Important: These changes have not yet come into force. @utopian-io will post an official announcement soon.
The Utopian Rules for the Development and Bug Hunting categories needed an update to address certain types of contributions that were rejected in the past, mainly:
- outdated, low quality or plagiarised projects, uploaded to GitHub to have the "Open Source" label for the reward
- too common, simple or redundant projects that are not worth being rewarded
- too little work done that's worth being rewarded
- too trivial bug reports
I tried to address these and some other issues and rewrote the rules for those categories. Thanks for the inputs from the other mods! Here's the result and some additional words for each rule.
In the development category you can submit Bug Fixes, New Features and your Own Projects.
This addresses the fact that there are different types of contributions that need to be handled differently.
Contributions must have a comprehensible commit history. Larger projects or updates submitted in a single commit will not be accepted.
Contributors get rewarded for their work and therefore this work has to be evaluated by the moderators first. This is simply not possible if contributors don't use Git in it's intended way and instead make commits, that crash the browser when viewed on GitHub.
Outdated or low quality code can lead to rejection.
Software should always be actively maintained and up to date because hopefully there are users who are actually using it and relying on it.
Generated code or other results of automated processes will not be accepted.
No work. No reward. Makes sense I guess. We had contributions that only contained an updated dependencies file or unified code formatting.
Submitted projects must have a unique value. Redundant projects will not be accepted.
Utopian can reward one super awesome innovative calculator app and maybe two or three. But if we accept more than one there will be hundreds. Aside from this, there's no real added value.
Trivial code snippets, example code or simple templates will not be accepted.
Everyone has to start somewhere, sure... but Utopian can't reward every beginner programmer out there and projects on Utopian should have a real world usage and a realistic future.
Bug Fixes and New Features must be submitted via Pull Requests. The Pull Request must have been merged within the past 14 days.
This is just like before but you know have 14 days.
Updates on Own Projects can be committed directly, without a Pull Request. Commits must not be older than 14 days.
Of course PRs don't necessarily make much sense if you work on your own project. This is now reflected in the rules.
Bug Fixes for your Own Projects will not be accepted, unless the Bugs were caused by third party dependencies.
This is just to avoid specially "prepared" project submissions. It also doesn't make much sense to be rewarded for fixing your own bugs in general.
Your Utopian account must be connected to your GitHub account.
Makes proof of account ownership much easier for moderators and contributors. No need for screenshots or mentioning your Utopian username on GitHub and what not... For the development category I think this requirement totally makes sense.
Removed
Only merged Pull Requests on the official repository will be accepted or on a fork as long as the fork is not just a mirror of the original one.
Covered by general rule for repositories.
You must always link the merged pull requests with the given functionality in the editor.
Should not be a reason for rejection and can be 99% automated in the future anyway.
If your username on Github does not correspond to the Utopian username...
Covered by required GitHub connect.
Images, screenshots, links and examples are not necessary but preferred.
This is not a rule, more a suggestion. Also I think contributors will feel it right in their hearts when they want to share a screenshot or link. :P
Your Utopian account must be connected to your GitHub account.
The repository on GitHub must accept issues.
This makes sure an issue on GitHub is filed and the project maintainer has a chance to actually see the bug and react.
Bug Reports for projects in pre-alpha stage will not be accepted.
To avoid being flooded with bugs, we need to draw a clear line. Projects that are in very early stage (preview/pre-alpha) obviously contain a lot of bugs and the developers probably know about them or at least about fact that they exist. I think the linked Wikipedia article gives us a clear definition.
Cosmetic issues, that do not affect the functionality of the software, will not be accepted.
For cosmetic issues it's simply not really possible to draw this clear line and we can't accept every small pixel issue. In the future we can integrate different levels of severity in the rewards but for now it does not make sense to accept those "bugs".
You must provide sufficiant detail to reproduce the bug.
Add screenshots, video recordings or animated GIFs, if they can help to understand the bug. [SOFT]
Obvious...
Include information about your technical environment, like your browser, your device and operating system, if those factors can not definitely be ruled out.
This information is of course important for most bugs but it's just the same as with screenshots and so on... sometimes they just don't add any relevant information. E.g. if a server returns an error if the limit parameter is > 100... it's very unlikely that this has anything to do with browser, device or OS.
If you or someone else submitted the issue on GitHub first, the Bug Report will not be accepted. Approved Bug Reports will automatically be published on GitHub.
This is just a more precise and Bug Hunting specific version of the general rule "Same contents already shared before in Utopian..."
I hope the rules are now a little bit more clear and most of the issues we've seen so far (and for sure will see in the future) are covered now.
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors