Release a stable version (7.x-2.4)

Agreed about the need for an upgrade. The last stable release was almost 2 years ago (2012-Feb-03). Really for a module that is this popular, the community shouldn't have to wait over a year for a maintenance release. There are only 23 open D7 issues, which makes this really quite manageable.

I do think that there should be incentives to ensure that people who are contributing to it are recognized. There should be some motivation to go through the issue queue and see that reports that people have made are acknowledged, repeatable, fixable and eventually closed. This is a lot of work, but there should be some acknowledgement done for those who are tending the issue queue, but I don't think that's enough.

I've blogged about the use of Flattr & Gittip. The latter brought up some great discussions about initiatives like Top Shelf Modules and DrupalFund.us.

Adoption of any of those platforms seems to be pretty slow though. Gittip has the greatest acceptance on d.o because there is at least a form on each users Profile page to add it in, and yet, there has been marginal increase in the adoption or donation rates https://www.gittip.com/for/drupal/

I tried to highlight how Gittip could be incorporated into d.o's issue queue in order to provide incentives to individual contributors. From feedback there, I decided to look at how Corporate logos could be incorporated into the issue queues (even for anonymous users).

None of these solutions is without it's problems. Some of these solutions will work better to support some projects than others. I think there are probably hundreds of other ways to help shape participation in the Drupal community such that end users, developers, designers and Drupal shops are able to find easier ways to contribute back. But I think we need to get the conversation moving about how to see that important projects like this get the support that they need to see that they are properly resourced.

There's a place to discuss Drupal.org improvements in GDO but there isn't a lot of active participation there.

Ultimately, what kinds of functionality/UI changes would help make this module better maintained? For folks who are active contributors, what would help you? Each project may have it's own ideas about how to best motivate the community that uses it's code. It might be that folks are confident that there's no need to change anything, and perhaps they are right.

I would like to know when we can expect to see the next stable release of this module and think it is great when there is a meta issue queue to gather the issues that should go into that next release. Are there things that should be fixed in dev before it is turned into the next stable release?

7.x-2.4 release has been tagged and created.

Thanks Dave!