We're starting to think about what we could do to improve the experience of 3rd Party Nodes within Node-RED both for the developers and contributors as well as the users.
I'd really appreciate it if you could spare some time to fill out this survey, (almost) all the questions are optional so feel free to skip any that you don't like, I'm keen to hear from people that don't really use additional nodes as much as from those that develop lots of them. Its mostly multiple choice with followup questions for comments.
As always we'll share the (anonymised) results back to the community.
might want to scrape all users info from a search of node-red-contrib on npm and email us. I just happened to see it and many of us are gone for a month at a time without checking anything but our email .
This is a tricky one, there's over 3000 packages published in the catalog so mass emailing those people feels a bit spammy. Even if we could identify email addresses for them, a lot of pacakge.json files don't have an email.
I'm going to let this survey run for quite a while probabbly 4-6 weeks as its over the summer anyway.
My current feeling is that anything addressed to the wider community goes out on our community channels, here, slack and twitter, we may well try emailing individual developers if they've published an address before anything that would specifically impact their nodes.
On a side node would you be interested in a mailing list specifically for node publishers, maybe thats something we should consider here.
...would you be interested in a mailing list specifically for node publishers
Yes I would.
I'm kinda sad about the Node-RED 2.0.2 Released thread. You took the time to contact all of us node-red-contrib makers to let us know that our package is kaput, and it seems like this 3rd Party Nodes survey came about because of the lack of response from us 3rd party creators.
I'm happy to see something being done to herd us cats most of us have full time jobs and prefer to create instead of live on the forum/slack in the little free time we have.
What I don't understand is its rather easy to abandon a package and make a note. Ive done this with node-red-contrib-i2c-lcd-adafruit-sainsmart and in big bold letter at the top I've posted Broken for node-red version 1.4 or greater and let others know why I'm not maintaining it and if you want to take it over.
I hope the solution your framing up now for certification will solve the issue of these packages showing up in the flows search. We need a button to sort through the 3000 packages for the maintained apples
I'm highly interested in throwing 4hrs a week at helping out with this issue. If its just testing or contacting people thats fine. I have no issue admitting my JS skills are no where near the level of some of you guys, but I do manage to get a PR approved now and again.
I've started to layout some proposals based on the initial results of the survey, we'll still keep the survey running for at least another month or so but some people commented that they wanted to see more details.
Please remember that these are just PROPOSALS at this point and scrapping them is still an option! You can see the different sections here Improving the Node Ecosystem Ā· Discussion #59 Ā· node-red/designs Ā· GitHub
Feel free to comment on the propsals in each thread or you can still respond to the survey and I'll do another review of the responses later then update proposals accordingly.
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most of us have full time jobs and prefer to create instead of live on the forum/slack in the little free time we have.
