Request to remove Django from supported projects #111
Description
Activity
Thank you very much for your sincere feedback.
Emails are being sent to contributors because donors paid to support them and contributors need to know about it. But they can unsubscribe easily by clicking a link in the email. I agree that micro-amounts don't worth it and some contributors might get offended.
Please accept our apologies for inconvenience caused by our service, we are working to find a solution to this problem.
Perhaps we should:
- set the minimal tip amount (e. g. disallow tips below 1$)
- allow project maintainers to set notification threshold (e. g. don't notify contributors of their projects until they reach a specified amount of bitcoins)
Do you think it would be good enough?
Thanks for proposing these options, but we don't think it's appropriate to extract emails from git logs, even with the best intentions.
There's a word for mining email adresses and advertising an initiative through unsolicited email: spam.
If you don't switch to opt-in, we will file a complaint with your SMTP provider, Mandrill.
I kept my request short, but one of the reasons we want to get out of your program is that it creates perverse incentives. tip4commit funds all commits, regardless of their contents. That's wrong. Rewarding the number of commits goes against our goals because we prefer fewer (rebased and squashed) commits of higher quality. As long as the amounts are negligible, that doesn't matter, but if they grow, that will become a problem.
By the way, since I was committing actively when you lanched last December, I got 0.00101168 BTC at the time (that's 0.37€ at today's rate for over 100 hours of work). I'm happy to send these back to whatever bitcoin address you want.
Hi @aaugustin,
I'm not a Tip4Commit maintainer but I'm a frequent user of the service. I can understand why you've found this service to be annoying, given Django is a very active repository (almost 19,000 commits) and it looks like your project has only received one tip, for 0.00225800 BTC or 2,258.00 BIT on the 19th of December 2013. Even if that entire donation was paid out in one donation it would only be 2x the threshold payout, and even assuming $1,000 per BTC it was only $2.26 at the time.
https://tip4commit.com/projects/92/depositsGiven the exponential decay function along which Tip4Commit operates, this almost instantly gets into dust territory. While I fully understand the frustration, 1,011.68 BIT is infinitely more than zero and I'm sure the person that sent in the original donation felt strongly about what you're doing, even if they didn't necessarily have the capital to show it.
@AlexandrZ and @arsenische, perhaps we should set a minimum threshold donation in order to "initiate" a project into receiving tips for commits? I'm guessing we already have an "unsubscribe" from receiving notifications but if not we should probably add that.
@aaugustin, regarding your concern about the incentives this type of system creates I think that's a valid concern. My background is in compensation program design, and one of the challenges with designing any type of incentive program is trying to identify reasonable, objective measures to reward the behavior and results one's looking for. As of right now, there are basically three ways to compensate people on open source projects that I know of:
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Bounties on solving specific issues: bountysource.org is a good example. This is nice because it rewards results, and not just something that is often a symptom of getting closer to achieving a result (e.g., commits). The downside is it's basically impossible to reward spontaneous bug fixes unless an issue was first created and then a bounty placed on it, and "unglamorous" but incredibly important development will likely not receive the same attention as issues that are easier for the layman to understand or seem sexier. From the perspective of the person donating in this way, there is a high amount of oversight in how the funds are allocated
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Money allocated by the project maintainer: at least in the Bitcoin world, one of the major sources of funding for open source projects has been to collect donations in an address for the project and then for the maintainer to allocate it to contributors. This is appealing because the project maintainer should have a pretty good understanding of the material value of a given contribution. The downside is it's incredibly subjective, and can give the appearance of favoritism even if there isn't any. Also, sporadic or one-time contributors will probably not be included in the allocation of a limited pool of money. From the perspective of the person donating in this way, there is basically no oversight into how these funds are allocated.
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Money allocated for accepted commits: this is a very objective measure, and rewards process over results. It requires that maintainers have a dialogue with contributors if they feel that they're gaming their commits to try and gather the highest tips. This in my opinion is the best way to reward new or sporadic contributors since the maintainer does not have to keep track of who all is contributing what, and there is an immediate payout in response to the contribution. There is also a fairly high degree of oversight into how the funds are allocated from the perspective of the person providing the donation.
Everyone has their preferences, and I think the ideal project funding is some combination of all of the above, since they all touch on separate issues and help mitigate some of the "cons" of the other funding sources. Hopefully that helps, and again very sorry you had a negative experience with this service.
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Hi @BLKSwan,
thank you for your nice explanation, but I think the main point here is getting missed. While we do not think that this service is good way for rewarding commits, the main issue here is the spam mails beeing sent out. Offering a way to opt-out is not going to cut it, neither is the option to allow project maintainers to set a threshold (we don't wont to maintain anything for something we don't want anyways). And bluntly put, given the legal situation in my country, what this service is doing is downright illegal. Even with an unsubscribe link, you are not allowed to send mass/advertisement mails without prior consent.
So please, just make this opt-in and we can all get over it.
It is not a mass advertisement, it is notification about tips sent to contributors on behalf of donors.
I understand that it looks spammy when amounts are small. But if there were a tip of $1000 in btc, would you consider it to be a spam too?
I agree however that it would be nice to make it opt-in without loosing the idea of the service.
Perhaps we could send a single email when the amount hits some noticeable threshold (e. g. 0.01 btc or $5) and if user doesn't do anything about it, s/he wouldn't receive any additional emails from us.
Do you think this solution would fix the problem?
@apollo13 and I have made the decision of the Django project clear. We are not interested in arguing it any further.
If someone wants to give thousands of dollars to fund the developement of Django, they should give it to the DSF (tax deductible).
I'm giving you until September 19th, 23:59 UTC to stop sending unsolicited email.
If you haven't removed Django or switched to opt-in by then, we'll file a complaint with Mandrill and publish a blog post about this issue.
@arsenische @AlexandrZ django is being very clear here that they want themselves removed as a project so we should do that ASAP and consider this issue resolved.
@arsenische can you do this yourself or do you need @AlexandrZ to perform the removal? I wish I could help but I do not have a technical background and am not familiar with the specifics of how the site operates.
- added a commit that references this issue on Sep 18, 2014
Hello,
I have disabled notifications of new users for your project. If you change your mind you can always enable it in the project settings: https://tip4commit.com/projects/92/edit
Also, I have added a notification threshold of 0.005 btc for new users.
Sorry for troubles!
Thank you very much.
Hello,
I'm requesting that tip4commit stop sending unsolicited email to every contributor that gets a commit accepted into Django.
I'm a member of Django's core team and I've been mandated by the core team to make this request on behalf of the Django project.
Not only is this illegal in many countries with decent online rights legislations, but it's frankly infuriating to get tipped a fraction of a cent for hours of valuable work. If you wish to keep Django as a supported project, please make your service opt-in rather than opt-out.
For your information, your project has several copycats who follow the same pattern of sending unsolicited email. I'm asking them to stop too.
Thanks.