Plugin Aggrivation
Listen up all you folks out there writing plugins. Yeah, I am talking to you developers, especially those of you doing things for WordPress. Oh, but if you are writing for another platform, tune in as well. I got a beef with you of recent. A beef that I am sure almost everyone else that is using your product has with you as well.
I have seen a trend of late with a lot of plugins just constantly churning out new versions. I will keep the ones that I am thinking about nameless for now. But it is just a bit too much when one in particular has a new update to the plugin at least once a week for the past twelve weeks running. It is by no means the only one that is has fallen into that same kind of routine, as another has hit seven of eight weeks up until a week or two ago and yet another had releases on four out of eight weeks.
Do not get me wrong, as I do understand the occasional need to get a set of rapid fire releases out if a mistake or two is made and a major security flaw found after that. However, in a lot of these cases, it was a nothing update. First, there were several that had nothing in the release notes about the minor x.y.z.1 release of the plugin. Several more were code cleanup releases – but in both of those cases I get the same urgency in WordPress that there is a new release. More than a few of these were a patch fix that effected a very few people who also had some additional plugin running that specifically conflicted in some way.
Even worse are the two additional trends that I am seeing. The first is just an annoyance, where in the plugin that was activated and as it updated has an attempt to reactivate, instead has some configuration option reset. The resetting of the option forces a reactivation of the plugin. In all but one case that I have seen this it posted the information for donations to support the cause. Several of those have even had the make a donation option clicked by default.
Two plugins I have tried of late have not only been disabled, but have also lost configuration options that I had set on the previous version that I was using. One in particular, reset my information with their default information in all the right places I had configured. In that case I could have run for a long time, pointing what I thought was my revenue stream instead to someone else instead.
Look guys, I completely understand and more than a number of plugins (and especially GPL/GPU software) have seen my donation in the past without such tactics. In fact, such tactics tend to make me not only search for an alternative but to clearly go out-of-the-way to make a donation to such strong armed tactics. Face it, if you want to develop for a community driven platform you have to realize that in itself it is not a path to riches and the more you force it the more apt you are to turn folks off.
Okay, now I am done with the soap box and will return to my regularly scheduled program, putting the soap box away for at least twenty-four hours.
