Bitlink to this thread: https://bit.ly/pmcolors Last night on Poggit, I rejected 9 plugins with the following message: What's wrong? (image contributed by @TheDeibo) TeaSpoon generates an enormous ASCII text. PureEntitiesX writes a GOLD message about something users don't care about most of the time, then writes a debug message in AQUA. AdvancedJoin uses a mix of AQUA and GOLD to try to attract users' attention as if they wouldn't know they have installed the plugin otherwise. These messages hurt users' eyes seriously. And worse, the user won't be alerted when an important error/warning message shows up. Why not? If you look at the server startup logs carefully, you will notice that PocketMine already logs a message about your plugin: You really don't need to write this message from your plugin again. OK, so you really want to tell the user that your plugin is not only enabling but also already enabled. But you don't need to make fancy messages with rainbow colors and 12 lines of ASCII text, do you? Maybe you think your plugin is great; it finally has no syntax errors, it finally doesn't crash, it finally enables. You want to tell the whole world about your greatness. But wait... every other plugin on the server did the same. Now plugins are going on a loudness war. In the beginning, some plugins wanted to make an extra message to stress that it was loaded. Some others thought it was not significant enough, so they started making colors. Then some thought everyone was using colors and they couldn't stand out, so they used ASCII text. One day we will wake up to see plugins calling your phone to tell you that the plugin is loaded. What can I do? Of course, colors are there for a reason. But they are not to be abused. Please let the important messages stand out. If a user types a command, you can decorate the response with colors, because the user asked for it. You can tolerate Microsoft Word showing its famous startup window when you open a document and you are waiting for it to startup, but you won't accept every program you installed opening a popup when you turn on your computer. (Now I finally understand why Android requires apps to explicitly declare permission to get notified when the phone starts) If you just want to highlight particular words in a sentence, it is OK too. Colors are great for highlighting particular words to make messages easier to read. But don't highlight the whole message, else it's equivalent to not highlighting anything. If it is an important message, of course, you can color it too. This is what colors are supposed to do. I wrote this thread mainly to allow these messages to stand out. If you can't decide whether a message is important, think from the user's perspective. Does the user really care about it? Maybe you really want the user to care, but the user will just ignore you. What if I really want to use colors/ASCII text? Let me quote a suggestion from @Thunder33345: This is really a great suggestion. You are probably the only person in this world who wants to see that message. If you really think others would like it, let users enable it in the config. P.S. Throughout writing this thread, I had a hard time determining which lines I should bold, which words I should italic and whether I should underline or colorize anything. It is the hardest skill to teach in software engineering!
You are not wrong, but it is just a console spam on startup, only on startup. This won't prevent someone from finding an important error or something. However, if a server owner can't find what he is searching for, he can simply press the magic buttons (CTRL+F). I do not disagree with that because they violated the rules of poggit but anyways, all these is my opinion only.
How would the user know what there searching for if they don't see the error message in the first place to know that there's a problem. Besides, not everyone knows that shortcut. (and I can't remember if it works in the terminal, console, or powershell)
Meanwhile, svilex tries to annoy the developers... https://github.com/svilex/SkyWars-PocketMine/blob/master/SW/src/svile/sw/SWmain.php#L154-#L161
But they don't even know there existed an error. The error is there to alert the user, not to stay and get searched. Well, if the user doesn't read the messages anyway... then why would they care about your cool ASCII texts? Or, to make real errors and warnings stand out, we have to make ASCII text out of ASCII text? omg
on a semi-related note, it is intended to change plugin load/enable messages generated by PM itself to debug level instead of info. This won't affect messages generated manually by plugins though.
re sofe, what if i log onenable and ondisable under DEBUG is it acceptable? @SOFe i think it would be since normally these are hidden and debug means it's for dev my personal razor is simple: `dont show it if user dosent need to take action against it` under that message like "[OK] Connection to MYSQL established" would be cut away, since no user action is needed, but "[ERROR] Connection to MYSQL failed error: server offline" would not be cut away since it prompts user's action or attention to fix a probable issue
who install plugins? The user, of course. If the user chooses to install a plugin that does x. Whatever it does, blame the user. We can't block nor deny any plugins that choose to use colorful things Code: onEnable(){} . I do understand the fact that plugins misuse things that shouldn't be used. I mostly agree with SOFe. But again, my counter-arguments is simple as; we shouldn't care. A [server software] should get deployed as if. Whatever the user chooses to install, for example, [a plugin] shouldn't be an issue for us, but one for them. Yes, xx misuse color xx on Code: onEnable(){} (or wherever) but how does that affect you? If it's your server, just simply [uninstall] that plugin. That's like blocking a plugin that communicates with maybe a fork of PMMP? Developers these days like to BOOM their users, they want to let their users know that their plugin is enabled (even though PMMP does that), they want to stand out from maybe other plugin messages. They want all eyes on them. But, that shouldn't be a reason Poggit deny their plugin entry. That is plain vacuous. Instead, you can just apply a tag to those plugins and maybe separate them. But denying them? no no. You're killing what's left on the of such fraternity. In conclusion, That's my argument, you may/not agree with it. I wouldn't care. Everyone has their own point of view to everything. What's yours?
And then what? Write one yourself? For most users it's not the option, and even if it is, it takes time. For example, there's effectively only one option for permission management right now and that is PurePerms. The situation is similar with most of the plugins. Competition is almost nonexistent. You can't "just uninstall the plugin". No, blame Shoghi that's absurd, the user practically doesn't have a choice, how come they're the one to blame? I would agree that it should be more like "SHOULD NOT" rather than "MUST NOT", but blaming the users? Lol.
Plugins released on Poggit are only some fraction of the plugin ecosystem. I am doing this (rejecting plugins and writing this thread) not only to explain what I did on Poggit, but also to promote the campaign to eliminate the abuse of startup messages in the whole plugin ecosystem.