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Developers Code of Conduct

This document covers developers' rights, responsibilities, and rules for fair play.

If you are not a dev, check how to become a developer.

See Also: Users Code of Conduct.

Golden Rules

  • Follow the Developer and Content Guidelines the best you can. When in doubt, ask.
  • Respect your fellow developer and communicate through any issues you have civilly.
  • Make room for other developers to get a chance to work on games they like, in their own way.
  • Do not discourage anyone from working on any game, in public or in private.

Developers must do the following to keep in good standing:

Revisions - Working on Sets with Existing Achievements

Revisions, as in working on a set that has existing achievements typically requires community approval by presenting your plan in the forum and in the #revision-voting channel in Discord. Not all changes need approval. See Achievement Set Revisions for details.

Expiration of Developer Status

Inactivity

The developer status will expire and account type will be set to [Registered] if the following conditions are met:

  • Developers: Inactivity as developer for 6 months or overall inactivity for 3 months.
  • Jr. Developers: Inactivity as developer or overall inactivity for 1 month.

It is important for developers to remember that this is NOT a punishment and is only done for security reasons!

Inactivity as a developer will be defined as:

  • Has not made or renewed a set claim.
  • Has not created new achievements.
  • Has not performed maintenance on existing sets (revisions, rescores, badge changes, etc.)
  • Has not resolved, closed, or otherwise addressed any open tickets, theirs or otherwise.

Negligence

Alternatively, developer status will be removed if the developer has 10 or more tickets that are at least 2 months old. If the developer has any active claims during this period, they will be given an additional 30 days or until the earliest claim renewal (whichever comes first) to resolve all 10 tickets. Not doing so will result in the developer falling into inactive status and the claim(s) being released.

Reinstatement

If a user's developer status was removed due to inactivity and they wish to have it reinstated, they must contact Dev-Compliance. However, before doing so, it is recommended to review any changes that were made to the Developer Code of Conduct, updates to the achievement creation tools, and have a plan to address open tickets for their achievements, if applicable.

The steps involved in reinstatement will vary from user to user depending on the following:

  • The amount of time elapsed since developer status was removed.
  • The amount of tickets that may have been opened on their achievements.
  • Other QA issues that may have come up since developer status was removed.
  • Moderation warnings or actions the user may have received.

A user may be required to submit work to code reviewers if more than a year has passed since their developer status was removed or if they initially obtained developer status before the junior developer program existed (July 2018) and did not retroactively obtain the Junior Developer badge.

Note: Achievements edited by other developers will not count against a user seeking reinstatement.

Achievement Ownership

When you publish your work you are giving it over to the community to be reviewed and reworked over time - see Achievement Set Revisions.

While the original developer does not own published achievements, they are still the caretaker in terms of bug fixing and maintenance. If another developer revises the achievement, they are the new caretaker of that achievement.

Changing Accounts

If a user with either Developer or Jr. Developer status changes accounts, achievements and tickets under the old account will be re-authored and reassigned to the new account.

Feedback about the Developer Code of Conduct

Although the Developer Code of Conduct is the result of an intense debate, it's not an immutable document. If you have suggestions for improvements, contact us on our Discord server or send a message to RAdmin.

Released under the GPL-3 License. There are no copyright-protected ROMs available for download on RetroAchievements.