Has anyone else had a negative experience trying to release a plugin for Obsidian?

Developers: Plugin & API
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I’ve personally gotten a lot of value from the Obsidian community and the plugins people have written. The enhances that others have written have dramatically improved Obsidian and allowed me customize it to fit my needs. I’ve written a few Obsidian plugins myself now, and since I’ve gotten so much value from the plugins others have written, I wanted to contribute back to the community.

However, after going through the plugin submission process, I’m discouraged. While I think it’s valuable for Obsidian to review plugins to ensure that they’re safe, documented and work as advertised, this process soured my opinion of Obsidian development and left me no longer wanting to contribute.

  • After submitting my plugin, it took almost a month for somebody to respond to it. It’s okay for there to be a backlog of reviews, but somebody should have at least commented.
  • The reviewer left poorly formatted feedback that was difficult to read (ironic for a markdown notetaking app).
  • The reviewer nitpicked my code, asking me to make changes that I believe would have made the code a bit worse. Since the main ask was opinioned, and I’m the one maintaining the plugin code, I’m not sure why they cared.
  • The reviewer’s comments were terse and without explanation. They never explained why they felt a change was important, only that it was required. They also didn’t engage in discussion—a trend I’ve noted in other reviews as well.

Yes, I could have appeased the reviewer and updated my code, but honestly, after waiting so long and receiving such unfriendly replies, I didn’t want to jump through any more hoops. Reading through the closed pull requests in the obsidian-released repo, I’m guessing I’m not the only one who decided it wasn’t worth it.

I’m not sure Obsidian understands the value plugin authors bring to their product. Plugin developers are essentially doing free work to improve a closed-source, commercial product and their work is what gives Obsidian a competitive edge. It would have been nice if their process communicated that they appreciated these contributions.

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Hello, @Landon, in the meantime, if you want to bypass the review and share your plugin with the community directly, you can use GitHub - TfTHacker/obsidian42-brat: BRAT - Beta Reviewer's Auto-update Tool for Obsidian.

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@bishop1860 Good idea. I’ll look into that. Thanks!

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I looked into this, and I think this particular situation is a combination of unlucky events. The Obsidian team is small (seven people) and only one person is working full time on plugin review — which is quite a large task! Unfortunately he was sick for a couple of weeks which caused a bit of a delay recently. Also, English is his second language. He’s a very kind person, so please excuse any unintentionally terse responses.

Please be aware that all plugins must follow our submission requirements and plugin guidelines. They are there for a reason, and designed to make community plugins cohesive and safe for Obsidian users. It is assumed that you’ve read these when submitting a plugin. When those guidelines are ignored/overlooked it makes the review process slower for all other plugin developers.

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