As a beginner of discourse, there seems to be too many plugins and most of them are non-default. Truely I think some of them are fully-developed (you know, no bugs and very helpful. ) and can improve the forum service very much.
But there are still many plugins that are only an idea hoping for suggestions are many plugins useless—— or we say not for most of the forums.
So I think we should maintain a list of plugins recommended. And let the plugin developers to apply for entering such list. We can also vote for the best plugin for the month and then the winner plugin would enter such list. You know, for fun and encourage developers.
That seems like a pretty good idea. Plugins have varying levels of support, and then sometimes get subsumed into core, so they are no longer needed. The current system of posting plugins in plugin is pretty bewildering for a new user.
I often think about trying to create some meta-pages that link to various plugins, howtos and FAQs, but even I keep getting more work doing programming that I’ve not gotten much past daydreaming about it.
I like to think that the Discourse team takes Discourse Core code seriously enough that any reported issues with it will be dealt with appropriately as time allows.
I also like to think that any plugins written by those that are not part of the Discourse Team would at least work with the version of Discourse that existed at the time the plugin was written.
And I also like to think that any plugin, despite its origin, once “blessed” and shipped with Discourse will receive the attention of the Discourse Team.
Currently here at meta there is both the Plugin and Broken Plugin categories.
IMHO it is unrealistic to expect the Discourse Team to be responsible for keeping track of code written by others. If a plugin no longer works it is already possible to post the issues in its topic and / or flag it to be moved to Broken.
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