Why is Bukkit polluted with a lot of rubbish plugins?

Hi,

I used to program Bukkit plugins years ago, and I probably accumulated 10s of thousands of views on related YouTube videos and many thousands of downloads.

Since then, Bukkit seems to have been polluted with plugins which just, frankly, don't deserve to be posted.

There are ~700 pages of plugins.

Quite a few of which seem to do one thing. "There is now a chance x block drops y item". People have chosen an item, made it restore hunger and published it. I understand people want to feel proud of their first plugin but there are so many duplicates!

TO NEWBIE DEVS:
I don't mind replicas, but if you're going to do the same thing, ask the original creator (or go ahead if he hasn't updated in years), and please, do a better job.

PLEASE READ THIS:
There are also, however, a lot more marvelous plugins which is what makes this community amazing. I just wish people didn't have to trawl through crap to find these golden nuggets


Am I the only one who thinks this way?
Regards, Tster

 

Dude, it's not your problem that these shite plugins are being published. They'll get pushed out of view quickly anyway because of what they are. No offence, but you yourself can't really make much of a difference with one post to a forum.

 

I wasn't trying to cause an 'enlightenment' per se, but was just wondering if other devs agreed.

 

I bet your first plugin wasn't no Logblock, essentials, Vault, TagAPI was it? You can't bring people down for trying.

 

In this case this isn't really in the right forum. You should probably move this to the offtopic forum.

 

If you make a plugin that already exists, don't publish it, unless It's better than the original one.

 

I agree on replicas but calling peoples work "shite" in general is just being a jerk.

 

Luke_Lax I agree, thats not polite to do, unless they ask for your opinion.

 

I'm not trying to say in any way people's plugins are bad.
I was just wondering what the other devs think about people publishing their first plugins and making endless replicas.

Well, anyway, seems like most people so far agree to an extent.
That's all

 

Everyone starts somewhere. Everyone has different levels of creativity. Just because one plugin has the same features as nother, doesn't mean that it's worse or better. Plugins have different levels of uniqueness.

You can't really stop one from attempting to be unique or creative; that's like telling people not to draw unless they can draw something that hasn't been drawn. It's not really fair..

A lot of plugins have been revamped and updated as well, so there is no more issue if incompatibility within versions.


I don't mind it.

 

While your opinion is quite different to mine, I appreciate the comment a lot.

I'm not suggesting people who can't make good plugins don't make them, I don't mind, I just feel publishing lower-quality plugins for the sake of it isn't particularly beneficial to the server owners.

Thanks a lot for the thought friend

 

It's very simple. People make them. Any other questions?

 

The question is who decides if a plugin is of high quality or not? What makes a plugin high quality? If you'd like to find high quality plugins I bet there are tons of plugin reviews out there that will help you choose them. But in order to make a plugin available in the first place you need a platform like dev.bukkit.org you can build upon.

People are all doing this for free here. Bukkit Dev staff ensures that plugin developers follow some basic rules. If you want a Quality Assurance team you probably need to pay one that has its own rule set for high quality plugins.

 

because there is no limits, you can make "hello word" and post it, it will be approved, ever if it feature nothing usefull.

it's is not fair to disallow making noob plugins, everyone shoud start with something.

but, there is no reason to place into same list usefull plugins like World Edit and "hello worlds" from random users.

 

I think the most common problem is more likely the search not the plugins sharing the same ideas or slight sharing of.
whenever I type for example permissionsex I don't see the search result on top while I think it feels better if it whas more abstract on how many characters you have in the search and in common so it takes it more litterly.

 

I still don't get who thought naming it that was a good idea...

 

At the end of the day you can't change what plugins get published and although I agree that there are many copies and replicas, sometimes as a new developer it's a confidence boost to post a plugin and get a few downloads, even if it isn't that groundbreaking or amazing.

 

Plugins are "permenent" - tons of plugins outdated, valid option to decrease number of plugins to automove to special category plugins developed longer then 3 major minecraft versions ago.

 

That wont work. My ServerMonitor Plugin will not need any update for future versions. Why should it be deleted?

 

!=
deleted

this will provide priority to plugins updated time to time (active) and will drop abandoned plugins.

 

What about moving plugins that do not work, as of 3 versions ago, to a special category.
Also, an option for people to take over a plugin that has been inactive for 3 months, with special rules should the original creator come back?
Obviously there are LOOOOADDDS of complications, I'm just throwing some suggestions out.

 

there is no way to check all plugins if they work every version.

no update from major API change or more then 3 major versions - marked inactive and excluded by default from search output.

if someone want to view all projects - single checkbox near search button and everyone is happy.

same can be done to hello world plugins that follow submission rules but completely useless.

 

Honestly, i think people shouldn't release their private plugins as often as they do. Instead I feel it'd be better if people found projects they could help out with and learn during the process, that's what I did with Localshops and Heroes. I started by helping out with a servers private plugin needs, and modifications then moved into helping with patches/features on larger plugins and creating my own.

As an aside though, this is all opinion and bukkit doesn't quality check anything, so it's basically 'not their problem'

 

Well who decides what is beneficial? I'm sure the author of the plugin thinks it's perfectly beneficial, as do it's users. Who decides what is "lower quality"? Everyone has a right to publish what they feel is a better offering than what is out there. It's not up to you or me to decide if that is true, unless we are discussing your server, in which case you don't have to use it.

