[zetetic]

I agree that there are problems with the current setup, but I'm also not sure a new forum would help.

It seems to me that like others have said, most of the coders who abandon hacks do so because they disappear from here entirely. So they probably won't be around to hand their hacks off to someone else anyway.

Also, while it's true that people can just take over support of a hack in the thread itself, the problem is that non-coders (like myself) end up having to wade through 25 pages of comments where there might be a dozen different "fixes", some of which are unnecessary, others that have already been added to the first post, some that are just wrong, etc. And it's very difficult for non-coders to separate the good from the bad, the necessary from the superfluous.

Originally Posted by Erwin

Possible solutions:

1. Have a checkbox when you submit a hack to say "Yes I allow this hack to be taken over by another hacker" or "No I will not allow anyone else to develop this hack".

The problem with this is that initially not many would choose to say "Yes".

So why not just make it part of the deal that when people post a hack, they implicitly agree to surrender their code if they disappear, unless they specifically request that it be removed? That way if someone wants to take over a hack they can just PM a staff member or something, and if the staff can't get a response from the autor either then the hack ownership is turned over to the volunteer.

I can't imagine why anyone would object to having development of their hack continue after they've obviously given up on it and moved on.