Hi Mike
The people who you submitted the reviews on behalf of have been contacted and offered the opportunity to submit them themselves.
As with all content on the Moodle.org site - unsolicited advertising is not allowed, - just as signatures are not allowed on forum posts. So in this case the reviews cannot mention or promote POET.
If an individual wants to join the reviewers group and submit reviews they are welcome to do so. Please let us know.
Individual Moodle developers and experienced users are welcome to volunteer to be a Plugin Guardian and do the technical review as part of Moodle plugin approval process and thus help build a healthy and sustainable eco-system of Moodle plugins
.
See Moodle Docs for more information on Plugin guardians -> https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Plugins_guardians
So Mike, if you yourself write a review and would like to submit it whilst adhering to the non promotion aspects of the site policies of Moodle.org - then please go ahead and submit one.
Regards
Gavin
Hi Gavin -
Any update? I've made it more obvious that I am one of the reviewers on each, and I have removed what I think you were flagging as "unsolicited advertising". Is there still something wrong with the reviews?
mike
Hi -
I still haven't heard anything back about the changes I made and whether there are still changes needed. I am happy to work with you to make the reviews acceptable to the submission requirements and rules. I just need help understanding where the current submissions violate these rules.
I know you mentioned a concern about "unsolicited advertising". I wanted to assure you that there was never an intent to advertise anything. POET is a group of people from various organizations that have an interest in Moodle, and wish to work together as one team to provide value back to the Moodle project and community. We have no commercial services.
I felt one of the quickest things we could do as a group was to create a plugin review process and structure that would enable us, as a team, to produce good quality reviews in a reproducible fashion. The first ten are our first results, and we'd like to do more. Using the Moodle plugins database review function seemed to be the natural place for these, as it is in the community and already known. And we'd be able to work with the community to refine and perfect what is needed from these reviews.
Please let me know what I can do to help move this along.
Mike
Hi Mike,
As you know, there is a set format for reviews now, broken into four sections with ratings - so if you want to submit a review please submit it with this format and include the ratings against the way the sections are right now. Doing it other format or structure ways will mean reviews are not coherent across reviewers and is liable to confuse.
In upcoming changes to the UI, we will be exposing the reviews more and the ratings into the listings and also exposing the technical review aspect from both the automated technical tests and the guardian process - so the place for that kind of technical information is in that area, not the standard review areas.
Unlike where plugin submissions can have co-authors, the review system is for individuals - just as a forum post is an individual user posting. We will consider adding capability for linking multiple users as reviewers into the roadmap for the plugin system - but for the time being, only the person submitting is given credit, so please submit ones you primarily write and have others submit on their own.
So in short how can you make the reviews acceptable? Only put in the parts which are relevant to the structure as is, and keep the content related to the plugin itself and leave other co-authors out until a time that we implement such a system.
For information on the guardian process please see https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Plugins_guardians
Regards
Gavin.
Hi Gavin -
Thanks for your response, but I a still a bit puzzled.
You mentioned:
As you know, there is a set format for reviews now, broken into four sections with ratings - so if you want to submit a review please submit it with this format and include the ratings against the way the sections are right now. Doing it other format or structure ways will mean reviews are not coherent across reviewers and is liable to confuse.
I presume you mean the sections for "General comments", "Usability", "Accessibility" and "Performance", the last three which have the ability to assign a grade out of ten. But when I look at any of the existing reviews, I can only see three out of several dozen that have done this, and none of the most recent dozen reviews have followed this.
I have looked for the guidelines and/or requirements for reviewing plugins and have found this - https://docs.moodle.org/30/en/Plugin_Review_Criteria. Is there another document somewhere? I want to ensure there is no other requirement I need to meet that differs from what we've submitted and what is already present.
You mentioned:
In upcoming changes to the UI, we will be exposing the reviews more and
the ratings into the listings and also exposing the technical review
aspect from both the automated technical tests and the guardian process -
so the place for that kind of technical information is in that area,
not the standard review areas.
This sounds promising. Are there more details on these changes somewhere? This sounds a lot like what I offered to help with earlier, with respect to the technical testing anyway. In the interim though, I presume I can continue to put the results of the technical testing done in the reviews I submit? It is valuable information to help judge the maintainability of the plugin.
You mentioned, "leave other co-authors out until a time that we implement such a system". I can do this, but it seems like the wrong thing to do. Often times, the only reward in contributing to an open-source project is to be visible in your contribution. Not giving credit to the people who contributed seems .... wrong. I'm also not sure how including the names of those who contributed to the review can negatively impact the review, the community or Moodle?
I'll start to rework my reviews again, but it would be great if you could respond to the above points in the interim.
Thanks again.
Mike
Hi Mike
On the technical testing - the automated and guardian process - it's just planning to display what's already done. If you want to volunteer to be a guardian and personally be involved and follow the laid down processes feel free to volunteer.
A lot of the reviews were created before this structure was in place But now that's the standard So consistency is important.
I don't think it would be right to put user information in plugin review content either so let's go with keeping things consistent for now and when we add in multiple review author linking then the credit can be added.
regards
Gavin
I have reworked one of the reviews here - https://moodle.org/plugins/reviews.php?version=10799. If this is satisfactory, I will rework the others likewise.
I still think it is a shame that we cannot recognize other community members who contributed to the review, even if in the text of the review.
One suggestion? You should come up with some guidelines as to how to score out of ten. Without that, it becomes difficult to assign a meaningful score.
mike