ATN Featured Add-ons Policy
Featured add-ons are top-quality extensions and themes highlighted on ATN, Thunderbird's Add-ons Manager. These add-ons showcase the power of Thunderbird customization and are useful to a wide audience.
Featured add-ons are chosen by the ATN Featured Add-ons Board, a small group of extension developers and fans from the Mozilla community who have volunteered to review and vote on nominations.
New featured extensions are chosen with every Thunderbird ESR (Extended Support Release).
Criteria for Featured Extensions
Before nominating an extension to be featured, please ensure it meets the following criteria:
- The extension must have a complete and informative listing on ATN. This means:
- A 64-pixel custom icon
- A clear and concise name (no lengthy keywords)
- A clear and concise summary of the extension's functionality
- A detailed description and privacy policy, if applicable
- Updated screenshots of the extension's functionality
- The extension must have excellent user reviews and any problems or support requests must be promptly addressed by the developer.
- The extension must have a minimum of 500 users.
- The extension must be compatible with the latest ESR of Thunderbird.
- Most importantly, the extension must have wide consumer appeal to Thunderbird's users and be outstanding in nearly every way: user experience, performance, security, and usefulness or entertainment value.
Nominating an Add-on
If you wish to nominate an add-on to be featured and it meets the criteria above, send an email to atn-featured@thunderbird.topicbox.com with:
- The extension name, URL, and whether you are its developer
- A short explanation of why the extension has wide appeal and should be featured
- Optionally, links to any external reviews or articles mentioning the extension
Extension nominations are reviewed by the Advisory Board leading up to the release of the ESR. Common reasons for rejection include lacking wide appeal to consumers, a suboptimal user experience, quality or security issues, incompatibility, and similarity to another featured extension.
Losing Featured Status
The Featured Add-ons Board may remove an add-ons featured status outside of the normal selection period. Some of the most common reasons for add-ons being removed from the featured list are:
- Lack of growth — Add-ons that are featured typically experience a substantial gain in both downloads and active users. If an add-on is not demonstrating growth in any substantial way, that's a good indicator the add-on may not be very useful to our users.
- Negative reviews — Featured add-ons should have a great experience and very few bugs, so add-ons with many negative reviews may be reconsidered.
- Incompatibility with upcoming Thunderbird — Featured add-ons are expected to be compatible with stable and beta versions of Thunderbird. Add-ons not yet compatible with a Beta version of Thunderbird four weeks before its expected release will lose their featured status.
Joining the ATN Featured Add-ons Board
ATN Featured Add-ons Board Members:
- Are active members of the add-ons community, whether as a developer, evangelist, or fan
- Commit to trying all the nominations submitted, giving their feedback, and casting their votes every month
- Abstain from voting on extensions that they have any business or personal affiliations with, as well as direct competitors of any such extensions
Members of the Thunderbird Team may veto any extension's selection because of security, privacy, compatibility, or any other reason, but in general it is up to the Board to select extensions to feature.
This featured policy only applies to the addons.thunderbird.net global list of featured extensions. Extensions featured in other locations are often pulled from this list, but Thunderbird may feature any extension in other locations without the Board's consent. Additionally, locale-specific features override the global defaults, so if a locale has opted to select its own features, some or all of the global features may not appear in that locale.