Plugin Directory: Hide some plugins from search

[Ipstenu]

Some plugins shouldn't show up by default unless the exact name is used. This would benefit kids-camps so that kids don't accidentally find plugins like porn-embed when looking for embed plugins (unless they manually look for pron, at which point, we're not responsible).

1) Plugins should have the ability to use the nsfw tag which will hide them from search. This would be self managed by the devlopers.

2) Admins would be able to mark plugins manually, via a custom meta value or something.

[agilelogix]

My plugin doesn't appear anywhere in search, even with the same name, can you please check this.

​https://wordpress.org/plugins/post-timeline/

Thank you

[SergeyBiryukov]

Replying to agilelogix:

My plugin doesn't appear anywhere in search, even with the same name, can you please check this.

See #2642, this ticket is unrelated.

[agilelogix]

Hi Sorry, the topic is related to my problem so I wrote it here, can you tell me what should I do and where should I report it?

Thank you

Replying to SergeyBiryukov:

Replying to agilelogix:

My plugin doesn't appear anywhere in search, even with the same name, can you please check this.

See #2642, this ticket is unrelated.

[Ipstenu]

This topic is about INTENTIONALLY hiding certain plugins (or allowing developers to decide to omit their plugins from search).

Your issue is that your plugin isn't showing up, so you should read https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2642 to understand why.

[gibrown]

unless the exact name is used

This gets a little tricky in the current search alg.

Do we have some example searches where this is a problem? The "embed" search doesn't seem to show anything on the first 5 pages at least. I feel like most cases of this would be so niche that they will not be very popular and easy to find without trying.

The complications:

• Filtering out is easy
• Deciding when not to apply the filter is pretty hard
• Trying to rerank based on a mature tag is hard and there are no guarantees. We could lower the ranking on anything with the tag which would probably work unless the user searches for something

One idea I can think of is we could have a hard coded list of words, and if the search matches any of those words then we turn off the mature filtering. I suspect this is what Google does (except they are probably smarter about it).

There definitely are a chunk of searches for "porn" and related stuff in the search logs. I could probably try and build a list of words from that. Would help to see a list of the plugins that are likely to get marked this way. Also, we'd probably need a plan for non-English.

[Ipstenu]

Given that we don't have a way at all to say "Don't show up on search..." ... no. We don't have any examples.

I was picking the porn embed as an example of something they wouldn't perhaps want to see. I'm loathe to censor anything, but I'm okay with allowing people to self-regulate.

[dd32]

Given that we don't have a way at all to say "Don't show up on search..."

For the record, it turns out we do.. If you add the post-meta plugin_disabled with any truthful value (I'd recommend "Exclude from search due to XYZ") then that's excluded from search results.. Even from exact-matches. You can use the wp-admin PostMeta section w/ the "enter custom post meta key" functions.

Badly named post_meta, and appears to be a holdover from early search configurations, but it works (I've tested it)

[Ipstenu]

If you add the post-meta plugin_disabled with any truthful value (I'd recommend "Exclude from search due to XYZ") then that's excluded from search results.. Even from exact-matches.

That would mean

1. Now they can't be found at all, not even by exact name. I envisioned this as 'searchable by exact name only' to allow someone who wanted to use a porn plugin to find it, but not kids.

2. The plugin team manages. I would want this to be a button "Exclude my plugin from search except by exact name" on the fancy big 'danger zone' panel. Less work for volunteers, more agency to devs :)

Basically We (.org) never de-search someone unless we're de-listing. But you (devs) can if you want.