The team acts as gate-keepers and fresh eyes on newly submitted plugins, as well as reviewing any reported security or guideline violations.
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Instagram is accelerating the end of their current APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways..
Per a notice on https://www.instagram.com/developer/ no new clients can register, and soon some basic functionality will be changed.
We will be reviewing plugins that call these functionalities and, if they are not updated, will close them in order to prevent adverse impact on users.
If you know you’re not going to want to fix this, please email plugins@wordpress.org, provide a link to the 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., and tell us you’d like us to close it. We know that Instgram (and Facebook) have been difficult to work with this last year, and fully respect and support your decisions here with regards to your plugins.
Here is Instagram’s announcement:
UPDATE: Starting October 15, 2019, new client registration and permission review on Instagram API platform are discontinued in favor of the Instagram Basic Display API.
To continuously improve Instagram users’ privacy and security, we are accelerating the deprecation of Instagram API Platform, making the following changes effective immediately. We understand that this may affect your business or services, and we appreciate your support in keeping our platform secure.
These capabilities will be disabled immediately (previously set for July 31, 2018 or December 11, 2018 deprecation). The following will be deprecated according to the timeline we shared previously:
- Public Content – all remaining capabilities to read public media on a user’s behalf on December 11, 2018
- Basic – to read a user’s own profile info and media in early 2020
For your reference, information on the new Instagram Graph API.
There’s been a lot of quiet change going on for Plugins, so now is as good a time as any to get into it!
If you’re interested in any details missing, leave a comment. I do ask you try not to speculate too much into the why’s and wherefores of what people do with plugins. I’ve been at this a while, and the one thing I can promise is people do weird things.
We finally migrated off of the old system and on to HelpScoutHelp Scout A 3rd party service we use to process emails for plugin reviews. in March, which allows us the ability to sort and organize emails into teams. It also lets us properly filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. bad actors so not everyone has to deal with them. We make heavy use of automated filters now, which has let us do the impossible …
We onboarded two new team members in November and have been easing them in to the weird workload of Plugins. They’ve been instrumental in sorting out what filters and team assignments do and don’t work well for Plugins.
I’ve been using a new bash script to expedite scanning plugins. While we’d love to use WPCSWordPress Community Support A public benefit corporation and a subsidiary of the WordPress Foundation, established in 2016. (and I personally recommend it to for everyone), even with a heavily parred down version it hasn’t quite met our needs. The goal for next year is to move the bash script into a PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. https://www.php.net/manual/en/index.php 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. we can use to automate a lot more.
Our saved replies (the standard ones you get for closures and reviews) have all been cleaned up, spellchecked, and formatted for easier reading. Now, when you get an alert that your plugin has been closed, we attempt to direct you on exactly how to resolve the issues. This is still a bit of a work in progress, but we’ve made great strides on consistent tone and softer language.
Sadly as many people found out, we got dinged hard by some trademark owners, and are taking action against people who violate trademarks. Around 1000 plugins were closed due to that, and it’s one of those things we can’t protect you from. We’ve changed the plugin uploader for new submissions to blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. a lot of that.
Remember the basic rule: If it’s not your company/product/library, don’t begin your plugin Display Name or permalink with it!
(Trademark owners: Please ask the developer to changes things before coming to us. Communication will help everyone.)
A lot of people like this part. Here’s the overall outlook from 2019:
And in a slightly more consumable summary table:
| Requested | Rejected | Closed | Approved | Pending | |
| Most in a week | 194 | 109 | 480 | 118 | 718 |
| Least in a week | 129 | 2 | 9 | 25 | 527 |
| Average | 161 | 25 | 117 | 76 | 623 |
| Year to Date | 8048 | 1221 | 6038 | 3836 | N/A |
We’ve had 1000 more plugins submitted in 2019 than 2018, however the Rejected and Approved numbers only went up by 100.
So where are the extra 800 plugins? On average, pending plugins did go down but only by about 25 a week. Most of the missing counts are there, but they’re also in the dreaded “Closed” section.
A higher than expected number of developers have submitted plugins for review and then asked them to be closed within a 6 month timeframe. This has led to us pushing back on people and making notes in their accounts about that kind of behavior. There hasn’t yet been a common thread to why that’s happening, so we’re keeping an eye out.
HelpScout also helpfully provides their own statistics for how much we used them. This is just since March when we switched over:
We make heavy use of Saved Replies to speed up reviews and processing. These were brought in to use in chunks, and I’m omitting the exact numbers. They won’t do you any good to know we sent 2,679 “Approval after send” emails when you realize we also only sent 628 “Intro to new Review”. All that means is we pulled in the Approval email first. Next year these stats will be more useful.
All that said, I think having a look at what the most common sorts of issues are might be a little enlightening. Everything is ordered from most use to least.
These emails are sent out when a plugin is closed or the developer needs to be warned about issues/behavior.
All these emails are sent when a plugin is being reviewed.
A pended plugin is one we stop before even reviewing the code. This usually happens because someone’s infringing on trademarks, or using a personal account to submit a company owned plugin.
This should give you an idea of why plugins are rejected. Top of the list? People who don’t reply.
The rest of the emails are lumped together. You’ll notice we have prefixes to what each email is. That helps us find them faster.
Posting here with a journal entry for reference: I was pinged in a few tweet storms in the past week, so I took the liberty of reviewing the email template that seemed to kick off both conversations (sockpuppetSockpuppet A false online identity, typically created by a person or group in order to promote their own opinions or views. Generally used to promote or down-vote plugins en masse. activity). I edited it for clarity, flow, and WordPress Voice. The issues that prompted the complaints on Twitter have also been resolved through direct communication.
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