Plugin homepage URLs are not hyperlinks

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#1

For example https://pedalboards.moddevices.com/plugins/aHR0cDovL21vZGRldmljZXMuY29tL3BsdWdpbnMvbWRhL0R1YkRlbGF5 refers to http://moddevices.com/plugins/mda/DubDelay but it’s just displayed as plain text rather than a clickable hyperlink.

#2

that’s the plugin URI, not a URL for the homepage.
URIs often do not exist, they are just an indentifier for a plugin.

#4

(Sorry, got confused between topics in my previous post.)

Ah, I only just noticed that there is also a hyperlink at the top of each plugin page which seems to link to the homepage. Am I right in thinking each plugin has two fields (amongst others), as follows?

  1. A URL for the homepage, which may or may not be unique to that plugin (e.g. it might not be if the homepage is a collection of plugins such as http://guitarix.org/). From the MOD Duo web UI you can click the “See Online” button to visit that homepage.
  2. A unique URI which may not exist and is used to uniquely reference the plugin

I have some suggestions:

  1. Don’t have the second (unique) URI using the http protocol. This misleads the user into expecting it to be a valid link. If it’s just needed as a unique identifier then there’s no need to reference http.
  2. Add another field to each plugin pointing at the location for the source code (if available), and include that hyperlink in the plugin pages on both the https://pedalboards.moddevices.com/plugins web UI and the MOD Duo web UI.
  3. Add yet another field tracking the license under which this plugin is released. Of course this will become more important as support for commercial plugins are added, but it also helps with Conspicuous lack of free/libre/open references on website & more
#5

I don’t disagree with your critiques, but this is probably one of those long-term community-level quality efforts. Here’s what the docs says about the URIs:

The documentation for a URI can often be found by visiting that URI in a web browser, e.g. the documentation for lv2:binary can be found at http://lv2plug.in/ns/lv2core#binary. All standard LV2 classes and properties are documented in this way, so if you encounter a URI in some data which you do not understand, try this first.

The URI of a plugin does not need to be a resolvable web address, it just serves as a global identifier. However, it is a good idea to use an actual web address if possible for easy access documentation, downloads, and so on, even if no documents are currently hosted there. There are compatibility rules about when the URI of a plugin must be changed, see the LV2 specification for details. Note that this does not require authors to control a top-level domain; for example, URIs in project directories at shared hosting sites are fine. It is not required to use HTTP URIs, but use of other schemes is strongly discouraged.

AUTHORS MUST NOT CREATE URIS AT DOMAINS THEY DO NOT CONTROL WITHOUT PERMISSION, AND ESPECIALLY MUST NOT CREATE INVALID URIS, E.G. WHERE THE PORTION FOLLOWING “http://” IS NOT A DOMAIN NAME. If you need an example URI, the domain http://example.org/ is reserved for this purpose.

#6

[quote=“aspiers, post:4, topic:1388”]
Don’t have the second (unique) URI using the http protocol. This misleads the user into expecting it to be a valid link. If it’s just needed as a unique identifier then there’s no need to reference http.[/quote]
But that’s exactly how URIs work. they are purposefully similar to URLs, but not required to be one.
We’re not the ones dictating which URIs the plugins use.

[quote=“aspiers, post:4, topic:1388”]
Add another field to each plugin pointing at the location for the source code (if available), and include that hyperlink in the plugin pages on both the https://pedalboards.moddevices.com/plugins web UI and the MOD Duo web UI.[/quote]
This will come soon. we already store the code when opensource builds are done in the cloud, we’re just missing a public link to it for download.
This is even better than linking to a git repo, as we might have custom patches or use a specific non-latest commit.
Downloading the code that was used to build the plugin means you get exact source.

Something that we’ll need to do for sure.
Plugins can use a random string to specify their license though, so an automatic parser will have to be smart to handle those cases…

#7

OK I see - in that case presumably it would still be possible to tweak the UI to clarify that this URI does not necessarily correspond to a homepage, in order to avoid confusion with genuine homepage URLs.

That sounds great, but ideally in addition to this it should still be easy to navigate directly to the upstream source repository.

Yeah this license hell is something I’m all too familiar with … :wink:

#8

We already do that, by making those "URL"s non-clickable.
Some look like URLs, but there’s nothing we can do about it.

#9

IMHO that’s not quite obvious enough, otherwise there would have been no confusion and this thread would not exist :wink: True, it’s possible that I’m the only person who would ever get confused by this, but I suspect that’s not the case.

IMHO It would be worth adding some brief text which explains that:

  • these are URIs uniquely identifying the plugin, rather than (necessarily) reachable URLs,
  • that’s why they aren’t clickable, and
  • if the user is instead looking for the hyperlink to the homepage, it can be found elsewhere (near the top of the page).

To avoid cluttering the UI, this explanatory text could be hidden as a tooltip behind a typical “What’s This?” question-mark icon. But again I appreciate this is a level of polish which is probably (quite rightly) lower than most of the other stuff currently on your plate :slight_smile: Anyway, thanks for listening and responding!!