Microsoft Team needs to Clean Up The VS-Code Extensions Market-Place Please...!!

[RobFosterNYC]

When either on the website or within VS-Code looking for extensions, a person finds themselves immersed within
thousands of deprecated rotting extensions that are either outdated, no longer maintained or completely deprecated by the author.
Or if an author stopped development/maintenance because the extension conflicts with VS-Code itself or other extensions etc etc.
The Market-Place tends to build up a massive amounts of junk that hinders users from getting actual extensions that would benefit them.
In particularly with new users along with everyone else in the ecosystem.

Why do these old outdated, deprecated and useless extensions still exist in the extensions Market-Place ?
Its time for the entire Microsoft Team to go through ALL the extensions and start cleaning out the closet.
If its old throw it out, It its no longer being supported or used throw it out, If its deprecated throw it out,
if it breaks vs-code or other extensions in any way, throw it out.

And also setting new rules for the extensions Market-Place, forcing authors of extensions to completely remove their extension,
if the author of the extension posted in any shape way or form that their extension is either no longer maintained, deprecated, outdated, breaks vs-code or other extensions or the feature has been implemented within vs-code by Microsoft. But DON'T leave it in the Market-Place to rot.
Hundreds and hundreds of extensions should no longer remain in the Market-Place as it massively clogs the Market-Place with useless outdated extensions
that either are deprecated, un-maintained, outdated, or the feature has been implemented within vs-code or no longer in use in 2021 going on 2022 and beyond.

I find that a lot of features & ideas from extensions where already implemented within the official release of VS-Code by Microsoft,
and therefore the extension itself should no longer remain within the Market-Place clogging up the Market-Place with useless items that is rotting away within the Market-Place. Basically there are too many cob-webs in the Market-Place and Microsoft seriously needs to clean the closet. Please stop hoarding in the Market-Place.
The only exception to this rule would be Themes.

Finally every extension should be dated when they were last updated, and it should be posted in very clear view.
To allow ALL users to know when was the last time the author updated the extension.

It should be mandated that every extension should have a Github Issue page, so users can report problems with a specific extension.
A lot of extensions in the Market-Place do not have an Issue's link if things go wrong with that particular extension.

Thanks for reading... :)

[hediet]

When either on the website or within VS-Code looking for extensions, a person finds themselves immersed within
thousands of deprecated rotting extensions that are either outdated, no longer maintained or completely deprecated by the author.

Can you share more concrete examples (including the search term) or even screenshots of situations where you experience this?

[ssbarnea]

That issue is real and becoming more generalised. IMHO trying to manually address extensions one by one would not work, we will not even be able to make a dent.

One solution that would work is to start performing some basic scheduled sanity checks on existing extensions with current version of vscode. The amount of tests would grow in time but when an extension fails them it would automatically be hidden from the marketplace with email to author.

Obviously that approach requires allocating at least one senior engineer full time on that kind of activity: "improving automatic testing of existing extensions. The testing should focus on assuring that basic vscode functionality is not broken by the extension presence and not on the features of the extension, which are unknown. The same kind of sanity/validation should happen when someone uploads an extension, the key here is that it needs to run again at least once a month, as each new release could break some extensions.

[hediet]

That issue is real and becoming more generalised.

I would love to see more (or at least some) concrete examples, including screenshots, what you searched for, which extensions were shown and which extension you wanted to install.

If you provide some concrete situations that demonstrate this issue clearly, I can ping other team members and start internal discussions!

I generally think we can do better here, but it is hard to act on this general feedback.

[phiresky]

Here's one example:

There's a great spell checking and grammar checking system called LanguageTool. If you search for "spell checker" in the marketplace it is no where to be found. You only find "Code Spell Checker" and "Spell Right" which are both much less capable. If you search for "grammar checker" it is still no where to be found, even though it's literally the only extension in the store that does grammar checking. It still finds "Code Spell Checker" though even though that doesn't have "grammar" anywhere in it's name, description or tags.

If you search for "LanguageTool" specifically, you find this:

1. an unfinished extension with 4k users that says "Obviously this is rough - PR's are welcome!" that doesn't do what it should and has not been updated since 2018.
2. An extension that's buggy, has a bad rating, and where the maintainer passed away 3 years ago.
3. An extension that requires more setup to get it running with an external server and only supports markdown, and where development has stalled. Works fine, but is work to set up.
4. 20 extensions to extension (2) that are useless.
5. After scrolling aaaall the way down, finally you find LTeX, which is the extension that works well and that's actively developed. it has "grammar checking", "spell checking" and "languagetool" in it's description AND tags.

I basically used subpar language checking tools for the past 6 months because I assumed there was no well working integration of LanguageTool with VSCode - but there is, you just can't find it.

[valentjn]

@phiresky While I fully agree with your comment (disclaimer: I'm the maintainer of LT_EX), the reason you can't find my extension by searching for LanguageTool is probably that VS Code seems to display the extensions whose titles contain the search pattern first, but the title of LT_EX is just LTeX. I'm not sure about the order of those extensions (whose titles contain the search pattern), though. I'm guessing it's some sort of combination of install count and date of last update (?).

All this means that within the status quo, I, as the maintainer, will have to include all relevant search terms (e.g., “LanguageTool” in this case) in the extension title in order to enable users to find my extension. This raises two issues: First, the extension titles will get cluttered and messy, which is probably not a goal of the Marketplace, and second, isn't this exactly what tags are for?

IMO, the current system of searching is focused too much on extension titles—it's easy to find an extension you know the title of, but it's hard to discover new extensions that fit your needs (see @phiresky's comment).