Off-topic: how do you handle the community side of a small open-source project?

[TomW61]

Mostly a lurker here. I use CC for cleaning up drone photogrammetry clouds on small heritage sites, nothing very advanced.

This is a bit off the usual topics, but it is the coffee place so I will risk it. Alongside the scanning work I help moderate a chat server for a photogrammetry and scanning user group, about 1,400 people now. It started as five of us swapping classification tips and it got out of hand.

The thing I did not expect was how much of the growth comes from a handful of members. Two or three people bring in almost everyone else, and until recently I had no idea who they were. I wanted to give them a contributor role and thank them properly, but the counters we had were useless: they counted accounts that joined, opened nothing and left a week later.

We ended up running a small invite-tracking bot that separates the people who stayed from the ones who bounced, and it reshuffled the ranking completely. The member I assumed was our biggest recruiter turned out to be third.

So I am curious whether anyone here looks after the community side of an open-source tool. How do you work out who is actually doing the work of bringing people in, and do you bother rewarding it at all? Keeping a forum alive for over a decade like this one seems harder than any of it.

[daniel]

Hey,

We actually don't do any of this. We have almost no information on who uses CloudCompare and for what reasons. And on this forum, I am the only moderator (hence the long moderation process when I'm travelling!). Some people have an account for a very long time and still come by here and then. But I don't really track that either.