Contact LN Webworks Private Limited about contribution best practices to avoid being caught up in farming

Per the Credit Abuse policy → I've sent the first warning/educational message to the people listed as founders/technical leadership.

Adding one issue to the Specbee list where a breaking changes was introduced in a minor module version, by fixing PHPCS issues 🙈

This user only seems to contribute to PHPCS/Readme issues... https://www.drupal.org/user/3721098/track →

Okay so Specbee is for sure into the credit farming game. They are digging up 7y+ old issues for D7 modules to add readme files. There is a pattern in here.

User Nupur Badola → digs up the issues
User ravi kant → creates a MR, usually with errors
User nitin_lama → comes in and fixes most of it, often still with typos or issues

Observed this on a multitude of issues. Users are sometimes mixed, but's there are several employees of Specbee active on these issues. Just check the recents posts on the users listed above and open a few issues.

Adding into the issue summary when the companies were reached out to. I know Specbee has been reported before not 100% sure SV Info @Hestenet could you fill those in please?

I received a positive reply from the LNwebworks team about doing an internal training session with the resources I provided.

I'm going to mark this issue 'Postponed - Maintainer needs more info' for now, because I would like to see if more recent contributions in the next month or two are improved before closing completely.

Setting back to active for: https://drupal.slack.com/archives/C0451JV7HRD/p1716453768932859

https://www.drupal.org/u/amandeep123 → and https://www.drupal.org/u/gurkawal → were blocked today due to framing / spammy / bot-like behaviour reported in the community slack (https://drupal.slack.com/archives/C0451JV7HRD/p1716453768932859).

If these users ask for account reactivation we will send them educational material first, but the company-wide issue is obviously still open.

I have applied the credit abuse policy:
https://www.drupal.org/drupalorg/docs/marketplace/abuse-of-the-contribut... →

Strictly speaking this is an elevated version of Step 2.

In summary:

• They have been delisted from the drupal.org/marketplace until they submit a remediation plan to me, minimum of 7 days.
• They have been delisted from the drupal.org/d7eol vendor listings for the same time period
• A -200 credit penalty has been applied for a minimum of 1 month
• The apparent bot accounts have been banned

Hello LN Webworks team,

I'm very disappointed to say that there has been a sudden surge in bot-like behavior from LN Webworks user accounts.

The following issues do not seem to show legitimate reviews or contributions, and seem to be clear attempts to game the system for credit. The issues are random issues that were recently opened on contributed modules. There seems to be no rhyme or reason why the contributors would be working on these issues, and the reviews are sometimes non-functional or fall into the category of forbidden contributions like simply converting a patch to MR without any other change:

https://www.drupal.org/project/ai_interpolator_openai/issues/3449252 ✨ Add simple text fields Fixed
https://www.drupal.org/project/ai_interpolator/issues/3446771 ✨ Add helper class to base fields to add imagestyle preprocessing Active
https://www.drupal.org/project/activities/issues/3448589 💬 Collaborate with Audit Log Needs review
https://www.drupal.org/project/coffee_zymphonies_theme/issues/3400053 🐛 Checkbox is not aligned with the text. RTBC
https://www.drupal.org/project/geolocation/issues/3449270 🐛 AssertionError: "Spatial fields" must be defined in MODULE_NAME.field_type_categories.yml Fixed

Unfortunately this means we have to deploy some of the consequences of the credit abuse policy:
https://www.drupal.org/drupalorg/docs/marketplace/abuse-of-the-contribut... →

These two user accounts have been banned:
https://www.drupal.org/u/gurkawal →
https://www.drupal.org/u/amandeep123 →

In addition to banning these two users we have taken the next steps according to our credit policy:

We have applied a temporary negative -200 credit to the organization profile, which will last for a minimum of 1 month.
The Organization Page for LN Webworks has been de-listed from the marketplace for a minimum of 7 days.
This includes:
The main drupal.org/marketplace
&
The Drupal 7 end of life marketplace: drupal.org/d7eol

This ban will remain in effect until you reply to this message detailing your response to prevent credit abuse within your organization. To be clear - we do not consider the responsibility for this to fall on individual users, but rather on the organization as a whole.

Please contact us with any questions, and send us your plan for remediating this credit abuse behavior as soon as you are able.

Regards,
Tim Lehnen (hestenet)
CTO - Drupal Association

I have received communication from the LN Webworks team confirming that:

• The accounts are not bot accounts, but they (along with others) have been watching the issue feed for things in needs review status.
• It seems like people are opening a bunch of new tabs, and not refreshing to see that other folks have already made changes - although even in that case d.o should warn that a comment has already been made at which point the dupe should not be submitted.
• They are working on another internal training round - which I have offered to help with.

The 7 day marketplace ban expires today, but the current credit penalty lasts until at least 23 June.

I'll re-evaluate then based on activity in the meantime.