Dealing with abandoned projects

Drupal has thousands of contributed projects, each with one or more maintainer. While most maintainers continue to care for their projects after the initial release, some need to move on and leave the project in the care of the community. Ideally, maintainers will put up a note that the project is in need of a new maintainer so the work can continue uninterrupted. Occasionally, though, a maintainer will simply abandon the project without a word. While experienced Drupal users know to check the queue and the cvs commits to determine the health of a project, having broken and abandoned projects available can be confusing and off-putting for new users.

If you find a project that appears to be abandoned, please follow the procedure below:

If you are a developer and would like to take over maintainership of the project:

1. File an issue in that project's queue under the "support request" category stating your request to take over maintainership. If you have a patch for the module, mention that as well as it shows you are already working on the code.
2. Wait two weeks to give the maintainer time to respond.
3. If there is no response or if the maintainer responds and gives the ok, move the issue to the webmasters queue to bring it to the attention of someone with access to make the change. Please include a link back to the project page to make it easier for the admin.

Note: If you don't already have a CVS account, refer to the issue when applying for one after you've gotten approval to take the module over.

If you are unable to take over the project yourself:

1. Review the issue queue and commit messages carefully to be reasonably sure the project is abandoned to avoid annoying a maintainer who may simply be busy.
2. File an issue in that project's queue under the "support request" category politely asking if it is still maintained. For the title, use something like "Is PROJECT_NAME still being maintained?" By putting the project name in the title, you can catch the attention of people reading via the global tracker.
3. Wait two weeks to give the maintainer time to respond.
4. If there is no response, move the issue to the webmasters queue.
5. Change the title to something like, "PROJECT_NAME appears to be abandoned" and list your reasons for this as well as noting that the maintainer has not responded. If you feel that the project is not only abandoned but badly broken (unusably so), mention your reasons for that as well. Please include a link back to the project page to make it easier for the admin.
6. A site maintainer (or higher) should carefully review the project. If s/he agrees with the assessment, s/he can then add a note to the project page that the project is abandoned and in need of a new maintainer.
7. If the site maintainer / admin agrees the project is badly broken and not recommended to use, s/he should unpublish all of the releases as well. If a replacement project is known, link to that project. This should only be done if absolutely necessary as unpublishing the releases will cause update status to notify everyone currently using the project that it is no longer supported. Because of the affects on the user, the site maintainer / admin should install the module first to verify that it is unusable before taking this step.