There’s pros and cons to this but I’m curious what people think.
A few pros would be that it’s easier for people to edit the entry for their plugins and would stop the current list from being a target for malicious actors. Since it’s on pidgin.im they’ve used it to try and build credibility to phish/con people.
A big con is that search-ability isn’t great, but maybe we could fix that with tags? Or maybe a pinned “mega post” or something to help group them?
I’m sure there are lots of other things I’m not considering so please chime in.
I worry that we’ll have the same problems with it being posted in discourse as with being on the main pidgin.im site. Sure, we can delete posts and ban the poster, but it’s still an attack avenue.
Oh for sure that’s always something we’ll have to deal with, but it will avoid casual end users from being conned as most of them won’t know what imfreedom is and thus won’t trust the domain.
One of the issues with the ss-otr incident was that they used the pidgin.im/plugins URL to look “more official” and I have no idea how many people fell for it, but it’s something we need to make harder and using discourse should help with that.
Also I really need to do that write up one of these days.
I am afraid, not having a list of protocol plug-ins will hurt Pidgin’s reputation as a multi-protocol messenger.
Looking at the only active competition I know, About Miranda NG | Miranda NG is pretty much “look at all the protocols” right away. It is similar with bridges, where protocols are even more important:
https:// wiki.bitlbee org/FrontPage
https:// matrix org/ecosystem/bridges/
https:// slidge im/
If I was coming across Pidgin and was presented with a list of topics in the discourse forum some of which are about advertising protocol plug-ins, some are other plug-ins, some are discussions, some are outdated or inactive, I would be deterred from even trying Pidgin.
Thanks for you input and I understand where you’re coming from. However I’ve written about this topic in the past here and I’m not sure any that having a list of protocol plugins on the website tackles any of the issues mentioned in that post nor does it stop it from being a target of malicious individuals.
Maybe we end up listing the “trusted” authors like we have in the current plugin list on the site? There is also the option to add them to the flatpak and binaries for windows and mac, but then we have to do co-ordinated releases and stuff, and that’s not fun either.
I like the plugin list how it currently is and would find a list in discourse sub-optimal. Alternatively, I could see a plugins page on an actual wiki work too, but of course there’ll be additional effort involved in setting up and maintaining a wiki. Not sure if that would gain you anything.
I made an account AND verified my email just to let you know how wrong you are.
BTW to whoever disabled anonymous posting because of “too much crap about rust”. I sympathize.
As a user when I want to know if pidgin supports a chat protocol i don’t want to delve into whatever a Discourse is.
(It is apparently an electron app masquerading as a forum.)
I want to visit the website the forced me to delve into whatever a Discourse is by disabling the website I visited and telling me “Using Discourse for this list is just easier for everyone involved and this page will one day redirect to it.”
When there are two ways:
Your way
The way you have to forbid everyone to use or else they won’t use your way
(BTW I composed this reply in a separate text editor because this “website” is an abomination. How dare you inflict it on anyone ever. Note: Edit this for tone later.)
Your way is not “the easy way”
Also I know correlation is not causation but it looks like Pidgin plugin development has stagnated since it was exiled here.
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
Working though this post, I think the complaint is that putting the plugins on some kind of external platform will make them harder to find.
Then again, describing Discourse as “an electron app masquerading as a forum” is, um, interesting and I’m struggling to find a kind way to comment on it but it but I think the comment is hurting the person’s credibility and suggests this person is either uninformed about what an electron app is or leaving a deliberately disingenuous comment.
Since this is bumped anyway, I want to say that the useful-ness of some kind of central list I think outweighs its vulnerability as an attack-point. I would caution against spreading thin across too many decentralized platforms because that is weird and confusing. “Oh, the plugins are on Zeep, but we host the information about the project on Whelp. You can find development documentation on Clottr.” In the end you’re maintaining multiple front-ends to avoid maintaining one backend and I’m not sure who that’s actually helping.
I wonder if having an aggregate page of plugins which shows a community rating and allows users to flag things could help? If it’s just a numeric up/down vote and preset flags (like “malicious” or “no longer maintained”) you wouldn’t really have to monitor it too closely. This would allow users to compare the post date with the number of votes and the up/down ratio to make a decision about what to trust for themselves… but this also means finding a platform with these features or create a bespoke website.
As a current Miranda NG user, on one hand they like to push their protocols to the front, but on the other they do not vet the list at all and the DeltaChat plugin, for example, is entirely unuseable and the wiki page instructions tell you to do something which, turning to the message board, you’ll find out isn’t implemented yet! So, listing a bunch of protocols that may-or-may-not be ready, even by trusted devlopers who do otherwise good work isn’t a perfect solution, either.
Okay, but who’s going to build and maintain this and clean up the spam and review bombs?
I should have been more clear in the original post, but the OBS Studio forums has a plugins section which is roughly what we’d be going for. But I would add a pinned item to list/categorize everything and link to the thread for each plugin. That pinned post would be what would be replacing pidgin.im/plugins.
Yeah, that’s the kicker. You need someone to manage the community. Then again, if you have something like the OBS forums, who is gonna moderate that? Are you personally maintaining that pinned posts list? Vetting who can sign up and post plugins to start with? Maybe something like the ModTheSims queue system would work… but then who vets the queue? Is maintaining a list by hand better than getting a forum software or CMS that would just allow thread tagging?
It sounds like maybe you have something in mind that isn’t fully explained here and I think knowing how you envision the whole process would answer a lot of questions and address a lot of concerns. At the end of the day, I think most people will put up with whatever you end up doing since the space for multiprotocol messenger clients is very small. Miranda NG is the only other one I know of that supports community or third party plugins at all. Trillian and All-In-One messenger rely on the devs making it compatible with the platform. I can’t think of any other options at all off the top of my head.
This was the point of making it a wiki page in the Plugins category of this forum which I already have to moderate. By making it a wiki page, we can allow others to update it. Discourse keeps a page history and makes the edits visible which simplifies things.
Here is a first attempt at recreate the list for purple3/pidgin3 plugins. Of course there’s still a lot of improvement to be done here, but this is roughly what I’ve been proposing.
Also we’ll need to bring in the existing pidgin2/purple2 list, but that’s a task for another time.
It might be helpful for the layperson when they come to the page to explain the difference between Gaim, Purple and Pidgin plugins on the page. Or, at the very least, explain Purple plugins vs Gaim and Pidgin plugins. The user hopefully will know if they are using Gaim or Pidgin, but might not understand what a ‘Purple’ plugin is and assume that Gaim/Pidgin/Purple are wholly exclusive when (unless I missed something) that wouldn’t really be the case.
