#112 Koji Build Failure Badges are "Negative"
Closed: Pushed None Opened 10 years ago by ralph.

Problem: Fedora Badges should be about encouraging and recognizing participation in the Fedora Community. There have been some arguments made that the Koji Build Failure badge series is "negative".

(in some combination) therefore:

1) they should be removed because they're negative and encourage people to busy the build system by submitting failing builds on purpose.
2) they are fine on their own, but should be removed because they set a precedent for other negative badges.

This ticket is open for people to chime in with their thoughts on the matter. If you want, you can leave a +1 for removing them or a -1 for keeping them.


I really need to write up my thoughts on a badge 'policy', but briefly, my thoughts on this:

"negative" is a bit of a red herring in this case. I'd rather say the problem with build failure badges is that they're encouraging/rewarding 'incorrect behaviour'. I think we all agree that one of the aims of Badges, one of the things we're trying to do, is encourage 'productive' work on Fedora - both reward people for doing it, and educate people about what kind of stuff would be a good thing to do in the project. Having a badge for build failures sends the message 'submitting failed builds is a productive Fedora activity that you could be doing!', which is an odd message to be sending.

I'd much rather replace the failed builds badges with the 'Whoops! I Got It' - 'fix a build failure', https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-badges/ticket/65; 'Fixed That For Ya' - 'fix someone else's build failure', https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-badges/ticket/44; and/or 'Measure Twice, Cut Once' - 'do a scratch build before a real build', https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-badges/ticket/78 badges. I think each of those proposals is in the same general area but attempts to reward/encourage 'good' activity. Some of them may not be possible with current fedbadges/datagrepper, though.

I'm with Adam. The failure badge is rewarding a behavior we don't want to encourage... the other badges mentioned are all much better imho.

I'd vote to just remove all the koji failure ones in favor of the newer ones (whenever they are available/practical).

Hey, so.. I opened this ticket to provide a place for people to comment on the controversy if they were motivated to do so. Thanks for the comments so far.

There's clearly disagreement about it, but it doesn't seem to be overwhelmingly on one side or the other (I, for one, like the negative badges). How about this for a resolution:

  • We don't go back and change the existing negative badges, only because it would be an exceptional amount of work to remove them (it will screw with the badge-counting badges).
  • We make a point to not introduce any more negative badges from here on out, which will lead to an overwhelming ratio of positive to negative badges in time.

I'm closing the ticket to get it out of the queue, but feel free to comment further if there's discussion.

Metadata Update from @ralph:
- Issue tagged with: koji, negative

7 years ago

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