Ordinary Nothing

Mycroft provide a huge collection, the collection, of search plug-ins for Mozilla/FireFox.
They have a very large repository, and since a basic plug-in is pretty
easy to make, they make it simple for people to check their own search
plug-ins and submit them.

And provide a warning that they’re swamped, so it may take a while until the submission is accepted.

I found a site I wanted to use, with no plug-in ready on the list,
so I decided to make one of my own, and send it to them for inclusion.
I sent it before mid-January. Today I got back an email, automated (or
just sent in bulk as a pre-made form. It’s alright, since they claim to
have too many submissions to be able to respond personally), letting me
know that the submission is rejected, because they already have a
plug-in for that site.

Which surprised me a bit, since in the passing months (That’s about 2.5 months) I checked occasionally and didn’t see anything.

And lo and behold, there was indeed such a search plug-in there. Which was listed as being entered today.

So if this went on a first-sender basis, it took even more time to
get the plug-in by the other guy… And if there were two of us
starting this that long ago, how many may have done the same in the
past months?

I can see that they have other things to do, and that they are busy,
and they really do provide a good service. But if updates takes so much
time, maybe someone else should do it.

If not, at least I think they
should provide some list of pending plug-ins. Make it automatic even,
based on subject lines of submissions (which they request to include
the name of the site) or something like that. Just to let people know.

I just can’t help imagining that what they should have really sent me was "Your plug-in, like 534 others for the
same website, was rejected, because we just now added the 535th one to the
list" …

March 23rd, 2005 at 23:14 EET | Categories: Web | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.