I'm not sure about this one. I think there could be maybe more effective ways to motivate a plugin developer to release a new version:

• Let developers know you are using the plugin and that you like it or how you use it or how it helps you doing something
• Reported features ideas or make other suggestions for improvements
• Make a donation even if it's a tiny amount (if links are visible)

For me the question would be how do we make users do this? For example we could add a link to the plugin issue tracker. A link can be already specified in plugin.json via support.issues and we could default to the github issue tracker. An empty value in support.issues would hide the link.

We could add something "Are you using this plugin?..." in Marketplace UI or "Do you like this plugin?..." in the Piwik UI. "Let the plugin author know ...." "... make feature suggestion and report bugs".

A review / rating system would be nice (only within Piwik App for now possibly do prevent misusage). A plugin developer who gets good ratings will be motivated to continue and a plugin with not so good ratings might be motivated to make it better to get better ratings.

There are possibly many more ideas :)

thanks for your answer!
Sure you are right!

The idea was not to ask for a lot more work for the developers, it was only to ask to make already done work (e.g. several commits in github after last release) also available for public in the easy way to install by using the marketplace.
example:
I did it the manual way for bandwith plugin and open an issue to ask for a new release, because there were about 30 great commits since last release but only a small cummunity benefits from them.
Some hours later it was available in market place.
The idea was to automate this process of "reminding" to make a new release from time to time (only if possible)

For the developer there are also benefits:
his plugin comes to top of "latest plugin" list in marketplace and even more people see it.
For existing users of the plugin the new release gives the feeling that the developer cares about the plugin. I think this is also a good point to got very positive visibility...
and all with only make already done work accessible :-)

Got it!

To not annoy developers we can make this "smart" and check whether there were commits since the last release (we know the last release / tag in the Marketplace) and only email if there are commits that haven't been released yet.

There might be 2 problems I can think of right now:

• I think we do not have email addresses of all plugin developers. We sometimes get an email from Github, but this could be also some random Github noreply email address.
• We might need permission of developers to email them. At least in Germany one is not allowed to send "ads" and stuff without permission. I believe this wouldn't be an advertisement and wouldn't be a problem but still we don't want to send emails without any permission.

To solve both problems we could only email developers if they specified an email address via "authors.email". We can see this maybe as an opt-in and they are able to opt-out any time.

sounds perfect 👍