My chrome extension has been 'pending review' for 10 days - is this normal?

[Stephanie Chiang]

Hey all, I made a chrome extension designed for Ethereum nerds that does price tracking and address search stuff. It's all very simple, non intrusive, open source, no ads etc.

The only thing it does that might raise the eyebrows of the code reviewer is scans the current URL of the active tab and checks it out against a database of malicious cryptocurrency URL's to prevent the user of the extension getting hacked or scammed. The user's URL is never stored anywhere, no data about where they have been visiting or anything like that is recorded at all.

So anyway it's been 10 days since i submitted it and it still says 'pending review'. I've seen other users freak out because it took over 24 hours. Does anyone have experience with this? 

I guess it's surprising because it's such a simple extension really!

[Francois Devatine]

It seems very long to me. It has taken me 3 or 4 days max in the past.

From my experience, try to fill all the fields in the chrome store > name, description, extended description, icons, screenshots and promo tiles. 

I read that many extensions without those are often considered as spam extensions.

If there's no update soon, I suggest you just unpublish (if possible) and create a new one instead.

// Francois

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[Stephanie Chiang]

Hi Francois, 

thanks for the message. I emailed Google in the end and got a really helpful reply. They basically said it's because the application scans all the URL's of the user and advised me to change my manifest.json permission to "activeTab" instead of "tabs". Although after I did that and republished the extension I still got an auto warning saying there will be a delay publishing and that I should consider using activeTab which seems odd because that's exactly what I did before publishing haha. 

the version I published had what you said, everything was filled out, I didn't do the optional promotional tiles (only the required one) because I thought that was only for people who wanted to advertise but maybe that would help!

Here's the code if anybody wants a look https://github.com/stechiang/portfolieth

Stephanie

On Wednesday, October 31, 2018 at 7:46:31 PM UTC-7, Francois Devatine wrote:

It seems very long to me. It has taken me 3 or 4 days max in the past.

From my experience, try to fill all the fields in the chrome store > name, description, extended description, icons, screenshots and promo tiles. 

I read that many extensions without those are often considered as spam extensions.

If there's no update soon, I suggest you just unpublish (if possible) and create a new one instead.

// Francois

On Wed, Oct 31, 2018 at 4:41 PM Stephanie Chiang <gral...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey all, I made a chrome extension designed for Ethereum nerds that does price tracking and address search stuff. It's all very simple, non intrusive, open source, no ads etc.

The only thing it does that might raise the eyebrows of the code reviewer is scans the current URL of the active tab and checks it out against a database of malicious cryptocurrency URL's to prevent the user of the extension getting hacked or scammed. The user's URL is never stored anywhere, no data about where they have been visiting or anything like that is recorded at all.

So anyway it's been 10 days since i submitted it and it still says 'pending review'. I've seen other users freak out because it took over 24 hours. Does anyone have experience with this? 

I guess it's surprising because it's such a simple extension really!

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[Francois Devatine]

Hello,

I'm having a bit of trouble to understand the functionality (because I don't know much about this business).

What I see is that you have a popup in the icon.

Also, you have content scripts executing on every single domain: https://github.com/stechiang/portfolieth/blob/master/manifest.json#L19

That part, I don't really understand, and it is maybe another reason why Google didn't publish your extension.

I'm not sure what you are trying to achieve, but basically you are including your script in every single page that the user is visiting. 

It's a little bit intrusive, are you sure that you need to do so?

I didn't fully understand the code but I see you read a lot of blacklisted website and check if the current website is blacklisted or whitelisted, but in the end, nothing happened (I was checking google.com page).

You can restrict the content script execution to a list of websites that you want to execute on.

If you really need to read all the domains, then you can ignore my comment. Oh, do you know about "<all_urls>"?  https://developer.chrome.com/apps/match_patterns

Cheers,

// Francois

On Thu, Nov 1, 2018 at 6:14 PM Stephanie Chiang <gral...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Francois, 

thanks for the message. I emailed Google in the end and got a really helpful reply. They basically said it's because the application scans all the URL's of the user and advised me to change my manifest.json permission to "activeTab" instead of "tabs". Although after I did that and republished the extension I still got an auto warning saying there will be a delay publishing and that I should consider using activeTab which seems odd because that's exactly what I did before publishing haha. 

the version I published had what you said, everything was filled out, I didn't do the optional promotional tiles (only the required one) because I thought that was only for people who wanted to advertise but maybe that would help!

Here's the code if anybody wants a look https://github.com/stechiang/portfolieth

Stephanie

On Wednesday, October 31, 2018 at 7:46:31 PM UTC-7, Francois Devatine wrote:

It seems very long to me. It has taken me 3 or 4 days max in the past.

From my experience, try to fill all the fields in the chrome store > name, description, extended description, icons, screenshots and promo tiles. 

I read that many extensions without those are often considered as spam extensions.

If there's no update soon, I suggest you just unpublish (if possible) and create a new one instead.

