A more consistent approach to third-party plugins

[philpax]

Right now, third-party plugins are too easy for people to use, and they use them when they don't need to. The latter problem will be largely addressed by #4. This issue is about the former: we want to make it clear that third-party plugins are unsupported, and that you shouldn't be using them.

@midorikami's summary of the Discord discussion:

1. Disclaimers good, make the user basically sign a tos to get access to custom repos
2. Different area within the plugin installer to install 3p stuff, made hella obvious to the user
3. 3p's go into a different folder, like 'unsupportedPlugins'
4. Ability to launch without unsupported plugins
5. Ability to turn off all unsupported plugins easily

Also relevant: #24, #9

[Zi-SH]

A ToS for adding custom repos is way overkill. People don't read terms outside these repos, they aren't going to read them when it's between them and the game either.

A disclaimer checkbox or something of the sort would probably be the most friendly way to go about it.

[ArcaneDisgea]

I don't think anyone was suggesting a full fledged ToS. Just comparing it to a ToS of sorts.

I imagine it's just going to explain briefly that we hold no liability for what a third party repo/plugin would do and that we will not provide any support when they are involved.

Basically an "I know what I am doing and accept full responsibility for what happens from here." is what I understood the discussion to be.

[Zi-SH]

Basically an "I know what I am doing and accept full responsibility for what happens from here." is what I understood the discussion to be.

I think that'd be a good addition as well.

[NadyaNayme]

I forget who first suggested it on Discord but we have Plugin (TESTING) so Plugin (UNSUPPORTED) would be "yet another indicator something is unsupported".

So there are 5 different ways to go about saying this and honestly I see no reason not to just use all five:

• The user has to check the checkbox saying these things are unsupported to enable the 3pp repos feature
• The 3pp repos tab will always have the unsupported disclaimer above the repos list, kinda like it does right now
• They need to install a plugin which will have (UNSUPPORTED) after its name similar to (TESTING) from testing repo.
• This plugin would can be found in the Unsupported Plugins section of the installer (should they be excluded from All Plugin `filtering?)
• These plugins could have a giant yellow notice: This plugin is 3rd party and unsupported by the Dalamud Community. after the support state/notice is merged .

If a user ignores all of these warnings we just kick them from the support channel I don't think anything more that could be done. It's easy to maybe miss one or two of these but missing all of them takes actual effort in ignoring warnings.

[lmcintyre]

I think an addition we discussed in Discord regarding this includes

An official link directly to the plugin's support system.

This, for first party plugins, would largely be GP. Meanwhile, first party plugins such as DelvUI and Sonar would be able to submit their own link to their own support page/system, and third party plugins will have a direct support link to however you would get support there. It is important here to add this for all plugins, because not only will it unify the functionality and code, but it will allow first-party-plugin users to get familiar with the "get support" flow for if/when they install a third party plugin.

[Limiana]

Instead of "UNSUPPORTED" it really can just be "3rd party" or "unofficial". Unsupported may not always be correct and often 3rd party plugins are supported elsewhere. Though allowing plugin to be marked as "unsupported" may be a good idea: but it should indicate that developer of the plugin doesn't provides any support and you're using plugin as is, not that it's 3rd party.

[NotNite]

I'd prefer "unofficial" - "3rd party" confuses users a lot in our Discord.

[reiichi001]

People get too pendantic when we say "third party" because "aLL pLuGinS aRE tHiRD pARty."

Technically, "unsupported" is true, because this very specifically means "unsupported by XIVLauncher, Dalamud, and in our support channels."

If we go with "unofficial" as our term, we should still be very clear that they will not receive troubleshooting or support in our official channels.

For plugins where the dev does not want to provide support, we'd probably be better off using "no support given" or "not supported" because those phrases have a different connotation to "unsupported" despite the high likelihood that a translator service would use the same translation for them all.

[philpax]

DIP17 is in. Let's coordinate with #4, #10, and #42 here. Likely that all four issues will be rolled into one monster DIP: