tl;dr Google, who already blocked anyone from emailing a zip with certain JS files inside (compressed/combined files), has moved to blocking them as ‘viruses’ entirely.
This week a new hassle popped up with anyone who uses Google Drive.
If you’re not the owner of a file, you may have seen a warning like this:
Or maybe this when trying to download:
In both cases, it’s Google being weird and sadly it’s not something we can fix.
What this means is that you will want to transition away from using Google Drive to distribute your zips, for plugin reviews but also for regular sharing of a zip that has javascript. They used to only do this for Gmail, so it’s somewhat understandable they’d expand this to Drive. Sadly they’re a little shortsighted on implementation and while they may get around to fixing this, they may decide not to care about it and keep blocking.
There are other services like Dropbox or Wetransfer, but also please remember you can always use code repositories like Gitlab or Github (both of which will build zips for you, so you shouldn’t upload the zip itself to the repos).
We’re sorry about Google getting weird like this.
ETA: Guess what else uses Google to manage attachments? HelpScout. I have a ticket in to ask to disable that, because hiiiiii. But right now, we’re having a banner day.