Reduce abuse of credits via sandbox projects.

Hi!

I think that reducing credit abuse is a good idea, however in sandboxes are birthed what eventually become full projects with stable releases. That said I think there are at least two points to consider. Devaluing of credits and at what point credits should have full value.

Devaluing of Credits

It could be that the community decides that before a project reaches a certain point the credits do not count or are devalued.

When should Credits have Full Value?

dddave created this issue regarding sandbox credit abuse. My question is should we stop there? We have projects that have had a development, Beta, Alpha, RC release for years without a stable release. These are not reviewed by the security team. We should encourage people to get to the point of a stable release as this benefits the community the most.

Another issue is that some projects add fixes to their development releases and wait some times years before committing these to a stable release. To quote another Drupal user philsward "Welcome to Drupal... Where stable is Dev and dev is Stable ;-)". This was regarding the demo module that the "stable" release currently leaves a site in a broken state but the development version does not.

I suggest the following to start discussion:

1. Credits for Sandboxes would not count until it became a full project.
2. Credits for projects without a stable release would be devalued. (lets say they would be worth half a credit)
3. For projects with a stable release, credits for commits to releases that are not stable (dev, alpha, beta, rc) would also be devalued. (again lets say they would be worth half a credit)

So to summarize once code commits reach a stable release credits would have full value. Before that they would not count if in sandboxes and commits to code that have not yet been released in a stable release would be devalued (count for less than their full value).

I believe a system like this would encourage projects to get to the point of a stable release and also to to continue to release stable releases instead of leaving fixes in the development branch for years.

I am interested to hear the community's ideas on this.

Frederick

For this issue, I think I’ll keep it simple and implement only credits for sandboxes not counting (until they become a full project) for organizations.

Since this issue is about marketplace ranking, we don’t need to get into user pages. And we don’t have user ranking.

Partial credit for other situations should be considered in separate issues. See also #2649100: Improve contribution statistics on user and organization profiles for a big list of possible credit, and there are a few other issues around for helping encourage full releases like #2035277: Draft text for security advisory coverage messages.

This has been deployed.