Recently, we are beginning to get a lot of examples and extensions submissions. Many community members are dissatisfied with the current state of things though. Most of the complaints were on discord, so i decided to compile them here for more serious discussion about them. The most common points that are raised are the following:
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Favoritism: extensions from GDevelop code contributors like me, Bouh and 4ian or extensions that look more interesting than others seem to get reviewed and added faster, and extensions that were submitted first left behind.
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Lack of “advertisement”: some users said that they wished they had known earlier how easy it is to make extensions/examples and submit them.
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Lack of reviewers: some users complained at how hard it would is to find someone to review their examples/extensions, making it impossible to go on with the submission process.
I think there is also another issue, linked to the above: the lack of clear structure. We recently said we would create community teams to handle extensions, the wiki, examples etc. But this was not done properly in my opinion: we ha e not decided what teams there are, who leads the teams except for the extension team, who can join a team and how, what can team members and the team leader do, what should they manage…
So the result is that everything is pretty much still fully managed by 4ian (he has to more or less review all of the extensions that are submitted himself). This makes the concept of teams pretty much useless.
So I am creating this topic to discuss and try to find solutions to those issues. I think first of all we should establish a set of clear standards for community submissions and the “teams”. They should cover:
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What best practices/events code style we want and all can agree on.
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What are the acceptable scopes of an extension/example (when an extension is abstracting too much, when it should actually be a built-in feature // when an extension is showing something too evident, when an example is showing how to do something that should rather be simplified via an extension/engine feature).
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What teams we should have, who are in/can join the teams, what different roles the teams members have, and what permissions the different roles and responsibilities the different teams have.
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What is the exact full process to submit an extension/example, from creating it to reviewing it to adding it to GDevelop (and everyone should respect the protocol to prevent favoritism).
Once we have a clear standard that makes everyone happy, we could then see how to make those more obvious. For example, if we want to have as requirement to becoming an example reviewer “Have been using GDevelop for at least 3 months and have used it actively for 48 hours in total”, we could then make a popup inside GDevelop encouraging users to become a reviewer once those conditions are met (this is just an example).
Pinging people that are concerned to bring the conversation forward
@Entropy404 @4ian @Bouh @tristanrhodes @VegeTato @Silver-Streak @Midhil