"Add-on Developer" should have a quality standards!

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1

thoses badges system are really amazing !
its a superb idea and its motivating everyone to be a better artist, better scripter, ect…
but i think that the new “Add-on Developer” badges have some flaws.

some peoples have the badge and they didnt actually make an addon.
(like in this example i suppose, my apologies if the person actually deserve the badge, but the badge is linked to a thread with no add-ons he visibly made, only a thread talking about his favorites addons (i don’t criticise this person either he did nothing wrong its just to illustrate the problematic of how to give people this new badge))

https://blenderartists.org/badges/118/add-on-developer?username=Metin_Seven

i think we need a better system of verification.

and what about ratings ?

featured artists are carefully selected from a jury, but anybody that can write a plug-in can have the developer badge ? is this right ?

should we have a quality standards of what kind of add-on we reward ?

  • YES
  • NO
  • i don’t have opinions on this

0 voters

for example:
if i made a really simple add-on that do a simple rotation 90 degree
should i have the badge ?

  • YES
  • NO
  • i don’t have opinions on this

0 voters

if i do an add-on that do something that another add-on already do ?
should i have the badge ?

  • YES
  • NO
  • i don’t have opinions on this

0 voters

if i do an add-on that do something that another add-on already do but crappier?
should i have the badge ?

  • YES
  • NO
  • i don’t have opinions on this

0 voters

if im not active and my last addon is 4 years old and totally broken ?
should i have the badge ?

  • YES
  • NO
  • i don’t have opinions on this

0 voters

if my addon is crappy, no one did it already but it useful ?
should i have the badge ?

  • YES
  • NO
  • i don’t have opinions on this

0 voters

if i posted a link of an add-on, do i deserve the badge ? people could easely have access and know that the addon i present exist, but, they will wrongly think that im the creator ?

  • YES
  • NO
  • i have no opinions on that

0 voters

if i can actually code blender itself (do separate builds, fix bugs, actually work at the blender institute) but don’t do add-on
should i have the badge ?

  • YES
  • NO
  • i don’t have opinions on this

0 voters

should i have a special badge then ?

  • YES
  • NO
  • i don’t have opinions on this

0 voters

can the two badges accumulate ? or is it either one or the other ? because obviously if i can code blender itself i can code an addon…

  • accumulate
  • only one
  • i don’t have opinions on this

0 voters

2

@Metin_Seven has been given honorary developed badge :face_with_monocle:

2 Likes
3

i don’t know this user :grin:, all i see is a topic that list his favorite add-ons and no indications he write them
maybe he is indeed an addon developper but the topic was wronly linked ?

again, if im wrong my apologies, and even if im right this is not a criticism of this user either
im just making a supposition and dragging the question of how do we reward this new badge

1 Like
4

Haha, no, I haven’t developed a Blender add-on. I guess the title was auto-awarded to me because of this topic. :grin:

Last time I scripted an add-on was The V-Ray Automator for 3ds Max, about 15 years ago or so. :grin:

1 Like
5

I don’t think this is a big deal, like with everything if you buy something you should make your own idea about if it’s wasted money or not.
I think this debate can be translated to modeling : You do some crappy modeling and you distribute or sell them … Are you a modeler : IMO yes, a good one , IMO no…
Is it worth buying your stuff ? If it’s valuable to me (eg : I need a simple model that I can’t do myself), it may be worth. Even if an average modeler will make it in no time.

Being a modeler means different things to different people , judging the quality of the work is kind of subjective and based on your experience and expectations.
Badge couldn’t prevent people for buying things that someone else would find badly done or not worth it.
Pretending being a good modeler if you aren’t will not get you really far.

And lastly, is having a “Addon-developper” badge give you some special treatment on this forum, does it make you more popular then ? What’s the issue having that badge despite the fact that you don’t know python ?

6

its the whole concept of reward, if its too easy to obtain whats the point of it ?

if its too easy to be featured it will not have any importance for peoples, that’s what im afraid of, if badges are too easely given, nobody will be proud of having it, having it will be meaningless, and it will not actively drive the community of the site to be active and motivated.

rewarding people is really important, if you do it wrong the whole idea is useless

7

Love this discussion and I’m following it with interest. I don’t have a ton of time/energy right now, so I’ll add a few considerations to the mix:

  1. A badge is not necessarily a reward or quality indicator, but can also simply be an indicator of activity.
  2. The current solution is almost automated - as soon as a moderator leaves a ‘like’ on a message in a certain forum category, the badge is awarded. An extended review such as you are suggesting sounds great, but it will require a LOT of dedicated work and in my experience it’s hard to find volunteers to do this for an extended period of time (and they need coordinating too). So before designing a super detailed and elaborate system, also think about WHO will do the work.
2 Likes
8

Hum, I tend to agree with Bart, I see badges more as an indicator rather than a reward… And they don’t mean much more to me. But of course that’s my personal POV.
As artists our work should speak for ourselves and I don’t need to be tagged as good or bad artist to make my own opinion about myself or others.

In this forum near your name there is written New User , but your avatar is the same of an user named Dododorian that I saw often , so are you really a New User ?

All that said I can understand that all this can be taken differently depending on people.

