why is anyone allowed to claim they contribute?

Hi, I'm a project leader for a project listed here on ohloh called stendhal (it's an rpg). http://www.ohloh.net/projects/stendhal

I notice that a couple of people have added themself as contributors who have never made commits. i don't even recognise the names as stendhal players (which i guess you could loosely argue is a contribution since it's beta testing?) nor do i recognise them from bug reports, feature requests or chat...

so, what do people think about anyone just being allowed to claim to be a contributor? and do you think project leaders/admin should be allowed to edit the list?

I wouldn't object, myself, if they just added stendhal to their stack and said they used it. or wrote a review. but please don't allow people to dilute our contributor efforts by falsely adding themself. i might not even mind if they had a note next to their name explaining how they contributed (just like some of ours have put developer, artist, etc)

so, any thoughts?

The problem with allowing admins to edit the list is how we know that admins are who they claim they are...

-there are some kinds of commits we just can't track

yes, I noticed that images for example don't get counted by ohloh, and a lot of contributions to our project are graphical. But I don't think any of our contributors have committed solely graphics, so they just look like they've done less than they have because only the code is counted.

-It's optional for a commit-less contributor to provide some description of the contribution, but we don't mandate it. Perhaps that should change.

Yes, that sounds like a fair compromise.

I don't know if the small number of bogus claims on our project would count as abuse. I only notice them, wonder about them, and notice that it then looks like our X lines of code are written by N people when in fact it's N-2, or whatever. Thanks for the offer to help if and when we need it. I've always felt ohloh is very good for that. Thanks also for putting in such a considered response to my post.

Anyone can just claim whatever they want it seems. http://www.ohloh.net/accounts/SoIntoYou claimed commits made by Brion Vibber in project Mediawiki :

http://www.ohloh.net/projects/mediawiki/contributors/94489303233

I think he has claimed on a few projects..... he has a lot of cross project same time commits which is odd

Reflection on this makes me think that what we need is a special code embedded in a comment. Something like:

ohlohuserid userid email diresuholho

Avoiding non-alphabetics reduces the chances that a this will cause problems in the diverse languages we parse.

That could be used to indicate that the version control user was tied to . It's tempting it limit it to commits by , but this breaks in-active participants and mass-attribution efforts.