We’re tackling this in a couple of separate stages. We just rolled out stage one, which is to temporarily disable commenting on the add-ons site. Add-ons can still be uploaded, downloaded, and rated — the only functionality we’ve removed is the ability to comment. This is not an ideal solution, nor is it a long-term solution. It was, however, a very quick and direct way to immediately stop the problem.

A few of you have asked us why we don’t just use a captcha. Funny story: we’ve had one for years! It appears during our account signup process, and all of the spam we’re seeing is coming from newly generated accounts who successfully make it through the captcha as part of signing up. We use Google’s reCAPTCHA. A little bit of searching tells us that reCAPTCHA isn’t as mighty as it once was, so we’re going to investigate alternatives.  Once we identify a route forward, we’ll roll that out as stage two and get comments re-enabled.

Again, we’re sorry for the mess! It bums us out, too.

• FOSSCamp
• Ubuntu Developer Summit & Getting Songbird into Ubuntu
• Add-on-Con & the Mozilla Add-ons Open House

Congrats to the fine folks at Canonical, Ubuntu, Mozilla, & Add-on-Con for hosting some great events.  I’ve uploaded photos to our Flickr stream (Add-on-con here, and Mozilla Open House here)

My thoughts on Ubuntu & Songbird got dugg, which led me to a couple of pages on Ubuntu’s site, including their Brainstorm page with some interesting thoughts on better GNOME/Songbird integration as well as a great community help page on downloading and installing Songbird on Ubuntu.

Speaking of distributions, this is probably as good a time as any to list some of our great community and contributed builds that have been kicked off since we launched 1.0.. so here they are (in no particular order);

• Fedora 9 & 10 (x86, x86_64, & PPC) builds, as usual, contributed and hosted by Auralvance and the fine folks at Rutgers University.
• OpenSolaris 2008.11 & SXCE (x86 & SPARC) builds, contributed by Alfred Peng at Sun Microsystems.
• Ubuntu Intrepid builds, built by the ever helpful guys at GetDeb.net & documented by the Ubuntu Songbird community
• Gentoo ebuild, contributed by everyone on Gentoo bug #139019
• Mac OS X 10.4 & 10.5 PPC builds, built by Thomas Legg.  These are currently test builds, and Thomas is looking for some community QA before qualifying them as final 1.0 builds.

For anyone looking to build Songbird on your own distro or OS, you can grab 1.0 final source tarballs for Songbird and its upstream vendor dependencies at our Contributed Builds page.  There are also links there with instructions on building the dependencies and Songbird… as as always, definitely drop by our IRC channel for any help or questions you may have.

• LyricMaster (more than just fetching lyrics… LyricMaster lets you save them back to the file, edit them via the metdata editor, style/theme the panel to match your Feather, etc.)
• MediaFlow (lets you flip through your album art)
• Music Recommendations (pulls up Last.fm recommendations based on your currently playing track)
• LiveTweeter (post your listening status and tracks played to Twitter, MSN/Windows Live Messenger, Pidgin, & Mercury)
• Notify Me (uses Growl [Mac], Snarl [Windows], or libnotify [Linux] notifications for track changes)
• seeqpod (an awesome search interface for the SeeqPod search engine)
• Mac Remote Control (adds support for the Apple Remote Control to Songbird for Mac users)
• YABS (hands down one of the best Feathers out there.  a personal favourite of many Songbirders, this is a really slick dark Feather with support for many add-ons like Media Flow, mashTape & LyricMaster as well)

What’s really awesome is that most of these are developed by community members and Songbird users (seeqpod, Notify Me, and Mac Remote Control are the exceptions).  For many of these developers and designers, this was their first Mozilla extension development experience… and now they’re some of our most popular add-ons implementing oft-requested features with tens of thousands of downloads each.

If you’ve got some experience with Javascript, CSS, and HTML or XUL – it’s pretty straight-forward to get started developing your own extensions or creating your own Feathers.

• Updating Extensions for Songbird 1.0
• Updating Feathers for Songbird 1.0

If you are an add-on developer, please take a quick read through the guides.  If you’re an extension developer we’ve made significant changes to support the new Media Core API.  If you’re doing anything media playback-related, things will need to be changed around.  Fortunately we’ve got some migration examples in the guide, as well as code recipes illustrating use of the new APIs.  If you’re a Featherer, we’ve packaged up the new graphics and CSS differences into handy .zip files for you to easily update your Feather.

A huge part of Songbird’s success has been having awesome add-ons, and we’re looking forward to having as many 1.0-ready add-ons as possible when we launch our upcoming 1.0 release.

This list is dynamic, and you can expect it to change over time as we identify those add-ons with broad community appeal. Your participation on the add-ons site is important in establishing which add-ons are most vital for new users, so be sure to use the rating tool and leave a comment on your favorite add-ons. We use a variety of statistics to help guide the selection but the key metric is community activity.

Tip: Check out the list in Songbird to get recommendations tailor fit for your platform and player version.

We noticed add-on authors keep a running ChangeLog in their long description fields. To accommodate this use case we added support for release notes to the
upload process. From now on, add-on authors will be asked “What’s New?” each time they upload a new version. The release notes for the most recent version will be displayed prominently on each individual add-on’s detail page (example). Additionally, a running list of changes will be available on that add-on’s version history page (example).

Since we now know what’s changed between versions of an add-on, we are offering a new Updated Songbird Add-ons Feed.

These updates, combined with the existing Newest Songbird Add-ons Feed, are great ways to stumble on new and interesting add-ons you might have otherwise missed.

As a first step, we’ve just enabled single sign-on for the Add-ons and Translate sites. For existing users of these services there are two noticeable changes:

• you are now required to log in using your email address instead of your username
• logging into one of these sites automatically logs you into the other (and vice versa)

If you have any questions feel free to contact us and if you notice any hiccups please file a bug.

Are there other feeds you would like to see? We’ve kicked around ideas for “Updated Songbird Add-on” that would show changes to existing add-ons, “Recommended Add-ons” that showcase some of the community favorites, and “author mega-feeds” which would roll comments for all add-ons from a single author into one feed. Have we missed any good ones? Let us know!

The new add-ons site is (a)live!

We killed the crufty old bugger and worked a little re-animation magic to bring you the healthy 8 pound, 2 ounce site we have today. He babbles more than he talks, but he’s already up and walking around.

As stated previously, our 2 main goals are to make it easier for you to find add-ons you find interesting and to improve the overall experience for developers. We ended up having to rewrite the site from scratch, but we’ll now be able to add new features more quickly and more easily.

Let us know what you think.

Thanks!

Here’s what we’re doing and why…

We want to make it super easy for people to find and install add-ons they find interesting. To that end, we’ve simplified the UI and added search, tags, and categories.

We also want to improve the overall exerience for add-on developers. We’re extracting and displaying more of your add-on’s data – your icon, your homepage url, friends who’ve contributed, and more. We’ve also improved our upload validation to better adhere to Mozilla’s spec. This should make it dead simple for Mozilla devs to port their add-ons to Songbird. We’ve added feeds for add-on comments and you can now include HTML in the “Description” that appears front and center on your add-on’s detail page. Anything goes (within reason), so have at it!

When we began this project it quickly became obvious that we needed to rewrite the site from scratch. This took longer than we would’ve liked, but it was totally necessary. There was just too much stuff that needed to happen under the hood. The good news is we’re now in a great position to be able to add new features more quickly and more easily. Hold us to it!

We’re also trying out a new visual style. Please let us know what you think. We’re excited to hear your thoughts on the new look.

Thanks!