 

Alshain01
Lots of noob plugins make search harder.
You dont have to use noob plugins, but you will be forced to if unable to code self or inspect source code.

 

Well, there are a lot of young(er) devs around these days. So when they manage to finish their first plugin, they are going to want to share it with the world who they expect to find it as amazing as they do. I know I thought that with my first plugin, who doesn't? Despite this, I dissaprove of people who post plugins which aren't innovative in anyway. If you remake a plugin which already exists, then unless you have made a meaningful change, don't post it. Meaningful change? By that I mean you do more than just change the name and a few numbers in the code.

Case and point, the classic TNT notifier plugin. Although not as common as they used to be, they were incredibly popular for the new people to make due to being made in one of the prominent tutorials. People would watch the tutorial and copy the code word for word, understanding very little about what the plugin does. But the plugin would work, they would feel happy and then post this plugin in the vain hope that people would somehow find their plugin better than the other hundreds of clones out there.

I would like to emphasise at this point, I don't dislike tutorials, or people using them, but you don't need to post these plugins as releases. I also do not dissaprove of clones, in the sense that two plugins may have a similar goal, but I do dissaprove of direct code copying.

With the younger generation of today having more of an interest in computers, and programming being relatively simple when done at the level of what bukkit plugins require, then it is to no suprise that there are lots of young devs doing what I have described above. As for the plugins being of poor quality, well that can be due to numerous factors.

1) Age of the dev. Generally speaking, younger devs are not going to be as good as older devs. When I say younger devs I do mean age wise. But do not take this to mean there are no exceptions, of course there are. But as people grow older, they gain a better clarity of thought. Older people will catch onto things quicker than younger people. Older people will have had a better education and understanding of basic concepts (For example maths). A young person (say 12 years old) would have very little idea how to make a sphere through the use of code because they would barely have touched them in maths (besides simply acknowledging their existance), whereas someone who is older (say atleast 18) would have studied them in maths, and would know the formula for the volume of a sphere, and could (with some thought) work out the code to generate a sphere. However, I do accept that when people don't know how to do something like this, then they would simply google it, copy the code and use it as their own.

I do also understand that just because someone is older, does not make them better. Someone could start coding at the age of 20 and would be worse than someone who is say 15 but has been coding for 3 years. But experience does not necessarily make someone a better dev neither. I could code for 5 years and still not be as good as someone who has coded for 2 years. People learn at different speeds, some people pick up and learn things faster than others, other have more time to learn and practice. When people say they have been coding for 5 years, they generally just mean it has been 5 years since they installed the java jdk and wrote "Hello world" in Eclipse. Therefore, people saying how long they have been coding is pretty much irrelevant in that sense.

2) Experience of dev. See last paragraph to previous point.

I'm getting a bit bored of typing this myself, since I'm sure very few people will read it all.

tl;dr
Direct clones are bad
Plugins with similar goals but different implementations are fine
Everyone starts somewhere
But not everyone needs to see where you started from
Some random ramble about age and experience

But most of all, when it comes to bad plugins, it generally due to a 'bad' dev (Take that with a pinch of salt). If you aren't a good dev, then you aren't going to make a good plugin. When it comes to the TNT notifier plugin (Or whatever the equivalent is nowadays) ... just remember, you can't make shite shine.

 

theguynextdoor love the signature:
'If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough'

 

It's my rule of thumb when it comes to teaching anything

 

The moment you start making these distinctions (age of the developer, "different enough" from other plugins) that is the moment you begin to squash creativity. And who is to make the distinction of what is "different enough". Once it begins, it starts going overboard. It's human nature. For now, we aren't allowing plugins "too similar" to others, next we don't allow younger developers who don't have the experience, then we don't allow you to publish if you don't have another major plugin like "Essentials" (just one example), finally there is such a strangle hold on who can publish and who can't that Bukkit dies entirely, we have totally defeated the openness of the system and chased developers away. It seems extreme but once it begins, it's Pandora's box. You can't ever put the evil back in. I'm willing to put up with searching for what I want if it means not destroying the system to prevent it.

 

I agree with what you are saying, and I agree that there shouldn't be any physical 'hard cap' on whether a plugin can be posted or not (unless it is a literal copy). However, although I didn't say it, the decision of quality, innovation, and whether the plugin is worth posting in general is really up to the dev. As for your point on later not allowing younger devs, then as I said in my previous post in the experience section, how someone may be younger, but may have more experience than another dev who is older. I understand how my previous post could almost be seen as controversial in the sense that I said older devs are, generally speaking, better than younger devs and then go on to say how younger devs could be better than older devs but I still stand by what I said, and with the age I was more focusing on the speed of learning. But all these are generalisations.

Bukkit is an open community when it comes to plugins. There is no, and should be, restriction on the plugins people post (with the obvious exceptions of malicious plugins or direct clones). But I would encourage devs to decide for themselves whether their plugin is actually worth posting (Whether they think there is a reason people should use their plugin as opposed to another plugin). However, this is not something which can be moderated. You cannot have an external source make these decisions for the dev without causing controversy and disorder.