Label abandoned plugins as unsupported

[Wade]

macromark This has been discussed before but it's come back to my attention with shill's release of the new HS4 Life360 plugin. I was reliant on a few of simplextech's plugins before he left and bequeathed several to SirMeili--who subsequently abandoned them and hasn't been on the forum since December 2021. I see that 9 of SirMeili's paid plugins are still for sale on HomeSeer.com with no mention that they're abandoned.

It seems a system for keeping up with developer support and/or abandonment of plugins is needed. As far as I know right now it's on the purchaser to research the forum or simply learn the hard way that a PI they're trialing or purchased isn't supported and may or may not still fully work. Long-time users know to do this but my guess is most new users wouldn't realize it's necessary.

At a minimum add a note on the plugin purchase page and at the top of the dedicated support forum explaining when a developer is no longer supporting a plugin. This implies a timeframe for it to be considered "abandoned". I would vote for 6 months of no dev response to issues and questions raised on the plugin's support forums or when a dev explicitly states support has stopped--whichever occurs first.

[donstephens]

Makes sense.

[racerfern]

+1

[CraigNotGraig]

+1 .............. I'd shorten the "no response" timeline to 3 months.

[rmasonjr]

agreed

[macromark]

We're looking into this. FYI

[Wade]

Thanks Mark.

[davidcald]

+1
This is related to discussion elsewhere about plugin management and obsolete/unsupported plugins https://forums.homeseer.com/forum/ho...238-complaints

Generally, I would think it possible as I've seen in other cases, where 3rd party developers must submit code in escrow to be held for the good of the user base when they no longer wish to support it.

Also, HS could require a small annual fee for active developers to submit plugins to the HS plugin management system. Then HS would automatically know if a developer had "quit" on the plugin. The fee would be covered by a simple agreement which contained the escrow requirement. The fee would go to support HS resources for plugin management and user forum services.

And about plugin management, it's almost doing the whole job. What about...

- alerting via email or other comms to the presence of a plugin update? Jon00's addin works for this but how about a builtin setting option.
- Author vetting their active plugins against each release of HS and confirming tested to HS framework or SDK latest versions. Shown on manage plugin page and plugin store as flag for each plugin
- highlighting in the plugin page available updates with color

I'm sure I'm oversimplifying all this but we are not the first one to face this issue, so what works best for us? Just throwing out ideas for debate.

[Bernold]

Thought I'd share my view on abandoned/unsupported plugins as a developer of currently 5 plugins, of which one is a paid plugin. And a free one might be considered abandoned, when undocumented became unavailable after a forced firmware update (GUI overhaul). I left it in case anyone could still use it.

• Abandoned plugins should become free, plain and simple.
• I read that some suggest that such plugins should be removed, but I feel that could make things worse, because such plugins would no longer be available to reinstall. And if there's no alternative it could still ba a valuable plugin as long as its API is not changed.
• Unsupported plugins should be marked of their forums, in the updater and shop. Also, it might help to add the release date in updater and shop as an indication of how recent it has been updated.
• There should be some place, like a dedicated forum, where you can let HST know if you think a plugin has been abandoned or a developer appears to be AWOL after weeks of no response (and where others can confirm), after which HST contacts the developer to check and later mark the plugins.
• I have my doubts about keeping code in escrow:
  • It may scare off potential new developers.
  • As one developer said when he stopped developing his HS3 plugins and shared the source code: You don't write or document with a change of ownership in mind. In other words, it would cost more work to do so and prices might go up.
  • My plugin sources have quite some comments, but the real documentation is not in the source, but in other documents, my head, etc. For my paid plugin it is actually quite hard to find other places with good documentation. The official API(s) have been taken offline and even have been removed from archives. Which leaves GitHub repositories, which are far from complete - maybe 20% of available functionality, rest was reverse engineered. My point is code in escrow might not help that much..
  • I don't think it's fair to expect when it's a free plugin.

[macromark]

SirMeili's plugins have been moved to the legacy section of the updater and are no longer offered for sale to new users. FYI