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Old 01-22-2013, 02:01 AM   #484
kiwidude
Calibre Plugins Developer
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Posts: 4,636
Karma: 2162064
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Australia
Device: Kindle Oasis
@edwecarlo - nicely said and appreciate the support.

If it is a feature I will use myself, then its chances of being added are obviously enormously higher. A number of plugins have evolved significantly from my original idea thanks to the folks here making great suggestions, so everyone benefits in that scenario.

For the rest of the enhancement suggestions the only real motivation I have is whether a significant amount of people are going to subsequently find it useful enough to show their appreciation - either in the forums or even more ideally via a direct donation. In case any of you think I am quietly making a fortune off the plugin donations - on average over the last two years I would guess I get a donation (happy dance time!) every 1-2 weeks. Which for 25+ plugins and likely 50,000+ unique users, for the many thousands of hours of development and support in my evenings, weekends and holidays means an hourly rate so far below the decimal point I would cry if it was my primary motivation. Add to that four months+ of 7 days a week Sigil work last year as well, and that is a heck of a lot of time that could have been spent on "other things". Entirely my choice of course - but please don't hold off clicking that donation link in my signature if you are thinking "surely enough others must be making it worthwhile for him so I don't need to" .

There will always be suggestions that are either too niche, too time consuming or too out of scope that I will reject. It doesn't always make them bad suggestions or ideas - in fact sometimes they may be worthy of their own more specific plugin. However every feature I *do* choose to implement becomes a commitment on my part - not only of the initial hours to write it, but to maintain it and support it over the life of the plugin from my perspective. When a plugin is new and still "finding its niche" I am more amenable to suggestions to help set the direction for it, as I said above sometimes one idea sparks a better one. However once the plugin matures, my usual answer is going to be less enthusiastic unless the idea is a cracking good one. And as time goes by or other projects come up I do have to start making more financially practical decisions about how I commit my after hours time.

In the case of this Goodreads Sync plugin I have from day one in this thread been very aware and constrained by their terms of service with regards to their API. So any change has to pass my "is it likely to be abused either accidentally or intentionally and if so screw the plugin for everyone?" test. On top of that it is one of the more complex plugins to maintain due to the complexity of the UI and existing features. There have been some requests on the last few pages to do with pulling data from other fields which I do intend to consider making when I next revisit this plugin, so it is not a "no to anything", but I'm not committing to a timeframe at this point either.

And as pointed out above by edwecarlo, if me saying that I don't want to spend *my* weekend writing a feature for *you* (please remember that is the real impact of what you are asking for!), there are always other options. You could learn enough to make the change yourself. There are a few forks of a couple of my plugins out there in the ether, and I am sure there are many more where people have hacked them for their own usage. That is what open source is all about - use it to learn and adapt to something you will make use of. Or if you don't have the skills, you could try paying someone to do it for you, be it me or someone else.
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