Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.Problem/Motivation
There are many outdated modules whom have non-responsive maintainers.
Proposed resolution
Better decision could be obtained with the ability to see when the user was last seen on the Drupal.org website. If user was seen years ago, then rules should be decided how to allow interested developers get access to projects that need a active maintainer.
Remaining tasks
Update user profiles with 'last seen' time ago field
User interface changes
Add field to user profile
API changes
None
Data model changes
None
Comments
Comment #1
stevesmename CreditAttribution: stevesmename for Avagate commentedComment #2
dddave CreditAttribution: dddave commentedLike the idea. you can already get a decent impression if a maintainer is active if you check his commits. In any case if you feel like a project is not properly maintained we have this: https://www.drupal.org/node/251466
Comment #3
stevesmename CreditAttribution: stevesmename for Avagate commentedYes, it is a good thought about commits. I saw a request in the #drupal IRC room to a missing project maintainer from an interested individual to take over the project. When I saw the request, I saw the following details on the project page:
The last update to the module was version 5.x
The last commit 6 years ago
Pretty popular project namespace (high in SEO)
The interested individual took all the appropriate steps mentioned in the Drupal community guidelines. In my opinion I had thought the project maintainer could had potentially left the community, not using Drupal (I know crazy!). Looking deeper into the user profile, he's a pretty popular user so it was indeed very doubtful.
Comment #4
stevesmename CreditAttribution: stevesmename for Avagate commentedIn general I think this 'last seen' type statistic which mentions the timeliness that a individual visits Drupal.org could benefit the community further. Although 'last seen' doesn't really work well for other cases than for a project maintainer. A user whom hasn't been seen for over 4 years can just log in and log out, and he appears like an active community user. An improvement might be based around average time the user visits the site, tagging the user entity. An example:
This would change the issue summary and be a bigger feature request.
Comment #5
killes@www.drop.org CreditAttribution: killes@www.drop.org commentedI think it's easy enough to see if somebody is active by looking at their commit log or recent comments by a user. If somebody just logs in out of habit, that doesn't really indicate "activity".
Comment #6
apadernoI agree with Killes. A maintainer could commit code into the GIT repository without logging in on drupal.org. That could mean the maintainer is not going to read issue reports, but that doesn't mean code is not being updated. (I think seeing the issue queue doesn't require to be logged-in, but I could be wrong.)
Comment #7
apadernoThat said, I also think this could be useful when handling some user requests, for example the ones about the confirmed role, or evaluating the best course of action. As it is nowadays, I can only see when the account was created, but I cannot know when a user last logged in. Normally, it's enough to see when the last comment or node was created, but in some cases, users don't create any posts but visit the site.
Comment #8
markhalliwellI agree with @killes, but closing a dup of this related issue since this is what the OP is really after.