Description
Topic
After contributing a fix, the all-contributors bot gave me credit in the README but since I had changed my username recently, it gave me credit under a different name, resulting in my account being referenced twice in the README and I had to manually remove the old account. This situation got me thinking about potential improvements to the all-contributors bot and how we can better manage contributor attribution, especially as it's an important part of p5.
Following this dicussion on discord, this issue has been raised to discuss problems and potential improvements that can be made to the bot.
Potential Solution for the issue above:
Using GitHub Account ID for Attribution
The bot could track contributions using the GitHub account ID (which is permanent) rather than the username, which can change over time.
If a username is changed, the bot could detect the user’s ID and update both the username and contributions automatically.
This would prevent the issue where the bot still links old contributions to the old username.
@ksen0 also mentioned an edge case they found where it sometimes refuses to add a person because somewhere there's been a closed PR with that person.
the all-contributors bot
Unfortunately, the bot development seems to have been abandoned which means to fix or implement the features suggested in this discussion we'd have to maintain our own fork, this has its associated pros and cons. My take is for this method as we won't have to worry about keeping up to date with the main project (since development has stopped) and so we'd just have to maintain the features that we introduce. Additionally, if we maintain our own fork, we could customise it for the p5 project, introducing p5 specific features (whatever they may be 😶)
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts, suggestions, and feedback for fixes and features