will need some more work and a re-proposal in the coming months.

The main issues people have raised are:

Limiting what kind of notices are permitted unbalances the state in a manner that would give an unfair advantage to larger plugins, or developer that have multiple plugins.
Permanent dismissibility is really easy to work around by using content spinners or just changing the language slightly. That would be impossible to monitor and wouldn’t help users at all.

In addition there were a LOT of small language fixes involved in the process, which I feel should be re-reviewed from the top down.

In the coming months, I’ll be making a new pull request with a new attempt at this, taking all that advice into account.

Thank you everyone for your help on this! It’s not an easy process to craft guidelines that are equitable and understandable, and I hope we’ll have a better version soon.

justlevine 11:00 pm on July 3, 2019

Keep up the amazing work @ipstenu!
General question re: things being hard to monitor, what place (if any) is there in the (re)review process for users submitting reports about pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party violations?

Your guiding principle (from the original post) that rules are only helpful if they’re enforceable without too much extra onus on reviewers is a strong one, and I wonder if reactive (vs proactive) enforcement has a place.

(Not to put the cart in front of the horse, but for example, I’d hope permanent disability isn’t dropped entirely and is instead being reformulated to mitigate the enforcement issues, and worst case relies even in part on user reports. I’d like to assume that 80:20 also applies to guideline followers, and that something that could help the ecosystem isn’t given up on because of the potential for a few bad actors that can be dealt with after the fact).
- Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 11:04 pm on July 3, 2019
  
  In general we recommend
  
  1. Point out to the developer “Hey did you know this was a guideline violation?” Most of the time people just don’t realize it.
  
  2. Email plugins@wordpress.org and we’ll explain things to them.
  
  The reason I mention ‘too hard to monitor’ is that … well. It’s hella hard to keep track of all pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party changes. We just don’t monitor them the same way we do themes. If someone could script up a checker into SVNSVN Short for "SubVersioN", it's the code management system used to maintain the plugins hosted on WordPress.org. It's similar to git. that caught bad things, it would be great, but since there’s no (for example) standard way to insert notifications, we’d probably never actually get full coverage 🙁
  
  Anything that relies on waiting for people to catch mistakes is going to miss things, and people (for whatever reason) always assume that us missing something must have some secret/nefarious reason behind it. You know, how DARE we close THEIR plugin for X when we didn’t close Y!?!? Tends to end with us saying “Thanks for letting us know about Y! We’re on it!”
Arnan de Gans 2:45 pm on July 4, 2019

Isn’t a bunch of those notifications just a hazard of installing too much work too crappy plugins? Don’t turn into the EU and stop policing or regulating everything.
- Arnan de Gans 2:47 pm on July 4, 2019
  
  Hmm this site doesn’t work right on mobile, can’t edit…
  
  Here’s the no-typos version:
  Isn’t having a bunch of those notifications just a hazard of installing too much or too crappy plugins? Don’t turn into the EU and stop policing or regulating everything.
- Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 4:00 pm on July 4, 2019
  
  We’re not trying to turn into the EU. And your assumption that it’s all “too many or too crappy plugins” isn’t accurate.
  
  Did you read the initial proposal?

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The Proposed New Guidelines Must Be Revised

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