[War.Frog]

Really? Sorry, too easy. vb.org has one of two choices here:

1. throw its hands up in the air and say "oh well too bad so sad"
2. get proactive and community-focused and address something that is obviously a serious issue here

The issue of copyright and code stealing is a red herring and makes for a way-too-convenient dismissal of the problem. I quite frankly respect a coder's right to his/her own intellectual property and vb.org can't possibly be expected to muck around in that quagmire. So THAT I agree with.

However, there are things that can be done to benefit the entire community here. Without even breaking a sweat here are just some of many ideas that could be considered:

• establish expiries on "Supported" tags
• a scoring model that publicly rewards active coders (why shouldn't they get recognized?)
• this scoring should appeal-able (similar to eBay model)
• automatic stale-mod indicator (after x-days coder not active)
• automatic notification to mod authors when their mods go stale
• indicator when creating mod that allows author to check "please mark as free-to-use if I stop supporting"
• automatic change of "Developer" image and text tag to "Developer - Inactive"

Come on, I'm sure there are ten billion other things that the community could come up with to help discourage the walkaways we see here all too often. Simply dismissing the issue with the wave of the hand demonstrates a shocking lack of vision and community mindedness.