Add-ons/Reviewers/Guide/Team

Once you have finished your first add-on review, you are part of our team. Welcome! Now you need to learn how we behave and communicate.

Communication Channels

All reviewers are subscribed to an internal mailing list. On this list we discuss add-on reviews and review policies. If you have questions about a review, you can ask them there. Queue status and reviewer contribution reports are sent weekly. Only members of the list can send messages to it, so it has fairly low activity.

For live communication we use the #addon-reviewers Matrix channel.

Finally, we encourage you to join the Mozillians directory. If you're a reviewer, you can ask on the mailing list or Matrix for someone to invite you and vouch for you. Adding the 'addon-reviewers' tag to your account should make you visible on our Mozillians group.

Behavior

We put a great deal of trust in our review team, so we expect reviewers to handle themselves ethically and professionally. They shouldn't abuse their power, for personal gain or any other reason. The following list is not comprehensive, but should give you an idea of what the expectations are:

• You must never review or moderate user reviews for add-ons you have contributed code to, or add-ons that directly compete with yours.
  • If you have contributed code to an AMO add-on, your reviewer account should be linked to that add-on, either as an owner or a developer. If you don't wish to be publicly visible as a contributor, AMO allows it to be hidden.
  • If it's not possible to do this for whatever reason, your contributions should be disclosed to the Mozilla Add-ons Team.
• When performing reviews and communicating with add-on developers, please maintain a professional and courteous tone at all times. If a developer is being stubborn, offensive or otherwise uncooperative, don't reply and escalate the case to an admin.
• The review tools must be used exclusively for performing add-on reviews. Any other unsolicited requests or questions to add-on developers are not allowed. You can use public contact information to approach developers as any regular user, but you should also disclose if you learned about the add-on while looking at it through the review tools.
• You are encouraged to review add-ons you have looked at before. Having knowledge of the code is beneficial and saves time. However, you should refrain from exclusively dedicating your time to a small amount of add-ons, or reviewing too many versions of the same add-on consecutively (more than 4).
• Sometimes, add-on developers will offer to show their appreciation for your time and assistance by offering a gift, such as a promotional t-shirt. Small gifts are allowed, but we require them to be disclosed to the Mozilla Add-ons Team.

Admins monitor the reviewer group regularly and remove reviewers who have been inactive for extended periods of time. While we appreciate all contributions, it's best that reviewers have regular activity so they are less likely to overlook things. Also, access to add-on code and our internal mailing list are privileges that should be limited to active contributors.

Enforcement

Volunteer reviewers represent Mozilla in their decisions and interactions with add-on developers, so establishing and enforcing review standards is essential to a good developer experience and user safety.

Admin reviewers perform regular spot checks of reviews. During these checks, they might find mistakes in review decisions. Here are the types of mistakes we track and their corresponding severity:

Most severe

These errors lead to a terrible developer experience, or security issues for users:

• Approving an add-on that should have been rejected

Severe

These errors are not egregious but can lead to a bad developer experience if numerous:

• Rejecting an add-on when it should have been approved
• Rudeness or offensive language when addressing a developer

Minor

These errors are minor, but again not great if numerous:

• Incoherent English
• Unresponsive or not helpful when involved in conversation with developer

If multiple severe and/or frequent mistakes are found, reviewers will receive a notification that they have been put on probation. In probation, an admin will spot-check a reviewer’s activity for six months and remove them from the group if they make one more severe mistake. If the reviewer improves, they will remain in the group conditionally, provided they do not revert to making errors.

Removal of reviewing rights is rare and done only when we feel users may experience a security risk, developers are having a poor experience, or the contributions are causing a drain on resources. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us in one of the ways listed above.

Thanks for joining the team and supporting the add-on community, our developers and users appreciate your contributions!

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