9

In my humble opinion, if you made an addon, you’re an addon developer. If the addon can be enabled in Blender and it does some function, the person who did it, is technically an addon developer. I don’t think it’s useful or feasible to have a judge and a jury on who is a who isn’t an addon developer. There’s one single cutoff point that is easy to manage and decide: did they make an addon that can be run in Blender and does something.

Of course if there’s something like top row for addons, then we could have similar badge you now have for top row art.

One option is to have cutoff point on likes for a person who made a thread about an addon. How many likes does a person get inside that thread that they made about their addon.

1 Like
10

lets face it, being featured is a reward for the artist, they want it bad, and it drive them and motivate them to do good art. Why ? because that’s just the nature of every animal living in society in this planet, they want to make it to the top and are ready to work hard for it, in my opinion, this desire of power and recognition is just natural in every human being (especially male but that’s a whole other debate)

i understand the fact that we don’t need to ashame anyone because they have or have not the star.
i totally agree with that. and if the community start to be overly arrogant with this star attitude we should remove it. But if the site could be an extension of this natural insctinct, it could drastically motivate a lot of people to do good work, we could help in that way, many, to become great artist…

the same for plug-in developer, this reward system could motivate a lot of people to learn coding and trying to achieve a plug-in as the same quality and usefulness as other developper that have the star.
this is a benefice for everyone, the users, the learner, for blender and for blender artist founders (because it generate a kind of addicting behavior but in a good way).

i mean this reward system is not new, look at multiplayer video-games, why do you think peoples get addicted to thoses games? because this reward system push them to get to a place of (fake) power, they do all the same boring stuff over and over and over again, for months and months, just to get some “prestige” and one of the most important point of this “prestige” is that its rare and only a few individuals have it, individuals “at the top”…, witouth this “prestige” system, players are easely bored easely and stop playing the game.

imagine having this same system of motivation but for actually achieving something useful in their lifes ? i personally find it amazing

no im not, im frequenting this site like a mad man since a year i think, and yes i was “dododododo…” change it because its aweful.

11

well i can volunteer no problem but we need to agree on who get it and who don’t
and also decide what is the meaning of this badge system, i really think that it need to be some form of “prestige” motivation system.(by the way i don’t see badges no more)

12

Hum, as artists of course we want to be better and we want to get recognition. And I agree that’s natural even if it’s something you can totally live without and find other motivations to live and be happy.

Personally , I want to be a better artist and improve in python, and get recognition but it’s more from people I know in real life rather than an online community.
Once again this reward system on forums similar to video-games isn’t really effective on me. I find featured work really inspiring but I never got the willingness to work to get featured on this forum.

This is turning really philosophical to me : is it ok to do good things for bad reasons ? it may do something good for the community but does it make you someone better ?
If we apply this on a community : you get a reward every-time you help people, so people help each-other to get an award . Does it makes a really good and sane community ? Do you really care about people you are helping then ?

Anyway I tend to think we generally do good things selfishly but to me that’s a bad habit we should try to work out …

13

we are more talking about self goals, and self motivation, there’s no kindness in that, its quite the opposite, its nothing but selfishness and its perfectly okay, because we are talking about careers and being a better version of yourself. I see it as an effective way to motivate people that don’t have this motivation in themself in the first place and need an extra boost to accomplish their shy dream of doing some fine art/plugins.

wouldn’t it help to know that all your work can result in a reward ? for me it was a true motivation, being featured is really motivating myself at achieving the best i can.

14

What if every-one can make a choice out of a set of indicators of activity.
For example: sculptor, generalist, add-on-dev, blender-dev, animator, rigger, etc.

( Or not a predefined set, but a custom tag/badge).

So these are surely not rewards but indicators. (Everyone has them).

15

Hum, to me not that much but I can understand the benefits for others, I’ve seen your work (which is great) in the gallery and the motivation you get from it, and all this is quite positive.

In the end I get the same motivation at work, I don’t do much personal work, but I tend to take projects I’m working on as if they were personal projects and I make my best to make my client and colleagues happy with the result.
Being rewarded by other is quite nice, in the end the best reward is still the one we get from ourselves. People may not like what you’re doing, as long as you understand why, nothing prevent you from still being proud of it.

To go back to the subject, maybe what can be nice is (as ambi pointed out) is some kind of awarded addons (free and commercial) . Maybe based on user votes. Like the featured gallery.
Having “Add-on dev” badges can be something that just inform other users that you are versed into python , without implying that you’re good at it or not.
I don’t know how useful this is , in the end there are users descriptions and eventually you end up knowing who is doing what by reading posts.

Also if you release some script, by looking at how many people download it and user’s feedback you get other kind of awards and that give you a glimpse of how much what you’ve done is useful and apreciated.

1 Like
16

So how does one get the add-on dev badge? I already have bunch of addons posted, do not mind honoring my steps.

17

well that’s a good question, the feature badge test was present for a few days then disapear
it way maybe a “beta test”

18

I had to disable it as there were performance issues. The Discourse team is working on a solution:

2 Likes
19

It’s a forum badge. It’s not a Nobel prize. It doesn’t really say much. Being an addon developer is not a higher state of being, nor a prestigious distinction.

If we’re going to have addon developer badges, no, there shouldn’t be strict standards. Use common sense.