Ubuntu – What happened to Ubuntu’s Hall of Fame page

history-of-ubuntuubuntu-website

Once upon a time (2008 – ????) Ubuntu had a Hall of Fame page (then located at http://hall-of-fame.ubuntu.com) in which it would give credits to contributors such as developers who patched a bug in the One Hundred Papercuts project or the top weekly contributors right here on Ask Ubuntu. You can see Jono Bacon's blog post about it here.

Some time since the last contribution to its Launchpad repository in 2011 and now it was removed from the website completely (DNS record for hall-of-fame.ubuntu.com removed). Extensive Googling has yielded no answers in any form. The the last snapshot of the site by web.archive.org reveals no clues, either (it looks perfectly normal, and then there are no more snapshots).

So I'm curious- why was it removed?

Best Answer

Ubuntu Hall of Fame has been unmaintained since 2011 and was planned to be rewritten entirely. While the plan seems to have been approved, the blueprint on Launchpad had noted that implementation is making slow progress.

The plan and progress

According to this dated Wiki, the codebase of Ubuntu Hall of Fame is not maintainable and the plan was to make it open source.

The codebase of the Hall of Fame is not open-source right now and is not really maitainable, also does it contain password and all kinds of other horrible things. The only good thing about it is the theming.

The plan is to rewrite it in Django and make it more easily extensible and modifiable. Also make it open source.

Given that the Wiki was created in mid-2010, the project may have been left unmaintained much earlier than the last snapshot in 2011 on Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

In early 2011, the blueprint was registered in Ubuntu Launchpad. While some features have already been implemented, most of the work items are noted as "postponed".

Supporting facts

In mid-2011, one Ubuntu member has published a blog post on "UDS-O Budapest: Day 5", which mentioned the state of Ubuntu Hall of Fame.

The Ubuntu Hall of Fame is a site hosted by Canonical but largely unmaintainable, and thus, unmaintained. They are working to moving it to Django and in this session they re-identified the current blockers and a new project lead took the helm [...]

Finally in late-2011, the designer of Ubuntu Hall of Fame has mentioned about the project on his blog in this post that is part of discussing the findings in the "Ubuntu Community Survey Report".

[...] Some will remember when we built the Ubuntu Hall Of Fame; this project was designed to highlight many of the great contributions to Ubuntu, but it had two unintended side effects:

  1. It didn’t really achieve the goal of a community feeling a personal sense of thanks from someone who benefited from their contribution.

  2. For those who did not make it to one of the Top 10 lists on the site, some felt like their contributions were not as valuable or appreciated.

So what happened and why

The reason Ubuntu Hall of Fame was being removed, is largely due to lack of maintenance. However, the last quoted source may suggest that the project implementation may have been improperly done for recognizing contributors' works. More relevant sources as follows.

From this dated Wiki on UDS Jaunty report (partially quoted):

Debian / Ubuntu Relations

  • ...
  • Why aren't Debian contributors on the Ubuntu Hall of Fame?
  • ...

From the first post, a comment raised by one of the readers:

...on November 21, 2008 at 3:29 am

[...] see comment 3… how would you go about extending this to appropriately give credit to Debian contributors? Would the entirely of Debian’s community process have to be driven through Launchpad to be recorded for the HOF to list? Debian is just one of many upstream groups whose effort can’t be represented by a shallow dive into Launchpad’s data pool [...]

From the later post, another comment raised by one of the readers:

...on October 26, 2011 at 4:12 pm

[...] Singling out top contributors is exactly what Jono wants to avoid [...] What’s needed is a recognition framework that has the ability to scale beyond launchpad as a data source beyond Canonical as a source of windfall and beyond Ubuntu in scope [...]

From this related post on Community Leadership Forum:

[...] One thing I discovered years back when we ran the Ubuntu Hall Of Fame project (we aggregated the top performers in the community) is that the social recognition of some was seen as ignoring others. It ended up become rather demotivating for some.

Based on above findings, we may understand why Ubuntu Hall of Fame was being removed and has been making slow progress for the past few years.

Disclaimer: This answer was written based on information that were found via Google Search, Internet Archive and few other sites. As such, the original post author was not in a position to give a conclusive answer.

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