And now for something that you won't believe didn't come from the mind of Sean Piche (Well, there was that
one time...)
Yesterday afternoon, one of Weasyl's directors (Struguri) posted a journal about a great new program Weasyl was starting up. This program, designed to help "encourage" the developers, was written up in a way that suggested that artists offer to draw free art in exchange for bugs getting fixed (As opposed to artists drawing stuff
because bugs were fixed, which I think is more of what they meant).
Development of code is an artistic process in its own regard. Inasmuch as it's completely ineffective to use authoritarian tactics on an artist in order to get them to accomplish creativity, it is equally difficult to use these tactics on coders. The more pessimistic would describe this as "herding cats," though frankly it's a combination of a whole bunch of different factors that have essentially rewired many folks to interpret authoritarianism as a flaw. In other words, authoritarians are something to be developed around, rather than for. Development-- as is similar with the creative process-- thus becomes a task to remove the authority interrupting the flow of things, rather than the focus of the love and passion for the task at hand.
Artists may be familiar with this pain. Pressure applied by commissioners has a tendency to diminish the desire to ponder upon what would make the commissioner happy, as the applied pressure translates into "getting it done is what will make them happy." If all they care about is the piece getting done, well... it's not going to matter just how much of your love and passion you put into it, is it? That's an upsetting feeling.
In the world of Information Security, there is a concept called the bug bounty. It's how hackers can legitimately make money. They do so by reporting the bugs they find to various vendors who these bugs affect in exchange for a cash reward. Though this is mostly a response to the underground market for high-price bugs, mostly of the exploitable variety. This, however, has a tendency to inspire greed, mostly due to the fact that they're providing a cash reward. Greed isn't exactly good, regardless of what Mr. Gecko may think.
Artistic members of the community have lamented frequently regarding a few of the cosmetic bugs of the site. Sadly, lamenting is all one feels they can do currently in order to get what they wish accomplished. But this desire to push things forward with the site has its benefits-- namely, there are, in fact, things artists can do to help move things along. Why not donate your creativity?
Our developers aren't just here to write some neat code-- they're here to write neat code for you. Many of our developers love the idea of working on an art site not for their resumes, but because they love art. They love your art, and they love supporting you. Why not further inspire this desire to support your creativity by giving a little bit of it back?
Here's an idea, insofar as how a bug bounty system on Weasyl might work, in terms of the longevity of the bug:
A bug is registered on the Weasyl tracker. Related tasks for developers are gleaned from the bug and prioritized relative to the needs of the users.
Artists will add a bounty of their choosing to the bug of their desire, e.g., "on completion of this bug, I will make one developer a necklace."
On completion of a bug, all developers involved in the bug fix will be allowed to select a single bounty from the list of bounties placed by artists on the bug in question.
Artists will have a limited amount of bounties they may place. In a hypothetical example, they may place a bounty for one developer on one bug for three separate bugs, or three bounties for three developers on one single bug, depending on what the artist feels they wish to reward on completion.
As a greater variety of artists place more bounties on the bugs they wish to see fixed, a plethora of reward options becomes available to the developers, demonstrating not only priority by the community as a whole but also greater possibility that one of the developer's favorite artists may have placed a bounty on a bug they wish to work on.
A pessimist may argue one shouldn't be rewarded for what they should already be doing. But this belies the fact that our developers are volunteering their time for the love and passion of the task at hand. This is counterintuitive to authoritarian control. Authoritarian tactics seek to diminish love and passion in favor of obedience. Indeed, our developers are here to donate their time and effort to what they love and wish to see occur. They have just as much an idea of what needs to be done as the rest of us. So simply telling them what to do, while seeming like the easy answer, is not the most effective route.
So since this isn't currently completely codified just yet, we're going to perform an experiment. Let's test the efficacy of this attempted system, shall we?
Artists, please comment on this journal with bounties you would like to place, using the following rules as guidelines:
You may place up to two commission bounties. You do not have to place both.
You may place both on one bug for two developers involved in the bug's fix, or each on two bugs for one developer per bug.
Here are the bugs in question to place bounties for:
Thumbnails. We currently have some additional neat fixes in the queue for thumbnails. This includes allowing you to visually have non-square thumbnails and arbitrary crops.
Notification management. One of the biggest issues currently comes in the form of navigating the site. There are currently tasks to be done involving reorganizing this and making it clear and coherent for users.
Comment hiding. This bug is actually in the process of being developed and completed, but it's still one of the big ones for our users.
User-linking syntax. People are confused by the linking syntax. While it's clear and coherent to engineers as to why it functions the way it does, it's not exactly clear for users.
Let the experiment commence. I have high hopes that this will effectively reward our developers while simultaneously bolstering the sensation of community we try to bring to the site. Let's hope I'm right. 
Apparently the Weasyl PR department was on vacation or something. I'm not sure what the procedure there is to post "official" site business, but the fact that this got through written like this goes to show
something is broken
somewhere. This is the equivalent of pouring gas on the fire that is the people claiming that Weasyl only cares about artists.
The journal was quickly pulled and replaced with a
"post-mortem", including an apology and admission that the journal was poorly worded to begin with.
