14 DAY TRIAL // Jquery.com, the largest provider of jQuery related materials, decided to temporarily shut down its plug-in repository, the section of the website where developers go to submit their plug-ins, after being confronted with a massive spam flood.
“We've been looking to provide a higher-quality, spam-free experience at the plugins site for some time, and we have decided to temporarily shutter the existing site. We will be providing more details on the new plugins site soon, so that plugin authors can hit the ground running with our new submission process,” reads the message on the plug-in repository page.
Even our Script Testing Department noticed that out of the 10 to 15 new plug-ins that were uploaded each day, half of them were actually advertisements for all sorts of products. Many of them didn’t contain links or anything, instead they just promoted shady products in a text form.
And this wasn’t the only spamming method. Many developers used jQuery’s repository just to advertise their plug-ins that were actually sold on other websites such as Codecanyon. In some cases users would post referral links even if the actual product wasn’t theirs, just to get deals on other sites.
Besides this, the forums were filled with developers that were complaining about the fact that many of their older plug-ins and changelogs actually disappeared from the site.
This is not the first time they’re confronted with this situation. About one year ago, they were presented with a similar situation and at the time they claimed they were trying to get rid of all the spamming that took place on the site.
“Longer term the site is going to be completely rewritten and we are hoping to have something launched in the next couple of months. The idea for the new site will be to make the plugin site more of a plugin index that link off to your plugin site,” Ralph Whitbeck from Developer Relations said at the time.
Hopefully, this time they’ll manage to come up with some more efficient ways of cleaning the website to make sure all their customers are safe and no more plug-ins mysteriously disappear.