Unreasonable rejection of Stylus extension

[wOxxOm]

Stylus extension, which is a fork of Stylish for Chrome with a faster code and less bugs, gets rejected on every submission due to a completely nonsensical reason:

To have your item reinstated, please ensure:

    The purpose of the extension is clear to users; and
    The extension either limits its functionality to a narrow focus area of subject matter or to a narrow browser function.

To serve multiple purposes with your extensions, please package each purpose as a separate extension.

The Stylus extension is functionally the same as Stylish and all users know what it does and why:

• it applies CSS themes to websites (clear as day)
• it allows to edit/create the CSS themes (obviously required, otherwise what would be applied?)
• it allows installing CSS themes from sites that offer them, currently https://userstyles.org (a convenient way to discover more themes)

All these functions are integral for restyling the appearance of sites and users happily use all of them. All these functions existed for about 10 years in the original Stylish extension for Firefox, then in Stylish for Chrome (present in WebStore), and finally in Stylus (rejected in WebStore).

The current maintainer of Stylus extension attempted to get an actual human response many times, but never succeeded. Is the review process in WebStore completely robotic and randomly unreasonable? Is there any way to draw attention of a reasonable human reviewer?

[Decklin / Deco]

It's being rejected on the basis that there is no clear "function" for the extension (as said in the reasoning), this can be due to it not targeting a specific subset of sites or it's use in editing and injecting scripts based on a singular website which targets a multitude.

The process is checked via a scanner, not any human interaction - its simply checking the files to ensure proper usage is implemented (mainly the manifest file), developers only manually review the extension if it is flagged as malware repeatedly on the Chrome Web Store.

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[wOxxOm]

Uhm, thanks, but it still doesn't make any sense, because Stylus does not inject any scripts, and its function is perfectly clear to anyone who wants to restyle web sites. Also, the maintainer's developer account was suspended after the automatic rejections - how is this reasonable? I mean it's totally inhuman. Is there any way to mark the extension as clear? Or the maintainer will have to explain each time the extension is automatically rejected that the rejection reason is nonsensical?

[wOxxOm]

Clarification regarding scripts: Stylus only has a content script, which may inject a style element, but never a script element.

[Hunter S. Thompson]

WTH is going on here? Stylus was reinstated after a manual review less than a couple weeks ago, and there hasn't even been an update submitted in the meantime, but today it has been removed yet again from the Web Store? "Unreasonable" is an understatement. This is borderline hostile to an open source project with absolutely no questionable code. Meanwhile, crypto-currency miners breeze through the review process. Should Stylus include one in order to get approved?

On Sunday, September 17, 2017 at 8:37:02 PM UTC-4, Decklin / Deco wrote:

It's being rejected on the basis that there is no clear "function" for the extension (as said in the reasoning), this can be due to it not targeting a specific subset of sites or it's use in editing and injecting scripts based on a singular website which targets a multitude.

The process is checked via a scanner, not any human interaction - its simply checking the files to ensure proper usage is implemented (mainly the manifest file), developers only manually review the extension if it is flagged as malware repeatedly on the Chrome Web Store.

On Wed, 13 Sep 2017, 09:42 wOxxOm <wox...@gmail.com> wrote:

Stylus extension, which is a fork of Stylish for Chrome with a faster code and less bugs, gets rejected on every submission due to a completely nonsensical reason:

To have your item reinstated, please ensure:

    The purpose of the extension is clear to users; and
    The extension either limits its functionality to a narrow focus area of subject matter or to a narrow browser function.

To serve multiple purposes with your extensions, please package each purpose as a separate extension.

The Stylus extension is functionally the same as Stylish and all users know what it does and why:

• it applies CSS themes to websites (clear as day)
• it allows to edit/create the CSS themes (obviously required, otherwise what would be applied?)
• it allows installing CSS themes from sites that offer them, currently https://userstyles.org (a convenient way to discover more themes)

All these functions are integral for restyling the appearance of sites and users happily use all of them. All these functions existed for about 10 years in the original Stylish extension for Firefox, then in Stylish for Chrome (present in WebStore), and finally in Stylus (rejected in WebStore).

The current maintainer of Stylus extension attempted to get an actual human response many times, but never succeeded. Is the review process in WebStore completely robotic and randomly unreasonable? Is there any way to draw attention of a reasonable human reviewer?

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[wOxxOm zOo]

Evidently, WebStore review is just for appearances. The automated check does nothing meaningful, it randomly rejects valid extensions like Stylus or randomly allows bitcoin miners and other malware.

[wOxxOm]

The extension was automatically rejected again.

The maintainer's account got suspended too.

He's tired of this absurdity (he has other extensions in the webstore) and wants to delete the extension from his account.