Do Curse Author Rewards reward bad practices?

Discussion in 'BukkitDev Information and Feedback' started by meiamsome, Aug 26, 2013.

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  1. The title of this thread does seem a bit out there but I have two reasons for asking this question.

    Information that I have gathered on the matter:

    From http://www.curse.com/author-reward-points-faq

    This, to me, makes it sound like releasing minimal updates would actually reward a developer more than if they waited to deliver a single well-tested feature update. In fact, you might come to the conclusion that you should release with minimal testing so that when someone finds a bug you can release an update and make everyone who has your plugin re-download it, thus increasing your share of the Curse Author Rewards points.

    Another such occurrence is when a new Bukkit version is released and many authors upload duplicate files just with the version updated. (I've seen this being stated by staff a few times around here)

    This, in my opinion, is bad practise. The Bukkit API should be promoting version-independent plugins, but instead the reward points would appear to be benefiting those who do not use the API to its full power.

    For example, I have a plugin that hasn't been updated since October 2012 - That's 10 months ago. This is an excellent feature of the Bukkit API. Still, however, people will be scared away by the fact that it's listed on Bukkit Dev as a plugin for CB 1.3.2-R2.0, In addition to this, the main plugin search sorts by time uploaded, adding yet another reason to upload incomplete or duplicate files.

    Of course, this is entirely speculative based upon what I have been able to find on the internet.

    Auto-updaters embedded into plugins would also cause the developer to get increased downloads, even more so with minimal changes.

    I partake in the Curse Author Rewards and it's a great feature, I just would really like to know if this is the case (I'm not going to change how I do things anyway)
     
  2. Offline

    jtjj222

    Interesting thesis. I, however, think that this is a non-issue because plugin developers that care more about author rewards and download count than user satisfaction probably wouldn't be getting many downloads in the first place :p
     
  3. Offline

    Everdras


    Kinda getting "no-true-scotsman"ish there.

    This is still a problem, in that it rewards people who exploit it more than people who don't (sometimes drastically).

    Especially in the very-stable-old-plugin scenario- that's seriously something to aim for as a plugin developer, yet if you do attain ultra-stable releases you're seriously hurting yourself in the only feasible way to get some sort of reward for your work, other than loldonations and a sense of accomplishment.

    We should instead be rewarded by page views too, or some other metric that actually shows how popular the plugin is. People who are reading my wiki pages on DBO are earning Curse revenue by looking at ads- shouldn't I get a slice of that pie too?

    Regardless, DBO should not be making it look so attractive for me to try to push as much of my stuff onto my own webserver as possible (where I can get adsense revenue AND endless customization of the UX).
     
    jtjj222 likes this.
  4. I would think that page views suffer from the same sort of problem. The only way that I can think that would be fare would be to do something like MCStats and reward plugins that actually are on servers. This however is way out of the realm of what BukkitDev should do (i.e. they shouldn't provide plugin authors with more bloat-ware to put in their plugins.)

    It might be possible that BukkitDev allows the download of an extra plugin which logs the plugin usage to the servers but I still think this is excessive. In short, I don't really know how to fix this.
     
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    Bertware

    if there are 2 files following shortly (e.g. within one or two days, can be chosen), and the same user (detected via IP + user agent) downloads both files, it should only be counted as 1 download when assigning reward points.

    This would fix it, however, I highly doubt if this is possible.
    Also, dynamic IP's would "break" this system.
     
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    andrewpo

    You cannot reliably distinguish individual users by IP + User agent.
     
  7. Offline

    Hoolean

    I, personally, try to ensure that if I do update a plugin to work with/to show it works with the latest version of CraftBukkit, I will also add in a few requested features as I do :)
     
  8. Offline

    RingOfStorms


    You can go to the file, click edit and add a version to it, making it display "1.3.2, 1.6.2". And it will show on your main page as 1.6.2, even though it is the same file. The fact that you can easily change the version it works for is why it is annoying for staff to have to approve files for people to add the version, probably because not many use that edit feature on the edit page for files.
     
    meiamsome likes this.
  9. Aha, that's great! I didn't actually know that multiple versions were selectable in that field!
     
  10. Offline

    Bertware

    Ctrl + click when you create the file, this is common in most programs :) (also selecting text in word, cells in excel, ... )
     
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