There’s been quite a few improvements to Mudlet from outside the core Mudlet dev team lately that were really nice – think package exporter rework, smooth map scrolling, and so on. Thanks to our patrons, we now have a bit of money and so we had an idea: why not use that money to make Mudlet better?

What we’d like to trial is rewarding the authors of popular improvements to Mudlet with a small bit of $. Here’s how it would work – after a release is made, we put all of the improvements in it up for a vote. The top 3 most popular improvements get some dinner/pizza/coffee money. In detail:

• top 3 PRs
• $25 for first, $10 for second, $5 for third ($40 USD/month when our income is 300+)
• all PRs are voted on a poll for two weeks after a release
• payout is via paypal (we’re not fans either, but it is what it is)
• mudlet core dev members allowed to participate
• min 10 votes total in the poll (all votes combined) for it to count

Now everyone knows how internet polls work by now… so some issues we could face:

• brigading – 4can-style people swarming the polls
• popularity contest – people just voting for a person and not the actual improvement
• fake votes with bots should someone be unethical
• mudlet core devs being discouraged from doing the “mundane”, but necessary improvements

This is new, unexplored territory so we’ll just do a trial run first for 3 releases and evaluate how it is working out and whenever we should continue.

Timelines

• general announcement October 15th (3 weeks prior to the next release)
• Mudlet 4.14 release, polls for improvements open November 6th
• two weeks of voting until November 20th
• payout to authors of top 3 most voted improvements November 20th

Comments, questions, feedback? We’re happy to listen!