Greetings, Sponge community! I have great news to share!
We are now actively approving plugin submissions on Ore!
Our Ore development team has put in substantial effort, squashing bugs and adding new features, to make the process easier for our review team. I am very proud of the work they have contributed, and I am excited to continue watching the development of our plugin distribution platform. Of course, as you identify any bugs in Ore please add them to our issue tracker so we can look into the problem (though we also appreciate open PRs).
Approval Strategy
I want to describe a bit about how we’re rolling out approvals. Our initial target is the latest release versions each plugin has for API versions 5, 6, and 7. New submissions made past our start of review also will see review. Plugins written in Kotlin or Scala are going to see a delay in approval as we finalize our process for handling those. We want to ensure plugins labeled as approved have been reviewed appropriately.
Guidelines Violations
Not all plugins we look at are going to be immediately approved. The Ore Plugin Submission Guidelines, released in May 2017, outline our expectations for submitted projects and files. As we have progressed through our substantial list of plugins to review, we have made note of plugins doing things that are against the guidelines. Some are simple oversights on the plugin’s project page and can be fixed with an edit. Others are present in the uploaded files themselves, and will require uploading a file that complies with our expectations.
Developer Outreach
We will soon begin reaching out to developers with information on what issues with their plugin submission need resolution, if any exist. The message sent will contain the plugin (or plugins) in question and what specific issues have been identified. We are giving developers until the end of this year to resolve concerns identified. As always, I encourage developers to reach out with any questions. On the Sponge Discord we have #ore-general, on IRC we have #spongeore, and of course we have the Ore Support subforum here.
Special Focus: bStats
Let’s talk bStats! The version that many plugin developers are using isn’t exactly compliant with the guidelines. All developers should update to using the latest version - 1.4. If you directly copy the file, you will need to grab the latest version of two files and place them both in the org.bstats.sponge package (rather than your own package as you may have previously done). If, as we recommend, you include them via their maven repository you should be able to just update to version 1.4 in your dependencies list. Regardless of which way you do it, you can find information here on updating as well as an example plugin. Note that you may not modify the bstats classes and doing so will result in your submission being rejected.
The latest bStats is compliant with the guidelines by querying the new API present in SpongeAPI 7.1.0 (available for a while now). This means that, for stats collection, you do not need to write your own checking into your plugin; bStats does it for you by querying the API. Server operators can control the enabled/disabled state of stats collection by your plugin through their sponge configuration.
Next Step: “Plugin Releases” Subforum Deprecation
With Ore approvals starting, it’s time to talk about phasing out the Plugin Releases subforum. At some point soon, we will announce a future date at which it will not be possible to create new posts on the subforum. All new plugins will be posted only to Ore. A couple months after this point, the subforum will be completely locked and will function solely as an archive of the past.