// Francois

On Wed, Oct 31, 2018 at 4:41 PM Stephanie Chiang <gral...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey all, I made a chrome extension designed for Ethereum nerds that does price tracking and address search stuff. It's all very simple, non intrusive, open source, no ads etc.

The only thing it does that might raise the eyebrows of the code reviewer is scans the current URL of the active tab and checks it out against a database of malicious cryptocurrency URL's to prevent the user of the extension getting hacked or scammed. The user's URL is never stored anywhere, no data about where they have been visiting or anything like that is recorded at all.

So anyway it's been 10 days since i submitted it and it still says 'pending review'. I've seen other users freak out because it took over 24 hours. Does anyone have experience with this? 

I guess it's surprising because it's such a simple extension really!

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[RGould]

You actually contacted a real human and got a real reply?!  Could you please share how you did this (the link you used or email address you used)?

[Stephanie Chiang]

Hi Francois, 

Thanks so much for such an in depth reply!

Now you put it like that, it does seem a little intrusive. The purpose is to check the current URL against a database of blacklisted URLs (that are kept in user storage and regularly updated) and if a URL comes up positive as blacklisted or malicious, the DOM content of that website is completely wiped and replaced with a big warning saying "you are on a malicious site". 

check line 2 and 33 to see what I mean: https://github.com/stechiang/portfolieth/blob/master/js/domainblacklist.js 

I guess I could just remove that element of the extension completely, but I would much prefer for users of the extension to be protected from these malicious sites (there's quite a few in the cryptocurrency world!). 

I use http://*/* and https://*/* which I think is like <all_urls> except excludes ftp and other protocols? I might be wrong though!

Thanks again so much for the reply!

Stephanie

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[Stephanie Chiang]

Hey RGould, it was either a human or a really really well trained robot called Ken. Here's the link I got taken to https://support.google.com/chrome_webstore/contact/developer_support/?hl=en 

[Decklin / Deco]

You would be better off replacing your manifest URL's with those that are only listed on the blacklist, and not every domain (https://* wildcard) for security purposes should your account be compromised, it prevents the ability for an update to be published without bypassing user consent for the ability to modify every protocol.

On Fri, 2 Nov 2018, 16:23 Stephanie Chiang, <gral...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey RGould, it was either a human or a really really well trained robot called Ken. Here's the link I got taken to https://support.google.com/chrome_webstore/contact/developer_support/?hl=en 

On Thursday, November 1, 2018 at 7:58:50 AM UTC-7, RGould wrote:

You actually contacted a real human and got a real reply?!  Could you please share how you did this (the link you used or email address you used)?

On Thursday, November 1, 2018 at 3:14:37 AM UTC-7, Stephanie Chiang wrote:

Hi Francois, 

thanks for the message. I emailed Google in the end and got a really helpful reply. They basically said it's because the application scans all the URL's of the user and advised me to change my manifest.json permission to "activeTab" instead of "tabs". Although after I did that and republished the extension I still got an auto warning saying there will be a delay publishing and that I should consider using activeTab which seems odd because that's exactly what I did before publishing haha. 

the version I published had what you said, everything was filled out, I didn't do the optional promotional tiles (only the required one) because I thought that was only for people who wanted to advertise but maybe that would help!

Here's the code if anybody wants a look https://github.com/stechiang/portfolieth

Stephanie

On Wednesday, October 31, 2018 at 7:46:31 PM UTC-7, Francois Devatine wrote:

It seems very long to me. It has taken me 3 or 4 days max in the past.

From my experience, try to fill all the fields in the chrome store > name, description, extended description, icons, screenshots and promo tiles. 

I read that many extensions without those are often considered as spam extensions.

If there's no update soon, I suggest you just unpublish (if possible) and create a new one instead.

// Francois

On Wed, Oct 31, 2018 at 4:41 PM Stephanie Chiang <gral...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey all, I made a chrome extension designed for Ethereum nerds that does price tracking and address search stuff. It's all very simple, non intrusive, open source, no ads etc.

The only thing it does that might raise the eyebrows of the code reviewer is scans the current URL of the active tab and checks it out against a database of malicious cryptocurrency URL's to prevent the user of the extension getting hacked or scammed. The user's URL is never stored anywhere, no data about where they have been visiting or anything like that is recorded at all.

So anyway it's been 10 days since i submitted it and it still says 'pending review'. I've seen other users freak out because it took over 24 hours. Does anyone have experience with this? 

I guess it's surprising because it's such a simple extension really!

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[Stephanie Chiang]

Thanks for the reply, 

A good idea, however the only issue with that solution is the blacklisted domains are dynamic and need to be really up to date (hour by hour minimum). As far as I know the manifest.json must remain static other than when the application is updated and can't, for instance, refer to an outside (dynamic) database via URL or whatever. 

In other news, they published my extension! yay im so happy!

Google dev support were actually super helpful so kudos to them.

If anyone is interested, here it is  https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/portfolieth/fkfbohgjokdkdlcolefgdebogmphekjc

thanks for all your help and suggestions guys :)

Stephanie

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