For example:
- core committer
- TerraGear committer
- fgdata committer
- aircraft developer
- manual maintainer
- RC tester
- Support staff
- wiki maintainer
- forum moderator
etc ?
Background:
Subject: Forum communication
KL-666 wrote:But it took me a while on the forum to know who i can trust almost blindly for their good knowledge. It would have saved me and the people that tried to help me some time if i had seen immediately that someone is a "top developer" or "serious helper" or something of the like.
But it took me a while on the forum to know who i can trust almost blindly for their good knowledge. It would have saved me and the people that tried to help me some time if i had seen immediately that someone is a "top developer" or "serious helper" or something of the like.
Subject: Towards better bug reports & better releases
Hooray wrote:I think we did have once a discussion about "badges", and Gijs said that it would not be too difficult - so if that would motivate /some/ people to get involved in testing/providing end-user support, why not (I guess)
Is this something that people (=forum users/fgdata contributors) would like to see implemented ?
We did have these discussions in the past (open the links for more context info):
Subject: Awards system proposal
Hooray wrote:I think Gijs also once brough up something like this - back then we were talking about having "forum badges" to more easily associate people with certain projects/efforts or tasks (aircraft developer, scenery developer, scripting, core development etc). Basically, something like this could work - and it could actually be based on ohloh stats. I am not sure if it's really an "award" in the sense of an "incentive" though - but it could be useful to help new users to more easily identify who to talk to about certain things, because FG development is mostly obscure, and it isn't really clear who you're talking to most of the time and who can help you with certain things (weather, scripting, glsl, FDMs etc)
Subject: Awards system proposal
Hooray wrote:some good points there - then again, the people doing much of the "invisible" behind-the-scenes work like James or Stuart are very unlikely to care in the first place - they're obviously not motivated by "badges", "awards" or things like that (or lack thereof)- I think "awards" would be primarily of interest to base package developers, not core developers - so this could actually work to motivate some of the younger contributors.
And frankly, it seems most of our manpower is coming from users who are under 20 according to their postings (which makes sense) - so it isn't all that unlikely that this could help motivate a few more people and get them involved.
Then again, involvement beats awards obviously - so I completely agree here. It's involvement that keeps the project alive, no matter in what form it may be, it starts off by participating in the forum/devel list/tracker/wiki, but it surely isn't restricted to those.
People doing "coding" (C++, GLSL, Nasal etc) are unlikely to care in the first place, so they surely won't be bothered by it - even though it would admittedly be hilarious seeing Mathias and Tim fight over a "gold" badge And I think it's "normal" for developers not to use FG for "flying" primarily - but that's also not necessarily what motivates coders