Steve Fenton

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Thursday, 19th August 2010

After two weeks of postings on the jQuery Plugin Developers forum, it was eventually officially announced yesterday that there is indeed a very big problem.

According to the official announcement, all jQuery Plugin Developers have been locked out of the site while they deal with a massive spam problem. The plan is to upgrade to an underlying site engine to contain the problem and while they have been upgrading the site, they have also been clearing out the many spam posts that have been made. They hope to make the website available to developers again at the end of the week and promise another update to the plugins website before the end of the year.

I was very sad to hear of the problems affecting the Plugin site. I have contributed lots of jQuery plugins and when I couldn't access the site to upload the latest version for two weeks, with no explanation, I didn't really know what to do about the problem.

I understand that most of the jQuery team are volunteers who have to find time to contribute for free to the project, but aren't all jQuery Plugins developers in the same boat? I find it very hard to find time in my schedule, but contributing to the open source community by creating plugins, or writing open source application on Codeplex are important to me and I make the time to do it.

I really hope that the jQuery team learn from this debacle. The simplest thing to do on day one would be to communicate the problem to everyone and ask them to be patient while the problem is looked at. The two-week silence has damaged a lot of the goodwill that the jQuery project has built up since it was created. It is still undoubtedly the best JavaScript framework, but will plugin developers be as keen to contribute when they feel they have been so poorly used?

I sincerely hope that this situation hasn't damaged the reputation of jQuery and I hope that the new site will be more resistant to spam in the future and that any future problems are communicated a bit faster, even if they take a similar length of time to solve.

For the time being, you can get the latest versions of my jQuery plugins on this website. I will update them on the jQuery website as soon as I am able to.

You can read more in the official announcement.