Display a special banner for very old, obsolete plugins

[tellyworth]

The oldest plugin in the WordPress.org plugin directory has not been updated in almost twenty years. Amazingly, it still works, in a way.

It's great that we have an active archive dating back decades. However, plugins that have been untouched for such a long time almost certainly shouldn't be installed on a production site today.

We do display a warning message on old plugins; but it's the exact same message regardless of whether it has been abandoned for 18 months or 18 years:

This plugin hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

I propose that we add a new banner for very old plugins -- those that haven't been updated in many years, and that have a Tested Up To version that is well beyond its end-of-life date. Something like:

This plugin is obsolete. It has not been maintained in many years, and should not be used on a new site. It is available here for archival and historical reasons.

Additionally, I would suggest that we remove the Download button from those plugins; make sure they can't be accidentally installed via wp-admin in recent WP versions; and exclude them from most searches (without making them completely impossible to find). The code would still be available in svn and for browsing in Trac.

I'm open to suggestions as to what the threshold should be for considering a plugin as "obsolete". To choose an arbitrary example, not updated since before 2010 AND Tested Up To is less than WP 3.6 gives about 1500 plugins, almost all of which have less than 100 active installs. A threshold date of 2014 would give closer to 9000 plugins.

[pedrosanta]

@tellyworth If we remove the download button, how will one be able to download the plugin nonetheless for legacy reasons? I feel we should warn the obsolete, but not impede the download of versions.

[tellyworth]

The Advanced page has a section for downloading previous versions, we could include the final release in that list for these obsolete plugins.

Moving forward, the Releases page #7783 could incorporate a download method with an appropriate warning. I think there's already discussion around having a slightly-hidden download menu item for older releases, that would probably do the trick.

I'm in favour of downloads being available, I just don't think it should be a big primary button on the main page when it's an obsolete plugin. (It might be cool to have a Playground button instead)

[tellyworth]

After experimenting with some data I'd suggest we consider a plugin obsolete if:

• It hasn't been updated in more than 10 years, AND
• Tested Up To is strictly less than (WP stable branch minus 3.5)

(Current WP stable branch is 6.6, subtract 3.5 gives a threshold of 3.1)

That criteria covers about 3800 plugins, 95% of which have less than 100 active installs. This includes about 1400 old plugins with no Tested Up To value set.

I don't see any need to have a special status value for these plugins; it can simply be a conditional check used in a few places like the banner message and download button.

Since the criteria is dynamic, older plugins would continue to age out over time. Anyone who wants to prevent their plugin from being considered obsolete can simply bump the Tested Up To version every now and then (which is common practice).

See https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7816