Group publisher memberships are still not working

[AutoControl support]

Some time ago it was mentioned in this forum that the "Group publisher memberships" option in the CWS Developer Dashboard is meant to allow multiple accounts to post replies to user reviews in the CWS.

This feature became a necessity since the new CWS only allows the extension's owner to post replies to user reviews. So, in order to solve this new limitation, it was requested by some that all accounts which are members of the group publisher are allowed to reply to reviews.

More info about group publishers here:

https://developer.chrome.com/docs/webstore/group-publishers/

Unfortunately, to this day this feature is still not working. See screenshots below.

This first screenshot shows the view of the extension owner account. The "Reply" option is available.

This second screenshot shows the view of another account which is a member of the group publisher. The "Reply" option is missing.

Could a Chrome staffer provide some comments about this please. Is this feature supposed to be working already? or has it not been implemented yet?

[Patrick Kettner]

Hey there!

Would you be able to share the extension ID you are trying to reply to?

Thanks!

patrick

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[AutoControl support]

Thanks for replying. The extension ID is lkaihdpfpifdlgoapbfocpmekbokmcfd

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/autocontrol-keyboard-shor/lkaihdpfpifdlgoapbfocpmekbokmcfd

[Patrick Kettner]

Thanks so much!

The account that owns that extension does not appear to be a group publisher, but an individual email account.

[hrg...@gmail.com]

the "Group publisher memberships" option in the CWS Developer Dashboard is meant to allow multiple accounts to post replies to user reviews

For this to work, you have to pay 5 dollars for each additional account you want to be part of the publisher group. Adding the accounts to the group is not enough.

This requirement is unacceptable and it kills the usefulness of the group publisher functionality. That payment is supposed to be a barrier to publish extensions in the web store, not to reply to user reviews.

In the old Web Store this wasn't needed at all. I used to engage with users using a separate account because the account owning the extension is my personal account which I don't want to expose to the public. Unfortunately, the new CWS imposes this ridiculous requirement of $5 USD in order to be able to reply to reviews with a different account. Paying for that functionality is unjustified, especially since I don't make any money with my extensions. So now I just can't reply to reviews anymore and those users who ask questions will never get an answer. Unfortunate and sad.

[AutoControl support]

The account that owns that extension does not appear to be a group publisher, but an individual email account.

Indeed it's an individual account.

After carefully reading the group publisher instructions again, we now realize that the process is quite involved, it requires an ownership transfer which cannot ever be undone and it also requires a payment for each account in the group (like the previous commenter said, thanks for that!). All this complications are beyond what's reasonable for our needs, we were only looking for a simple way of replying to user reviews from more than one account.

Could we request that this process is simplified please?

An ownership transfer and a payment seem rather excessive, honestly. We were expecting a simple mechanism such as the "Trusted tester accounts" which only requires entering a list of emails.

[Patrick Kettner]

In order for a developer account to be able to reply to reviews, they need to be a developer account. We don't have plans on supporting arbitrary users commenting on reviews, but will take the feedback back to the team.