Plugin is not listed in Obsidian's in-app community plugin browser (absent from community-plugins.json)

Summary

The plugin cannot be found from Obsidian's in-app Settings → Community plugins → Browse, even though community.obsidian.md/plugins/markdown-viewer-extension renders a normal listing page.

The in-app browser is populated from community-plugins.json in obsidianmd/obsidian-releases, and the plugin is not in that file. No amount of searching, cache-clearing, or reinstalling can surface it.

What I checked

Fetched today (2026-07-29) from raw.githubusercontent.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-releases/master/:

No entry with id markdown-viewer-extension, and no entry whose name contains Markdown Viewer.

The entry count moved from 6147 to 6149 while I was checking, so the file is live and being updated — this is not a stale snapshot.

What still works

https://community.obsidian.md/plugins/markdown-viewer-extension returns HTTP 200 and renders a real listing (<title>Markdown Viewer - Obsidian Plugin</title>, description, download count, "Add to Obsidian" button). For comparison, a made-up id renders <title>Plugin not found</title> — so the site genuinely has a record for this plugin.

The "595 downloads" shown there does not come from Obsidian's stats file (no entry exists), so it appears to be derived from GitHub release asset counts rather than from the registry.

What this looks like

The website directory and the registry the desktop client reads are out of sync. Being absent from all three files — including the removed list — suggests the plugin was never merged into community-plugins.json rather than de-listed after the fact, but I can only see this from the outside.

Two other symptoms that may be related, in case they help pin down where the submission stalled:

• markdown-viewer/obsidian contains only build output (main.js, manifest.json, styles.css) with no source, and its latest release is 5.0.0 while this repo is at 5.2.0. If any listing or review process points at that repo, it is behind.
• The manifest id is markdown-viewer-extension while the display name is Markdown Viewer. Obsidian's in-app search matches on name/author/description, not on the id, so anyone searching the id string from the plugin's URL gets nothing even in the normal case.

Impact

Users who find the plugin through the website, a blog post, or the plugin's own docs hit a dead end in the app and have to install manually or through BRAT — which also means no automatic updates.

Environment

• Obsidian 1.x, Linux (desktop)
• Reproducible from a clean vault: Browse → search "Markdown Viewer" → no result

Start by checking the plugin manifest and release repository against obsidianmd/obsidian-releases/community-plugins.json, then review the community plugin submission path. Confirm whether the external registry has a missing or stalled entry for markdown-viewer-extension. Done means the plugin appears in Obsidian's in-app Browse list and can be installed and updated there.