Re: Re: PHP Annual Bughunt!

Hello, On 07/02/2002 03:21 PM, Alexander Wirtz wrote:

I think you are overestimating the success too soon. The question is are all bug packs that were requested fixed? Of course not. The problem is always the same. This is voluntary work. People can only give the time they have now. Soon or later they will have other prioritary things in their lives and all the people that you see today coming back most likely will not be as available while the bug count never stops growing. What I suggested is to motivate more people to come by provided public recognition instead of remainining basically anonymous which is almost what they get today. People would still come and go, but showing the ranking in a public page would tease new bug fixers to keep coming and become recognized too.

Yeah, but this is always the case with OS-projects, isn't it? People come and go, invest their time and thus, sometimes the quality of the work varies, depending on the people currently involved. I think, the top motivation should be, to give active support to get a better, superior product, not to see ones name on some obscure list. I'm

Beggars are not choosers. It doesn't matter the motivation of people as long as they do the job. Job may not be well done regarless of the motivation. Since the patches of bugs fixed are exposed publically anybody can go in there and reopen the bug and even reverse the patch. It has happened. So it is not because you provide motivation that will attract more bug fixers that things will be different.

not saying, that all things concerning PHP-qa are good and well, and that there's no room for improvement, but your "lets 'fix' bugs to get more ego-points"-solution is making way for people who're just doing that: Closing bugs without even thinking about a real solution, only to cash in on the 'recognition'.

You are jumping to conclusions. It is not that bugs will be closed without being really fixed and nobody will notice. If they are not fixed properly, anybody can step up and do it right. Whoever does it right will get the credit, so it would be pointless for people doing it wrong.

I am not just guessing that this would work. I am sure it works as it has been working for years in the PHP Classes site (Sorry Sterling, I can only share the experience I have). As you know, in this page you can see all sorts of rankings that recognize the contributions that the users made to the site. http://www.phpclasses.org/browse.html/top/top.html It provides recognition not only to the users that contributed to the site with their own classes (now near 300) but also users that brought new subscribers to the site in an initiative that is called Friends of the PHP Classes site. http://www.phpclasses.org/friends.html

Excuse me, are you really comparing a site with a some userscripts with an effort like PHP? You must be kidding... You're really not in a position to give a guarantee, that what is working for your site will work here as well.

I am not comparing any project. Only you thought of that. I have studied a lot of human behaviour and people needs to understand what motivates people to do things with greater enthusiasm. That knowledge can be applied to any project that envolves many individuals in a community.

By the way, if I take a look at this top/top/top/top.html it seems to me, that the major function of this page is to boost your own ego, isn't it? ;-)

Obviously you do not know me, so I understand why you think that. I understand what boosts the ego of one person, may also trigger the envy of others. But those others can only blame on themselves for self-exclusion of not contributing to the site as well. Actually, if all goes well according to my plan, next year, contributing authors, not only can boost their egos but also they can generate income from providing support to their users. This means that besides the pleasure they also can dedicate to it if they make enough money to survive just from providing support. I am working on how to make that possible, so it will be more evident what will be loosing those that do not want to contribute. Anyway, that page was meant to motivate more and more authors to come to the site. And I can tell you that it worked wonders. The rate of contributing authors is 1 per 250 new users. If PHP project had a similar rate, now imagine how many contributing authors it had. As for myself appearing in rankings that is only a consequence of having contriobuted a lot. That is meant to work as an hint to other authors to contribute more and more. So, as you may imagine it was not an accident. My suggestion is based on my knowledge of what worked well. You may take or leave it, but if you leave it, now you may have an idea of what you are loosing.

This atitude of the site is what I call Fair Exchange. It provides something to get something in return. It also tends to reward more those that provide greater return to the site.

You get something in exchange for your work on PHP: A Fair Product.

Deep! :-) All I can see is that currently most people that fix bugs remain anonymous. That may be ok for some, but my point is that it is not very compelling for many that could contribute to eliminate the ever increasing bug rate! -- Regards, Manuel Lemos