Hi,
When I tried to publish my extension, the submit page generated a warning that auto-generated extension URL ending with /minfin-comment-blocker is already in use, so I published it with underscores /minfin_comment_blocker.
But it seems that that URL is free.
Can I re-publish my extension with the ‘original’ URL (with dashes instead of underscores)?
Error message:
This slug is already in use. Please choose another.
Hi ownmaster welcome to the forum
It seems you have the answer before you, but you’re not seeing it?
i.e. “slug”
Though “My Addon”, “my addon”, “My-addon”, “my_addon” etc. may look different, they would all have the same slug.
incorrect theory - see ownmaster’s third post following
Can you not use something similar to your preferred choice, just different enough so it won’t conflict with an existing name?
Its not a problem to use another URL, but I’m trying to understand the rules.
You say that my-addon and my_addon have the same slug.
But then I don’t understand why it was forbidden for me to publish my extension with my-addon URL, but it was OK to publish it with my_addon URL. According to what you say, my_addon URL has the same slug as my-addon and had to generate the same error. Do I miss something?
I’m confused. You’re saying that:
There is an addon named “minfin-comment-blocker”
You can publish another addon with the name “minfin_comment_blocker”
You get an error saying you can’t use the name “minfin_comment_blocker”
In other words, the process:
First checks to see if the name already exists.
If it doesn’t, you can publish
It then checks to see if the slug already exists
If it does, the process errors before it completes.
If this is the case, then I think it might be a good idea for both the name and the slug to be checked early on, before the publish. It could indeed be frustrating to have the impression that progress is being made only to later find out that there was something wrong with an earlier step. As disappointing as “fail fast” can be, I prefer to find out sooner rather than later.
Look, let me explain again.
I have an addon called My Cool Addon. And I try to publish it.
By default, publish page generates URL for it, which ends with my-cool-addon. But when I click Submit button, the page shows an error: “This slug is already in use. Please choose another.”
So, I manually changed the URL ending from my-cool-addon to my_cool_addon and then successfully published it.
Now it is accessible by URL https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/my_cool_addon/.
But, there nothing located at URL “in use”: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/my-cool-addon/.
And I’m trying to understand:
my-cool-addon is busy if there nothing at that URL?my_cool_addon is available while my_cool_addon is busy?It’s possible that the slug is taken by another add-on that is temporarily disabled. Or it could be some old abandoned add-on. You can write to amo-admins AT mozilla DOT org with the details and we can try to fix it for you.
I had the same problem last week when I first uploaded my add on ‘anti-social’.
Wanting ‘anti-social’ as a slug, obviously, I found - perhaps not surprisingly - that AMO told me that the slug ‘anti-social’ was taken, and asked me for another. I selected ‘anti-social-blocker’ and went on my way.
So now I have this page:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/anti-social-blocker/
Out of curiosity, I manually munged the URL and visited this page:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/anti-social/
There’s nothing there.
I agree with @jorgev that perhaps, in this case, as well as @ownmaster’s, something used to be there which has been temporarily disabled, or that some abandoned add-on has taken it and had the page removed (but the slug not returned to availability).
But I do wonder whether maybe it is worth looking again at the slug generation / submit part of the AMO site to see if it is sometimes not just generating a new slug but registering it as ‘used’ overkeenly, resulting in unlucky people like myself and @ownmaster having to alter their preferred slug to something else at the second stage of the submission process. It’s the kind of subtle bug that few would bother to report: you just think ‘oh, my cool name has been used before, well of course it has, drat, now what do I do’, and quickly think of a reasonable workaround.
But that’s two of us now saying this has happened recently.
Anyone else recently submitted a new thing and had to change the ‘in use’ slug?
Better yet, anyone else recently submitted a thing and not had to change the ‘in use’ slug?
Thanks for help, @jorgev.
I contacted AMO admins, then found out that it was actually me 2 years ago who made an unfinished publish under different account, so now I just deleted old addon and after that successfully updated URL of the new addon.
Sorry for disturbance, at the end the whole story looks kinda stupid. 
But, @wgmyers, there is a clear conclusion from it:
my-cool-addon and my_cool_addon are different slugsIt’s not that common that we have to free a slug for a dev, so we use a manual process for it now. Slugs are freed automatically if an add-on is deleted, but we don’t do that for disabled ones at the moment.