The team is also working on adding permissions and more controls, see the recent announcement and HN discussion:

https://obsidian.md/blog/future-of-plugins/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48109970

Since last week hundreds of plugins have been updated to patch vulnerabilities. That said there is a lot more to do and we're actively working on it. It's a very high priority.

If there are any other checks you think we should add to the automated review system I'd be happy to look into those. Since the review system is mostly open source you can also contribute to it directly, though perhaps that would be in conflict with the purpose of your company since our approach doesn't use AI for now?

https://community.obsidian.md/search?type=plugin&categories=...

https://obsidian.md/help/sync-notes

> No permissions system, nothing resolved.

I could not let that comment stand because it's simply not true, and you probably wouldn't say it that way to me in person. We're not some faceless corporation. We're a team of seven sharing a year's work, which is expressly imperfect and in progress. I'm not looking to be showered with praise, like I said in my comment on the post we're listening to everyones gripes, and working on them. But a bit of nuance and congeniality is appreciated.

I don't think these two points should be particularly controversial:

1. Permissions are planned but they're not a panacea. Apps are sandboxed on iOS/Android, browser extensions have permissions, yet both can easily do dangerous things. Permissions suffer the same issue you described: all a user needs to do is press "Yes" to allow danger. If you care about making powerful software you inevitably must have some way for a user to say they "understand and accept the risks". The other option is to simply not let your software be powerful, which is not what I am interested in working on.

2. Analyzing plugin source code must be part of the overall solution not only for security, but also performance, reliability, ease-of-use, etc. How can you be against that? It makes absolutely no sense to me.

48 hours in, the new review system is already working. Hundreds of updates have been published by developers cleaning up their code and making their plugins safer in ways that a permission system would not catch. You can see that for yourself by looking at recent updates from the community: https://community.obsidian.md/search?type=plugin&sort=update...

As I have stated elsewhere many times, I'd be working on Obsidian even if I were the only user. That's why the app is free, we don't have investors, and we're okay staying small. The way plugins work is not motivated by money, it's a reflection of the kind of software we want to use.

It is fulfilling to see many people find value out of the app. People are creating many useful and interesting plugins I would have never imagined. Selfishly, I want to be able to use and trust those plugins just like anyone else. And that's the only motivation I need to work on the problem of plugin safety.

I understand you wish we had sandboxed plugins first, and built on top of it that way. But we didn't. Now we have been cursed with success and a large ecosystem that needs to be managed and transitioned. We will continue to chip away at the problem bit by bit. I don't think there's any other way to do it.

I completely understand if you disagree, in which case Obsidian is not for you. It's perfectly fine to not recommend it! Obsidian is not trying to be for everyone.

See also: https://stephango.com/saw

The post has instructions to reproduce the review results using our open source eslint plugin:

https://github.com/obsidianmd/eslint-plugin

2) Yes. You will see these radically improve over the next few weeks. As stated on the scorecard itself they are a work in progress. You have to consider that overnight we intentionally exposed tens of thousands of warning messages across thousands of plugins, so there will be false positive, false negatives, and severity tweaks as we gather feedback from the community. But I expect these to get sorted out fairly quickly!

Millions of people depend on thousands of Obsidian plugins. We cannot just flip a switch and break everyone's workflows overnight. It will be a gradual process. We're working on it, and I hope you'll at least concede that this is better than nothing.

https://github.com/obsidianmd/eslint-plugin/commits/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48110592

AI is not used in the review process. The system is primarily based on our open source eslint plugin, with additional dependency and malware scanning

https://github.com/obsidianmd/eslint-plugin