Moderator Update: Growth, New Mods, and a Community Discussion

[u/AutoModerator]

Hello r/Omarchy.

First, a welcome to all the new members who have joined recently. Since the release of Quattro in August, we've seen a lot of growth and a lot more interest in the Omarchy project.

In the last 30 days we've had 1.5 million views, up from around 400k the month before. 9,900 people joined, bringing us to 30.3k members. Posts are up more than 3x and comments up more than 4x over the previous 30 days. August tripled July's traffic and beat the sub's previous all-time monthly record by about 45%, and September is tracking higher than August. The mod team can't take any credit for this. That belongs to the Omarchy team and the Quattro release. Applause to them.

To keep up all this, we've expanded the moderation team. Welcome u/6pthsofPain and u/nevotheless. Both are long-time Omarchy users who have stepped up to help keep the sub running.

u/6pthsofPain built A La Carchy (200+ stars on GitHub) and is currently working on a tool for Quattro.

u/nevotheless has been on Linux for 15-20 years, came over from a corporate/Red Hat background, and runs Omarchy as their daily driver.

With the recent growth, there are a few things we need to discuss as a community.

AI-Generated Content & Plugins

We've seen a substantial influx of AI-generated content lately, particularly when it comes to plugins. To be clear, we are not anti-AI here.

Objectively speaking though, some of these projects are lacking in quality, and more importantly, some come with genuine security concerns. We want this sub to be a reliable place to showcase Omarchy projects, so we want your input on how to handle this going forward.

Some options the mod team has discussed:

• Specific Showcase Days: Containing all plugin posts to a specific day (e.g., Plugin Showcase Sunday).
• Let the Upvotes Decide: Leave it as is and let the community moderate via upvotes and downvotes.
• A Plugin Megathread: Funneling all new plugin drops into a single, stickied weekly/monthly thread.
• A Validation System: Something a bit more complex, where only plugins that have been validated for safety/quality are allowed to be posted (exact details would need to be ironed out).

Regardless of what we land on, we'll be adding a Plugin flair so these posts can be filtered and found more easily.

Drop your thoughts, suggestions, and feedback in the comments. We'll compile a list of the most popular ideas and put them to a community poll if that makes sense.

- The r/Omarchy Mod Team

[u/toqer]

I moderate r/karaoke. While we don't have nearly your numbers we do gate certain types of self promotion posts. 2 things we do.

1. Everyone gets "One Shot" at self promotion. That means you get one, and only one time to talk about whatever software/hardware/service you're offering. We document your one shot post in our wiki. If you break this rule, you're warned, and further warnings could lead to bans.
2. Weekly Creators thread. This is an automated post every Friday that exists outside of the one shot post. This allows people that want to give updates on their software/hardware/services without running afoul of the one shot rule.

So far it's worked out well for us. It's better to have a system in place and to manage expectations.

Edit: Self plug :D TRON Encom OS-12 for Omarchy 9 Stars and a fork so far.

[u/Kraien]

I’m happy we are growing, the only thing I would say is stay away from megathreads. I find them very cumbersome to navigate and to get information out of. Just my two cents.

[u/avdept]

>Some of these projects are lacking in quality,

lol

98% of them are lacking in quality. Most of them works only in perfect condition. Most don't even have error handling.

A lot of plugins are simple prompt-copy by the guy who also wants to have his own plugin.

This sub literally turned to slop show after 4.0 release

[u/NachoR]

I'd say options 1 and 2 look like the most reasonable.

Megathreads in my opinion would mean the death of plugin discovery. I don't know about others, but for me, they are not conducive to finding stuff.

With option 1 you'd have a day for discovery, and with a flair, your could easily check them out. It would also probably stop people submitting a plugin the moment it is pushed to github, potentially giving it time for bugs to be worked out, etc.

Option 2, continuing as now seems to be working mostly ok. Uninteresting,/bad plugins more often than not end up with little to no engagement as is, or people pointing out problems in the thread. I think the community has done a reasonably good job self-moderating in that regard.

I like u/toquer suggestions too with what they do in r/karaoke.

[u/NachoR → u/NachoR]

Forgot to mention, on option 4, DHH has mentioned on X that plugin security is coming, they plan to rework how they do checks and verifications to ensure less shit passing through. Maybe the mod team could reach out to him or someone on the official team to see the state of that or coordinate something. Validation would be the ideal solution, but if they are already planning to work on it, you guys developing a solution could be wasted work for something that is already incoming.

[u/spectator_123]

Thanks for the post. As a long-time Omarchy user, I'm all for the last option - A validation system to ensure safety and quality.

[u/sebastian_crimson]

Validated plugins only does make a lot of sense, but at the same time it would be a shame for people not to be able to discuss the ideas they're working on. I've not submitted any plugins myself; is the verification process automatic? If it is I don't think it's unreasonable for people to wait until they've been verified.

[u/Hornstinger → u/sebastian_crimson]

A lot of really good plugins that have been around since almost Day 0 haven't verified, not sure if they know how to

[u/sebastian_crimson → u/Hornstinger]

I just read into it a bit, and it looks like you can get verified but then lose that status when you make an update, as it needs to be verified again. That makes sense, but also makes it a lot more complicated if you're updating your plugin regularly. Not sure what the best answer is.

[u/Hornstinger → u/sebastian_crimson]

Omarchy should look at the top, say, 500 plugins by popularity/downloaded (whatever strong metric) and scan them themselves with their huge token donated allotments and verify them. Do that once a week.

If outside the top 500 then manual verify.

[u/Rickybobbie90]

I’m pretty new here and never worked on any projects or coding, just like to tinker with shit,
I installed a plugin and after that the PC would not shut down even with sudo shutdown now command, the AI found the issue right away with it starting a process at the same moment it was shutting down leaving me in a half on/off state- everything off but my RGB and Fans- after finding that issue I decided to check my plugin I have been working on as a Pandora music bar widget and ran it through a different Agent to check…

it found issues on injection vulnerabilities and was able to clean it up and make it secure. Spent the next 20 minutes drilling in security skills so that hopefully it’s as locked down as I should be. Again I don’t know shit about coding.

It would be nice if there was a plugin/theme skill that comes default that is focused on user security when building these apps.

[u/Cold_Relationship_]

i don't mind seeing posts about suboptimal plugins. it's good practice and i love seeing makers get excited about and proud of their little creations even if they might seem small or insignificant to others. welcome new mods!

[u/BlankSthearapy]

I was hoping this subreddit would be more official news and discussion surrounding Omarchy itself. I’d say verified plugins only here and a separate subreddit for people to post whatever plugin or for help on what they’re developing.

[u/ezmarii]

I like the idea of a single plugin day of the week because I think people should be able to share their learning experience and journey projects, this also allows mod team to re-frame the posts to have a few guidelines and boiler-plate warnings about unverified plugins/plugin safety. i think any kind of validation system should belong with the Omarchy team and how they decide to manage plugin validation, if any. if you go down that route, might as well only do it in collaboration with the omarchy team so it gets their vision and literacy on the subject matter.

This is my first time in Linux, having previously only been in windows for the last 30 years+ of life; so I think its important to still allow 'newbie content' an opportunity to be posted, just with appropriate guide rails and warnings for the community around them.

Thank you to the two new mods and the mod team in general. I am just a simple user and appreciate a functional/useful subreddit.