back

by gregsadetsky·7y ago·view on hn ↗
Thanks — unfortunately that’s not my case.

I’ve received automated replies, contradictory explanations (the extension will be live — the extension will be removed), etc. from that email.

Did you get someone’s name or email from those conversations?

1 comments
here it is verbatim:

"Dear Developer, We have reviewed your item, "gif.com.ai," with ID: dfdojjbjcmnilhaenpijacjdgmilecpg and it does not comply with our program policies. Please review this section of our policy:

Developers must not obfuscate code or conceal functionality of their extension. This also applies to any external code or resource fetched by the extension package. One such instance was found in inspector.js

Your item was found to have one or more files that does not comply with this policy."

---

This reply is clearly template based but unlike some of the other replies it wasn't automated. There was clearly a human behind the email addressing my concern.

The total thread is 9 emails back and forth.

By the way. The extension was never re-instated even after I futilely tried to get them to see the light that my code was minified and not obfuscated. :/

This happened after I changed the version number in the package. So unless you need to update your package, don't! Usually changing the description in the dashboard is fine but if you start messing with some of the options it will invite review and a possible lockout.

- Thanks for sending your reply. Mine contains the same template text but does not contain a "Please review this section" bit. It only has the "does not comply" part. i.e., it says that something's wrong, but doesn't state anything else.

- I'm really sorry to hear that your extension was never reinstated...! By the way, my extension is also minified... I didn't know about this rule at all! It was never mentioned in any of the communications, but I am seeing at least one article [0] about this. Is that what this is all about?? I just un-minified and submitted it again (after getting an email prompting me to resubmit)

- Finally, when you say "If you start messing with some of the options", what do you mean? Which options? I'm particularly interested in adding more i18n languages to the extension (amongst other changes). Do you mean to not make any changes to the manifest.json & description in the store, but that code changes are (generally) fine?

Thanks a ton!

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-to-no-longer-allow-chro...

If you already submitted and its published, I would be careful about updating the package and changing options such as language in the dashboard. I was particularly thinking language as an option that would invite review. But if you need to change and re-publish make sure to also do your code updates externally and xhr from the extension so your able to minimize changes to the package.
I specifically read in the article that I linked above that the reviewers supposedly have a disfavorable view on 'hot loading' code externally, so that developers would not swap in different code than the code already reviewed...

Hmmm. Do you know if "major" extensions such as Boomerang, etc. typically update their extensions on the store, or do they do exactly as you say -- leave the store extension alone as much as possible, and update remote code?

Thanks for your input!

I don’t know. I’m my case I think the reviewers had a hard time following how my extension operated. And instead of following their written rules around minification, they closed it down. I didn’t feel comfortable sending over all my open unminified code.