Hi, I was wondering what I have to do, to be able to comment on Extensions in this Forum. I cant find the comment button? Do I need to do something more?
Thanks for your feedback
Best wishes
I am not quite sure how the restrictions will be lifted at some point. I still wonder how I could reply to anything.
The restrictions of users are to strict in my opinion.
Example: I can submit an Extension, users can see it and install it, but they can NOT reply to the original post for issues they have with it. That sounds weird to me too
Not sure if users can actually comment there, but usually you’d scroll down to the button and click here:
Yes I went there, there is no button there, for example on your recent events extension
while on the idea topics for example Live Soccer Scoreboard, i can reply
I dont understand why that is this way.
I can only guess, but I assume they want to have extension discussions here: Extension Support - Streamer.bot Extensions
To keep things in Submissions to be only about the submission there is not commenting on them. In fact that category ideally would be only viewable by the submitter and community that is part of the approval process, not everyone as it is now. The system does not have something in place to do that so it’s kind of a “We don’t recommend using these until they are approved so use at your own risk.” The one’s that have commented on those were not indeed supposed to even though permission allowed them to do so. Discussion and voting takes place in another category that is accessible by staff or users that have eventually reached a Trust Level of 3 in the system. Trust level is earned by interacting with the system in various ways through posting, logging in, etc.
The Extension Support category is a thread solution category. It is intended as a way to ask a question or report an issue and then a solution be marked so we know it’s been handled and the issue has been solved. That is sort of hard to do if you allow everyone to comment on a submission and you have to dig through all the various comments on it.
The Ideas category is meant to be able to be open to replies as someone posts an idea, people vote on it, and discussion could be had as to why it would be a good idea for a community member to take on the project.
As the community grows and people contribute, discuss, ask and answer questions more things open up to the community member. The process is meant to keep the documentation as clean as possible while encouraging users to interact that would love to help contribute. Currently, as the system is still relatively in it’s infancy, mostly community staff members have access to the voting and approval process. However as trust level is gained that automatically opens up for other users as well.
It is also possible that if a user is interested in being part of the approval process we bump their trust level up manually. So feel free to reach out to the community staff to state your interest as we could use more people looking at things. I know this is a slow moving process as anything done on any side of SB is done by volunteers. So more volunteers means more eyes on things but there’s also some assumed knowledge behind it as well. Best practices in coding (to a degree), guiding things to be user friendly, etc. So while more eyes help we also need those eyes to also be of people willing to give people constructive criticism to better their submissions.
While I know some may view this as strict, harsh, gatekeepy, whatever name you want to give it it really is not. It is about helping the people that truly want to learn in the community how to code and build things out in way that keeps them answering support posts to a minimum. Cause the less time they spend answering questions the more time they are honing their skills and building awesome stuff for the community to use, for free I might add.
I agree in several points to your security measures, but in some points I absolutely disagree.
I see that from the perspective of the creator.
If I send an extension to this forum, it will be in the Submission Category. No one except me and the admins can reply to them to add any additions, bugs, and so on.
There is a huge disclaimer above it all “IF AN EXTENSION IS USED FROM THIS CATEGORY IT IS DONE SO AT YOUR OWN RISK! THESE ARE IN THE PROCESS OF TESTING AND BEING APPROVED!”
I can understand that the admins have their RL and other jobs to do and don’t have always the time to approve extensions.
So my main question here is: How long must the creator wait until he gets ANY Feedback for his extension?
So if you (the admins) don’t have the time to check the extensions, then let others comment on the topics, that the creator can already improve the extension.
For me it is currently useless to offer extensions here, there is no chance of “collaboration” or feedback for the creator.
Best current example for this scenario is https://extensions.streamer.bot/t/random-source-position-obs/1260 where rondhi had the time to test it and made a suggestion for improvement. He was able to do it because he is admin. I was not able to do it. Kind of two-class society don’t you think?
Ok, you say you agree with several points in security measures but disagree with some points. That you are looking at it from the “perspective of the creator.” If you think I or others are not we can go back to the old system that didn’t favor creators. We have more interaction on THIS system then we did when the backend was hosted on GitHub and Pull Requests were the way to add documentation. That system was WAY more restrictive than this one AND has such a vast learning curve that for a creator just trying to build things and share it or people trying to respond and give feedback it was super intimidating so people just didn’t. You can’t earn trust through interaction on GitHub and will forever be at the mercy of the repo maintainers, that’s just fact, but you can earn trust to gain permissions to do those things in this system. I built up this system in order to make it a bit less restrictive and less intimidating to use for the average user compared to how we were doing things with GitHub.
Commenting to “improve” extensions is literally at the interpretation of the person testing it if you don’t have a system in place. Most people are just gonna use it and not give constructive criticism. The “huge disclaimer” is there because people keep ignoring the fact that submissions should be private but they can’t be the way this system works so best can be done is making users login. However, that’s being just told to everyone to go use this submission they just have to log in. So disclaimer just had to be added. There’s also best practices and guidelines that we try to adhere to that was agreed upon for the most part amongst those of us familiar with UI, C#, and building out a solid release. So while yes it may take a bit for us to get to them some times we give feedback when we see it needs it or if it looks good and hits so many votes we move it to approved. But even though the topics move the comments stay hence keeping documentation clean.
While I do understand that things can be a bit slow at times, cause you can ask anyone here I poke the volunteers to review when I see things siting too long, the offer is there for anyone that wants to be a part of the process. If being impartial, giving people constructive criticism, and enjoying helping others achieve a extension release that produces minimal support posts is your goal, then let one of the staff know and we’ll get you on board. This isn’t just about the here and now it’s about maintaining a healthy community run system and staff are really just kick starting it. Eventually people that have been around for a long time and contributing will unlock the same abilities that some others were fast tracked to. It’s only a “two class society” if you can never move from one class to the other and that’s not the case here.
You say there’s no chance of collaboration when there is a Extension Collab section for people to collab and get feedback and a Testing section to have people test and get feedback BEFORE creating a submission in Submissions to be reviewed and approved. There’s places that feedback can be gotten and staff are more than happy to move topics for people as well.
You also say it’s useless to offer extensions here. That is your opinion and no one is saying you have to submit them here. In fact I’m the one who practically built and maintain this site and I’m choosing to not release stuff here for the most part anymore but for my own reasons. I just have much love for the Streamer.bot community and want to continue to offer a way for the community to share that doesn’t get lost in the top of a Discord channel somewhere even if I no longer submit my stuff.
Again I get we all have opinions but if you do read this post through hopefully I’ve addressed all your concerns. If not I don’t know how much further I can address them as this post already went way longer than I intended.