Verified Plugins Program: Building a Quality Signal for the Marketplace

A plugin marketplace without quality signals is a junk drawer. You can have 900 plugins. You can have keyword filtering, install buttons, and a blog. But if a user can't tell the difference between a polished tool and something someone pushed once and abandoned, your marketplace is noise. This week I built the system that fixes that. The Problem with Plugin Discovery The claude-code-plugins marketplace had grown fast. Hundreds of plugins across agents, hooks, slash commands, and MCP servers. The explore page worked. Keyword filtering landed in PR #321. Install counts were visible. But there was no quality signal. A plugin with comprehensive documentation, error handling, and active maintenance looked identical to one with a two-line README and no tests. Users had to click into each plugin, read the source, and make their own judgment. That doesn't scale. The Verified Plugins Program PR #326 introduced a structured quality evaluation system. Not a vague "editor's pick" badge. A 100-poin