I was recently disturbed when AMO announced that the only communication channel with them I could routinely use would be shut down - the mozilla.dev.amo newsgroup was obsoleted by some web forums. While newsgroups flow naturally along with what I can glance over quite fast in my mailnews client, i'd need to open a website and log in and do several clicks and wait for page loads to read a web forum, which just takes up too much time in my busy daily life.
It made me somewhat angry to split their communication channel away from what most of Mozilla is using usually, but I accepted that because I rarely needed that channel anyhow. But, of course, once you accept a thing like that, you immediately get reminded of why it made you angry:
As you might know, I'm maintaining the package for the
German dictionary on AMO. When I uploaded a new 2.0 version of that package to support the newer HunSpell spellchecker which we have in Mozilla since some 1.9.0 alpha state, I realized that AMO wouldn't tell Thunderbird 2.0.x any more that the 1.0.1 dictionary version was compatible with that product, as the developer dashboard settings are only reported through the version check for the latest add-on version.
Because of that, I uploaded a 1.0.2 version with just an updated install.rdf so that everything should be fine again. Of course, I made that only report compatibility for Firefox/Thunderbird 2.0 and SeaMonkey 1.x, as for the newer versions the 2.0 version of the dictionary fits perfectly well.
But now for the real killer: At least since the last update of AMO, 1.0.2 is shown as the "newest" version because I uploaded it later than the 2.0 version. And now people with a current Firefox or SeaMonkey don't see the fitting dictionary for them any more!
And what's even better is that the "older versions" link at the bottom of the page does reveal the list of versions, but you can't get to any of those versions any more!
What the hell are the AMO developers thinking? Has anyone of them ever thought about testing such things on their preview/staging server before rolling it out to the public and f**king up add-ons developers' and users' experience and ability to work with the site?
I have been quite patient though a number of problems I've seen with AMO over time, as I knew a number of my problem were with the SeaMonkey-oriented things and those are a niche affecting a lot less people than cool new features for Firefox add-on stuff. But now I'm really badly pissed off.
Supporting versions of add-ons usably and somewhat correctly is no niche issue, it's a major f**k-up of the site - and when I posted this in mozilla.dev.amo, I of course got no reaction at all for multiple days, as usable communcation channels just get ignored by the AMO team.
On the other hand, I of course got angry messages from users who can't reach a usable German dictionary any more - and if you look at user number of that add-on, you can understand how many people this affects (German is the most-used Mozilla localization, so just guess the impact - it was among the 5 or 10 add-ons overall last I saw statistics of daily users).
(For now, I've upped the versions of the old myspell-based 1.0.2 version so that people have at least something installable, but it's more than suboptimal.)
Thanks to AMO for messing everything up and giving me and a good number of users a hell lot of trouble.
