Extension Store Discussion & Feedback

While both sides make good points, I tend to agree with HTMLCSSNoob on this.. it is highly unlikely that people will go to such great lengths to have someone else's $10 mod disabled. But for additional security, we could:
- lock the voting down by username and IP address.
- no "down" voting if your account is less than a week old
- alert email sent to us if a user down votes more than 5 mods in a day or few hours

There are a lot of proxy sites and ip hide tools out there, but as a user of them, I can tell you the quality of reliability has gone down on them and it takes a long time to get 5 new working IPs.

Anyone willing to make such an effort to do all that, just to down vote, probably deserves the reward for his efforts.
Still, we would get an email about it and be able to review it as soon as it goes disabled. But its a lot easier to govern this rare occasion than have to go and manually disable the dozens of bad mods that actually do exist.

I think I'll start working on this

proxies might be poor, but many people don't have static ips - it takes less than 30 seconds for my router to disconnect and reconnect my internet, with a nice new ip so it really isn't all that difficult. I like the idea of no voting without your account being at least a week old - this makes sense really. I would suggest if you allow the auto disabling of a mod that the mod owner receive an email alerting them so that he can "appeal" it should it be disabled. Perhaps someone who votes a mod down should have to give a reason for the vote down too? Just a thought

JAY6390 wrote:I agree with X, it really bugs me not being notified of new comments on a mod I've made. would probably be beneficial to people who comment on it too. Ideally I would like the ability to edit a comment too (my own of course) as mistakes do get made

I think changing vote is also important, as I just had a noob vote 1 star on a mod with a bad comment.. and then 2 sec later says "Oh nevermind, it works great" but was stuck with a 1 star vote.

Yeah changing vote sounds like a good idea too (and surely not all that difficult to do)

hmmm good point

Maybe restrict new accounts from posting mods as well.. but that might be too restrictive for some that just want to help and don't have an account yet and they may just not list it due to forgetting about it.

I'd say lets try it with what we have and see how it goes, we can always improve.

Yeah I did think the exact same thing. It's best to allow them to upload

Ok I'd like to start with:

Sounds good to me

This sounds like a bad idea.

Totally agree with rating but disabling availability based on voting down???

Honestly is this really going to save you guys time or are you going to end up having to mediate disputes and manually check extensions anyway?

Wouldn't it be better to have mods pass a basic test before they go live. So rather than chasing down bad mods trying to stop them before they get in and then using the community to pick up anything that slips through?

Also, if the reward for effort is too low then why not up your end. The current 20% is low compared to most template or app marketplaces. I'm sure your aware that not only do most marketplaces give the developer the lesser end of the deal but they also set the prices.

Now I'm not advocating you take that position but there's a fair bit of room between the current position and the competition.

Anyways I'll leave it at that because my self censoring is telling me that I'm coming off a little negative today. I know you guys will come up with something good.

Cheers.

Heh, your opinions are noted imaginetech.. but we are all human and learn by trial and error. Yes we are cheaper than other extension stores for the reason of trying to keep the costs down on the mods themselves. Magento and Presta stores have mods like the Authorize.net AIM going for $300-$400, while I've had that module since day one for Opencart for $20, which is really low, but $300+ is beyond ridiculous. People have already shared their distaste for all the commercial addons in opencart and it doesn't help if people jack up their prices just to cover the broker fee, that is bad for the community. The next best thing to free mods, is affordable mods, and I think we've set the bar quite well at a medium priced pace. Research shows that the bar set by the community leaders tends to set the path. Which is why ZenCart mods are mostly free at one end of the spectrum and Magento mods are mostly overpriced at the other end. I think we found a good niche in the middle.

But it's not about reward for effort. Yes your point about the person making the 20% cut should be monitoring more closely. But to what end. There is a reality there that people just don't have a world of time to teach people how to be civilized. A community of what we assume to be a majority of civilized people can be used to enforce good behavior. This isn't unlike our current society. There are few police to a city of hundreds of thousands. The police have to expect that if a good person sees a bad person do something, they will either intervene or escalate to authorities. But if a person can simply stop a crime by yelling and chasing them away, then that is best immediate results for the overall community.

