How are "Feature Addons" Chosen for Display?

I’m curious how the add-on’s are chosen for display in the “FEATURED ADD-ON” Display rotations. Does an AMO always choose them or are they script controlled or is it something completely different deciding this?
Not to be a PIA by asking and I apologize if I sound like I am, but there sure is several being listed that are created by certain folks.
I respect the position of the person in charge for this decision making and also wondered if I can make a suggestion if possible.
Would it be too much to ask if the slates on all the add-ons listed in this displayed section be restarted. Start the board over and have it rebuild itself. There are so many that have been in this position for years it seems. I am a person that likes changes and updating, just like Firefox browser gets updates for downloading. Maybe even adding each section of the areas we submit these images, for example; Abstract, Nature, etc etc. This is just a suggestion that kind of interested me and could possibly make viewing more widely available for the public.

Thank You for your time.
RLC/Bradmph

Featured add-ons are selected by a community board made up of add-on developers, users, and fans. Board members change every six months, so there’s always an opportunity to participate. Stayed tuned to this blog for the next call for applications.

If you’d like to nominate an add-on for featuring, please send it to amo-featured@mozilla.org for the board’s consideration. We welcome you to submit your own add-on!


https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/10/01/october-2015-featured-add-ons/
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Thank you very much for this information.
Does this information also pertain to theme creating as well? I ask because I am monitoring this theme area and also participate heavily with others as well. There is definitely a need for improvement within the decision making of the featured displayed themes since some are consistently holding a lease on the featured image posting of their own personal creations. I personally feel that it just about falls into abusing said system and strangely in a self promotional type of manner.
I respectfully want to say that this is only my opinion that I vocalize here above. Documenting it gives me a chance to get others opinion, so I can get reason for why some people feel they deserve more then anyone else when in a position like you mentioned.
I appreciate your response very much and perhaps I may approach the opportunity to volunteer for a good cause to participate in the Firefox browser.

Thanks Again
:.)

At least the featured add-ons have a rotation.
The “Most Popular” and “Top Rated” boxes on the category pages are as good as static.
I think they would be way more useful if they rotated the top 50 or something.

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Hi Brad, what do you mean by people “holding a lease on the featured image posting of their own personal creations”? Is there a screen shot or example you can send?

It’s true the Top Rated themes are very old; I’ve filed a bug for it here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1212626

Featured themes are selected every 1-2 weeks by the theme reviewer team. Reviewers are prohibited from selecting their own designs to feature, but can nominate them for consideration.

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Hi, I just see many images (themes) placed into the feature area, mostly by one person here getting most of the property space and time exposed. I hate being a whiner, but this seems to hit me in the face over and over and over again. I have taken inventory counts on my own time considering folks that get special attention and their images are placed regularly and in multiple. It just continues to feel like it is not a random placement of images, but a favoritism of some sort.
As a retired designer and freelance artist, also a male by the way, I might feel maybe a little jealous of the issue here in this theme section. I do try to keep my ego in check and I am an extremely fair personality that considers all submissions to be worthy. I see some incredible stuff created, but it never fails that the same certain individuals have control over who, what and where and this is not the way things should be done. I have had this feeling of this happening for quite sometime and even mentioned it in a subtle way before. Being careful not to try and open Pandora box on the issue, I can’t voice my real gut feeling about it.
I think this theme area needs revamping IMO. It is by far lacking some features that everything around it has updated but not this area of displayed images. I laugh at the count shown on the initial page, it says over 300,000 served, lol. I think there is one person here that has that many herself posted here. Sheesh , someone needs a life I think. In addition, the gods that have the Ya or Nay on theme file display need to retire and be put out to pasture or something. I am a naive person and usually things blow right by me without notice. But the constant visual fact keeps bopping me in the face on this. It just needs some better way of managing and hand out the early retirement checks as they head to the meadow to relax.
The last thing I want to do is step on any ones toes, but if it is rude enough to get my notice…it’s going to get documented for someone to see my opinion.

Sorry for such a long delay in reply. Thank you!

I firmly believe that the featured list should not have a time-limit constraint. The presence or removal of an add-on on this list should be dictated only by the add-on itself, based on the official criteria for selection. The fact that an add-on has been in this list for a long time should mean that it has been a reliable source of awesomeness for the browser for that long, which only adds more value to the featured list.

