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« on: April 23, 2010, 07:53 AM »
wow, talk about over analyzing a question :D Honestly, putting that much words in how fancy and thought in how fancy the question and it's replies have to be, makes me scared to even reply anything at all, as my inferior brain is not worthy :)
Anyway, from the top of my head, here's one suggestion which may have been touched upon before iirc:
In order to make people feel more valued and involved with DC, have a page with links to their software (eg: on the Software/releases.html page, or a dedicated page) - including the many programs people host on the member server, and others that are hiding in the forum.
As it stands, outside of the nany stuff and other contests, it seems to me only a subset of software developed by dc members is mentioned under the software section, which may not very encouraging to people that forked out the effort to work on coding snack or program.
I'm not sure if there's some reason but I find quite a few coding snacks in the forum that didn't make the software page. I'm not sure if there already is some kind of submission process or not, but there probably should be an easy to find software submission web GUI thingie...
Not only would this encourage development, but it would allow users to find software they need more easily. (There could be a keyword based search engine just for software, for example)
Then, when a program is submitted through the web gui, and accepted after review, it could be automatically listed on the appropriate software page. Then perhaps automatically assign a 'dc software developer' badge or something to the user.
With a semi-automated process like that you could do all kinds of neat stuff, like making an smf mod which will list all software made by a user in their forum profile - or automatically create a blog post for newly submitted/accepted software.