I'm not saying my way is best (yet ) but I think it is worth a try. It can always be improved later with additional filtering steps... you know.... Rome wasn't built.. yadda yadda.

I've not seen any ideas yet on how to better filter them on the way in, only thoughts about how to get rid of them quickly once they are in. Nothing says we can't have 2 levels of protection in the end. But we gotta start somewhere, and this is a pretty well developed idea for immediate results (yes im biased to my own idea.. sue me).

If it doesn't work then we can change things like number of votes or go from there.

Yeah I agree with what your saying. I think I can sum up my point of view by saying we don't need to reinvent the wheel. Why not leverage what others have already done. Why not pre filter extensions is there's only 10 or so per day and if that takes you an hour or so then why not move your position from 20->30% and cap prices at 40 for run of the mill extensions.

So basically, take what other people are doing and improve it rather than try to do something no one else is doing.

Anyway, I agree, pushsomething out and refine as needed.

Cheers.

I don't think the % is an issue. Daniel is busy, so is Q. I'd happily moderate new extensions without a fee. The problem is more that theres no system in place at the minute to notify of new extensions etc. Even something as simple as an RSS feed would be ideal for this kind of notification

imaginetech wrote: So basically, take what other people are doing and improve it rather than try to do something no one else is doing.

But this is actually how phpbb (and I assume other forums) do it. If 3 people report a post, it goes disabled from non-mods until a moderator oks it. And it's not abused.

JAY6390 wrote:I don't think the % is an issue. Daniel is busy, so is Q. I'd happily moderate new extensions without a fee. The problem is more that theres no system in place at the minute to notify of new extensions etc. Even something as simple as an RSS feed would be ideal for this kind of notification

Another good idea would definitely be an RSS feed

ok.. I've added an "Edit rating" function now. Now you can change your rating on any extension

Ok I've finished adding the "Report Extension" system.
Now all extensions have a report link.
1. Click the link once and it will show the disclaimer. READ IT CAREFULLY!
2. From there you can choose OK if you want to continue or CANCEL if you do not.
3. If click OK, a success or error message will popup.
- Accounts must be at least 1 week old to report or an error will popup
- You can only report each extension 1 time
- When an extension has been reported, the report link changes to "Reported"

When 5 reports are made, the extension is auto-disabled and an email is sent to me (for now) for review.

Qphoria wrote:

imaginetech wrote: So basically, take what other people are doing and improve it rather than try to do something no one else is doing.

But this is actually how phpbb (and I assume other forums) do it. If 3 people report a post, it goes disabled from non-mods until a moderator oks it. And it's not abused.

JAY6390 wrote:I don't think the % is an issue. Daniel is busy, so is Q. I'd happily moderate new extensions without a fee. The problem is more that theres no system in place at the minute to notify of new extensions etc. Even something as simple as an RSS feed would be ideal for this kind of notification

Another good idea would definitely be an RSS feed

Yes, but we are not discussing a forum we are discussing a store selling extensions. At some point we can't automate everything and need some human intervention.

If someone respectable like Jay says he's willing to moderate the extensions directory without charge then I'd suggest let him have a go for a while. What's the worst that could happen? If he does a rocking job then pay him. The thing about this is that the better that section becomes the more revenue it will produce.

Well dang, I didn't think my initial post would get such immediate action!

That's really cool though. Thanks a bunch Q for taking the time to listen to the suggestions put forth and then implement them so quickly. Really awesome job! I checked out the extensions section now and I see the Report this Mod link. LOL, I clicked on my first one already! Take that spam advertisement!

Although I do still think 5 is too high a number for an alert e-mail to be sent. The spam advertisement I clicked on (http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route ... order=DESC) has only been reported 1 time, so that means I am the first to report it. I'm just wondering are 4 more people going to take the time and report it too? If they don't, how is anyone going to know to delete it?

I think maybe an alert e-mail should go out on reports 1-3 (take your pick with the number), and then the auto-disable feature should kick in at 5 or whatever...