[wp-hackers] Contents of wp-hackers digest...

[David Anderson]

On 22/11/15 12:00, wp-hackers-request at lists.automattic.com wrote:
> Firstly, searching for single words is not the best way to search the
> plugin directory. Single word searches are largely useless. We're searching
> the readme.txt files. What did you expect to find with simplistic searching?
Hi Otto,

Thanks for replying. I wasn't personally suggesting searching using 
single-word terms. I was assuming that real-world users do that, and 
that giving them better results where possible would be a reasonable 
thing to do.

I don't have access to the search engine stats. Some stats on the 
average length of searches would be interesting. It may be a non-problem.
> However, "backup" was modified 7 hours ago,
Something interesting seems to have happened on this one. Here's the 
ancient "backup" plugin I was referring to via the Internet Archive, 
which was the 'live' one until I sent my email: 
https://web.archive.org/web/20150905125725/https://wordpress.org/plugins/backup/
It seems that someone then got in with a different one for 1 day: 
https://web.archive.org/web/20151122192417/https://wordpress.org/plugins/backup/ 
. It's now gone: https://wordpress.org/plugins/backup/ - returns no 
direct result for that slug.
>   "contact" in the last year, and
That's what I said: '"Contact" - brings up a plugin last modified > a 
year ago, tested up to WP 4.0.'. My point wasn't that they're all 
necessarily ancient; just that they're not good #1 results for the 
search term entered, when all the possible search factors that could be 
involved are taken into account (reviews + ratings, downloads, whether 
the plugin is maintained, + other indicators of how much the author 
cares (e.g. using a banner/icon)).
> "pinterest" I've closed because you brought it up and it is indeed 4 years
> old.
>
> Bringing these up to the plugins email address is indeed the correct
> approach. We weed too.
Thanks. I will do this in future. I was asking because based on a 
previous conversation (can't recall which one of the people on the 
mailbox it was with), I'd understood that ancient plugins aren't removed 
from the directory search because of the possibility that someone may 
find their code useful even if they can't run on recent WP versions. 
Since that's not the case, I'll just report them directly in future.

David