I monitor the site moderator's issue queue and the spam report. Both these are used by community members to make site moderators aware of undesired behaviour.
I've noticed – perhaps as a result of #2676042: Automatically assign issue credit for committing patches – that we're seeing some bad patches and merge requests being posted in issues. My guess is that the people doing this are thinking that not all project maintainers are mindful about excluding useless and plagiarized patches when closing an issue as "Fixed", and the automated assignment of credit will stick, earning them an undeserved issue credit.
In addition to the unpleasant nature of such activities, bad patches may create confusion and derail progress.
Thankfully, only a few individuals do this, but the few that do it create considerable (IMHO) justified irritation.
So far, they have been able to do this with impunity.
We need to discourage such behaviour.
My proposal is to introduce some means to disable automatically assigned issue credit for repeat offenders.
The details probably need to be worked out, but my initial suggestion is this:
I understand that the entire credit system is being revamped these days, and hope the team working on the revamp will take this proposal into consideration.
| Comment | File | Size | Author |
|---|---|---|---|
| #4 | Drupal-extra-credit-5-10-point-2022-dec-19.png | 60.38 KB | ressa |
Comments
Comment #2
gisleCorrected typo.
Comment #3
cmlaraI’m not sure if the CWG considers this their responsibility under the current CoC however in the latest draft CoC (not yet adopted) #3320237: Updating the Drupal Code of Conduct - Draft for Community Review “inflating contributions to benefit yourself or your organization” was illustrated as a situation that would be considered to be a CoC violation.
If the CWG feels that this is under their jurisdiction should this proposal be modified to require them to make the ruling?
Comment #4
ressaThanks for all the great work you do in the issue queues and forum @gisle, I really appreciate it.
I am not sure if any of these actions automatically assign issue credit, but I also see these actions more frequently lately by users:
As a side note, I wonder if fine tuning the credit system is needed, by adding more options when giving credit?
Some mammoth issues take years to complete, and much coding and reviewing, whereas others (such as the README.md updates I have been involved with lately) are minor, and faster to complete.
Would it make sense to graduate the credit system, and add two tiers, on top of the existing? So, keep the standard credit, where you get 1 point, but we add two more options, the "Extra Credit" (+5 points) and the "Major credit" (+10 points):
For minor involvement, requiring low effort and not much expertise, such as one-liner fixes, README.md updates, fixing spelling mistakes, etc. you would get one point.
For more elaborate tasks, taking longer time to fix and requiring higher expertise, the maintainer should be able to grant either 5 points "Extra Credit" or 10 points "Major credit" as well.
Comment #5
gisleAutomatic credit for uploading patches was introduced by #2676042: Automatically assign issue credit for committing patches, so yes: This is how it works.
Users also gets automatic credit for creating an empty issue fork (and I have also noticed an increase of instances of this – some people have started to report empty issue forks to the site moderators using the spam flag).
AFAIK, there is no automatic credit given for assigning oneself to an issue without working on it. I suspect that the people doing this is "calling dibs" on the issue, and then discover that actually fixing it is beyond their abilities, or they get other priorities.
There used to be an automatic credit given for uploading a file (e.g. screenshot of a patch applying), but that misfeature was removed a while back, resulting in a noticeable decrease of this annoying practice.
As for make the issue credit system more granular, I believe that should be a separate issue. I want to keep this one focused on working out some way to discourage people from gaming the credit system. I believe that pursuing low-hanging fruit is not abuse of the credit system as such. Novices have to start somewhere. (What do about low-hanging fruit was discussed back in 2017 – and a granular credit system was proposed in comment #13 in #2871769: Discuss ways to encourage more valuable contributions through issue crediting – but it ended up as "Closed (works as designed)".)
Comment #6
WebbehThis feedback may be outside the scope of this issue, perhaps #3308679: Interest to join small group to discuss encourage "positive" contributions on D.O might be a better place for this? See the discussions there about the "low value" term, as I think "low effort" may also apply here. This feedback could also be splintered off into its own issue, perhaps?
Comment #7
ressaThanks for clearing that up @gisle, and thanks @Webbeh for the link. I ended up posting my comment in #3086885: Marketplace ranking Algorithm: Weights & Measures.
Comment #8
drummThere was never automatic credit - there were defaults which maintainers reviewed. The defaults were removed some time ago.