I think the sorting of the featured list already puts the most recently featured add-ons at the top (correct if I’m wrong?). I’m not sure how entries from that list are picked for the small “Featured Extensions” block on AMO’s homepage; although I don’t fully oppose it picking entries at random from the featured list, I can see how there could be some room for improvement if that is indeed the case.

Am I too naive to think that just means they’re just that good?.. It’s reasonable to think that the more themes a person makes, the more proficient they become at it. More themes + increasing quality = higher chance of being featured. How is this wrong?

Also remember that featured status is not meant to be an exercise in pure opinion (by anyone, be it you or members of the advisory board), but a suggestion directed towards all Firefox user-base. I can understand how most times the “highest quality” or the “most creative” might not be the “most-fitting-for-a-season / appreciated-by-everyone / whatever-the-latest-trend-is / something-else”.

Are you somehow suggesting that (non-)selection for featured themes should also be based on its creator and not only on the theme itself?

Please keep this discussion to the point. Subtle hints at any sort of discrimination like this really won’t get you anywhere, and will just make your actual suggestions to improve AMO’s features be dismissed that much more quickly.

By this do you mean the Featured Add-ons Advisory Board as well? Or do you mean actual reviewers, independent from that board? I will for now assume the former, in which case:

Again, the advisory board is rotated every six months (unless I assumed wrong on my point above, in which case someone please correct me).

Now that’s very non-productive, and just mean. Again, anyone who puts out a large number of themes (and in your words, many get featured often), can only mean they’re just that good. I personally appreciate having access to a wide variety of quality themes to choose from; in part it’s what enables all users to make their browsers unique.

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It’d be interesting to create a public poll consisting of the addons submitted to be featured so that users can vote for their favorite addons. The current process is not transparent at all, which I imagine is contributing to why some developers may feel their addons are unjustly passed over. I submitted an addon to be featured once and while I’m sure the advisory board carefully considered each submission, the process did not inspire confidence. Sending an email and not receiving any acknowledgment or feedback is pretty frustrating.

@gwong, I personally don’t see how a public poll would differ from the current rating system (Top Rated page): it’s based on user input and even has added value from being a 5star-based rating, instead of a “yay/nay” rating. (Although the ratings/reviews system could use some improvement as well, I’ve been working on some suggestions for that myself.)

Also, that would bring an unfair advantage for add-ons with larger user-bases, as those would easily acquire more votes in a short period of time (a month); this would turn the “featured” status into one that reflects popularity more than anything else.

I can sympathize with the lack of feedback on the nominations and the process after that though. Some sort of notification that an add-on was rejected for featured status would be welcome, especially when accompanied with reasons, as those are a great indicator for aspects that could improved in the add-on.

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That’s a good point. A public poll would be pretty similar to the top rated list. My original thought was to have have a poll consisting of only certain addons (maybe ones that haven’t been featured before), but I haven’t fully thought through the idea.

At the very least, I think providing feedback to developers who submitted addons would be a great improvement.

Oh, I think we both should have said “feedback to developers who submitted their own add-ons”; while there could be some value in feedback in other cases, perhaps it would be a negative surprise for a developer to see their add-on be rejected when they didn’t even know it had been submitted. Maybe. :smile:

So, who is on this board review team? Are they people whom also submit themes to Firefox? (cough cough)
Personally I think this area needs to be flushed every few months on these ancient themes because these old themes that have sat in the feature area are beyond their life-cycle (as Microsoft would say) and it has now become just about impossible to have any of these available display places for a modern theme image. Also they are boring to look at day after day. Change is good, as you can notice even Firefox updates it’s browser program.
Also, feedback on themes should be removed from displaying in the theme posted area. Not enough people submit reviews to make it a fair enough thing to be displayed. IMO

@sdevaney, would you mind chiming in?

It sounds like we’re talking about “complete themes” in this case… You’re right—this featured content only updates quarterly, and ideally we’d update more regularly than that, but unfortunately we simply don’t receive the necessary volume of new content to justify more regular updates to this featured programming. To wit, we’ve only had one new complete theme go live this year. We had 10 in all of last year.

But for further info on how we update featured add-ons content, please see this page.

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