In reply to Bianca.

Well that's two manifest failures for the CMS in one reply! So if you're checking plugin authors - to see if they are reputable - that's a failure on the plugin review team's part. You shouldn't be checking to see if the plugin author is reputable, they should ALL be reputable [from the user's POV]! The fact you're saying that you have to check, means there is a failure somewhere higher up the pyramid. The second thing you're saying is that this notice, will prompt you to check this data point "is the author reputable?" when prompted. In other words, this notice, will be used by you as a user, to "reputation check" the CMS ecosystem. That will not have a positive effect. This is because you have been trained - as a user - to think that the plugins suck, or that they authors aren't reputable [why are you checking if you don't think that?]! Here lies a smell, and this is not the solution. This makes the smell worse. In fact, the notice will be used for exactly what you've said: to check if the author is somehow "bad" [which they too often are!]. In other words, this is a system to remind users how bad the plugin authors are. That's the effect anyway. The devs here are self interested, and most of them are competitive and consider themselves "good plugin authors" [probably are]. But the users don't care about the debate between good authors and bad. That's an internal family matter for developers. Users will only see the bad. Finally, the event of an author change is rarely associated with something positive. Usually the dev has died, or abandoned the code [fun!]. In other words as a user "Why am I being given this notice?" "Oh, because many WordPress plugin devs suck somehow, and this is a chance for me to check on that." Anyway I'll leave you guys alone again, good luck with this [my bet is it goes in!].