I had a plugin that I installed a while back that added different increments to the control buttons and also added a fan speed slider. Since I started from scratch with my Pi4, didn't think much of it, but that plugin isn't showing up in the repository anymore.
Do you know the name of the plugin?
more increments for the distance buttons https://github.com/ntoff/OctoPrint-ExtraDistance
cooling fan slider control https://github.com/ntoff/OctoPrint-FanSpeedSlider
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I'm pretty much new here, but I have a question: How do we know that a plugin is safe? Especially one that is not on the Octoprint site? TIA.
That's a difficult question... 
If you are worried about one or two non official plugins you could post a topic here and hope that some people have the time to look at them.
But please don't post a list with 23 plugins which nobody has ever seen before 
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Presumably, most plugins are installed from a public repository. This means that the source code is freely available to review. This alone tends to make things safer; if someone were bad then the truth would be revealed and the plugin would make it to the blacklist.
A bad plugin might try to send information back to some cloud-based site perhaps. One could look for any URLs and for calls to send information back to one. A bad plugin might try to put up advertisements but I don't think we've seen that. A bad plugin might try to damage your OctoPrint installation but that would just point the blame back to the public repository author.
Much of what you'd have to fear is a badly-behaved plugin whose JavaScript throws errors in the bundled script, killing all other JavaScript in that file. But this is almost always from bad code.
Thank you.
Thank you, I appreciate the information.
I was also looking for the Extra Distance Plugin and it didn't show up in my search in OctoPrint. Why would an app be listed in the Plugin library in OctoPrint before and then suddenly be delisted?
One possible reason is the author asking for it to be unlisted because they are no longer maintaining it and feel uncomfortable having it still be listed if they can't give it the proper attention anymore. And if I'm not mistaken that's precisely what happened here.
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