A strange offer from third-party to give them repository access

We are not spambots. We are real people and real community members. We do not have “approval” from the WP team to contact with plugin authors, we just asked for the ability to become a contributor and how we can do it. And they said that yes, this is possible, but only with the consent of the author. So we write directly to authors. We just want to support great plugins (such plugins are selected by us) which were updated long time ago. And for this purpose we need to get access to repositories that existing users could receive updates automatically.

We also have some stages of work like every project. At this stage, we write to the plugins authors who didn’t update their products long ago. Of course, we study and analyze each plugin before sending the letter with contribution offer to the plugin authors. Probably our letters look identical or as spam, but it’s only because there are a lot of authors and plugins, and we just cannot write a full review with future plans and changes which will be implemented (because we need to receive approval from author at first). After receiving a consent or refusal of all plugins that interesting us, we will start the following stage of direct development and introduction of updatings.
We have no reason to add malicious code. This is stupid.

We just offer our help to the community. You may accept this offer or reject it. We have already got approvals from certain number of authors who do not have any plans on updating their products.

People would feel a lot better if you and your group do something with the plugins you’ve already taken over, and prove that you’re going to improve our community.

Like I said, it looks spammy because, in part, you’ve done nothing with them. Change that, change our perceptions ?? oh and please stop telling people you’ve already talked to the “WordPress Support Team.” It implies you talked to the plugin team (you didn’t) or maybe the WP forums support mailing lists (you didn’t). You may have talked to one person, but you did not talk to the team as far as I know, and I’m on both.

We’ll let you know about our done work! Currently we have a process of studying and analyzing of these plugins. Soon we will provide a progress report.Stay tuned!

See … that bothers me (personally). You didn’t analyze or study them before asking to take them over?

I got same offer and I suggested they should submit a patch to one issue before I can grant them access. Still they insist they need to be listed as a contributor.

Plugin authors who grant these folks access wind up with their plugin polluted with a Spam menu, i.e. BWL in the admin sidebar.

Thus far they have infiltrated:

• DropCap Shortcode
• Post Star Rating
• Force SSL
• Enhanced Search Form

Dear Allimaple,

Thank you for your recent messages and topics created on WordPress. Your opinion is really important for us. However, we are not trying to pollute any plugins and would like our users to focus on the options they need rather than on the panel. It is just a collection of recommended tools which are compatible between each other and constantly supported by us and other WordPress contributors. Menu is is used to advertise authors of these plugins as you can see.

The access to all these plugins were received from the original authors and it can be revoked any time. Besides, these plugins were old (more than 2 years without updates). We thought that WordPress is a community and we are able to support old themes/plugins it in such a way. But now it seems that is not true, and we need to remove our work completely, because some of the authors just don’t like the way we do that.

We will try to remove these changes during the week…

Please don’t feign ignorance, such a child-like reply merely further illustrates you think you are dealing with easily duped amateurs.

WordPress users are not rubes, and as such we are well aware of what you are doing, ergo:

Adding a SPAM menu on plugins that meet your predetermined dormancy threshold and considering THAT an update, which is utterly absurd and is most often the purview of ne’er-do-wells.

If you are concerned with focusing on the options of the plugin, then actually implement additional functionality and include the menu as a tab within the plugin’s administration menu, NOT as a separate acronym and sole change that suddenly shows up on the Administration sidebar.

There is no discernible benefit to updating for example DropCap Shortcode as there is no added functionality, i.e. selecting the font, color, size, margin, those customizations are still required to be entered via manually entered CSS.

Okay, folks.

The Plugin team is aware of this. We’ll be contacting them via email about this situation and, if warranted, revoke access.

Please note: When you are added as a contributor to a plugin, you are given the access to edit a plugin but with that comes the responsibility of managing it for the users and it’s position in the community. You are always expected to add code of merit and functionality to a plugin.

Plugin updates to ‘game the system’ are grounds for a plugin’s removal. Period. Always has been, always will be. Plugin updates that do not make the change log are suspect, because you are expected to be honest. It’s open source. We can see what you did anyway.

We’re on it.