Problem: Some Godot code proposers are committing fraud. They’re creating defective AI code and submitting it as Godot pull requests.
The code reviewers are overwhelmed. Too many proposals for too few people to review. Too much code that later turns out to be defective. Good, correct code is not being reviewed/accepted due to lack of time.
Proposed solution:
From now on, your first pull request will cost $5 USD.
Once you’ve made the payment and submitted your pull request, it will be frozen for 30 days. This is to prevent you from canceling the payment.
During those 30 days, your pull request will be reviewed.
After these 30 days, a veredict will be emmited: If the pull request is valid, you have demonstrated good programming skills, so you will be granted the Trusted Developer status. From now on, you can submit more PRs for $0. And the $5 will be returned to you. (Unless you want to give it as a donation )
-If a PR is detected as fraudulent, poorly programmed, defective, etc., you will be banned from submitting code. The $5 fee will not be refunded.
-If you attempt to commit fraud again by submitting more defective code, perhaps with a new user account, you will have to pay another $5.
-Either you continue doing this, losing more money each time, or you stop.
-Either Godot earns more money, or gains trusted developers. Godot wins.
The amount of money doesn’t have to be $5. It can be whatever is established. This is just an example.
Great! Let’s completely prevent talented but low income developers from submitting code!
Chargebacks exist, and are really messy.
By whom? Some PRs require a lot more time than that, especially if there’s a large backlog.
Again, see problem with handling payments and money.
Once again, chargebacks exist.
This is beyond silly. This essentially says: “If you aren’t perfect on your first ever PR, do not even bother learning, you will be banned, you are useless as a programmer.” I do NOT want to support this in any way.
Here’s a thought experiment! I will charge you 1 cent USD in order to read my reply. Would you still bother reading it with that level of friction?
I see the sentiment, but I think a paywall is one of the surefire ways to kill the Godot Engine.
A paywall of even 0.01 USD (1 cent), is enough to limit a significant number of people from a product or service. But unlike those 2 things, you get a product or service. Godot is a volunteer-driven game engine people work on for the love of the craft and community, not financial gain.
And while I don’t contribute code myself (because I’m a shoddy programmer), I don’t think AI generated code is hard to detect. Also, the problem wasn’t AI generated code, it’s bad code that doesn’t work. It’s the job of the engine maintainers to prevent that, not us.
Even if the maintainers somehow didn’t spot it, the people using the feature the code modifies/adds sure will; and they WILL complain about it or file a bug report.
That’s my two-cents, which is more expensive than my previous 1 cent paywall.
Also beyond the issue of poverty and different economic conditions across the world, depending on where we’d base this service and what payment method we’d use some places might have sanctions or other issues that prevent them from performing transactions
AnyTHING that goes through the legal system is a serious liability and anyONE going through the legal system is literally experiencing hell on earth. Trust me.
I don’t have money, I live in the one 4th world country. And I made 2 PRs in the last month that greatly benefit the engine.
Also, contributing to code is WORK, you are asking me to pay to do work that I was doing for FREE.
It is difficult enough to wait for people to review a PR, some PRs are left waiting for over a year, others are from 2020 and still not merged, and you want to add POINTLESS wait time to it.
We (actual programmers) take time out of our lives to help the project, I won’t have the time I have now once I start uni again next month.
I don’t know of any AI PRs, but can’t they just like, ban the users?
I don’t know of any AI PRs, but can’t they just like, ban the users?
It’s not a matter of dealing with known AI slop contributors, those are easily dealt with, it’s about spending resources identifying them, and the risk of wasting time reviewing slop
Yeah that’s gonna kill the engine and likely breaks some laws in some countries. Not even mentioning the logistical nightmare. The entire point of Godot is it’s foss nature. Don’t you think making people pay to contribute is kind of against that nature.
Why not just use a short pop up message where the PRs are uploaded, explaining that AI/low quality submissions are a problem because bla bla. Tick this box and press continue if you are confident that the code is not a waste of time. I dont think most people submitting are aware that its a problem. Probably they just want to be helpful.
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