The MATE Contributor badge versus the MATE Developers group: What's the difference?

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As of late, I've been looking over the forum's nooks and crannies in hopes of finding some feature which I somehow overlooked in the past 11 months of my being here.

I've looked at the list of Badges one can earn here and have also looked at the list of User Groups. What I don't understand is why there is a group called "MATE Developers" and also a badge called "MATE Contributor". I would tend to guess that the former means that you work on MATE enough that you've been admitted to the MATE Core Team, and that the latter means you just, once, contributed code to the MATE Project as a one-shot, not intending on becoming a full-time developer per se. Is this assertion true?

OK, I'll admit that this question is somewhat self-motivated: I have contributed to several MATE projects several times as a "guest", instead of contributing enough to become a "MATE developer", and I noticed I don't have the "MATE Contributor" badge. I wanted to ensure that I don't have it because I would have to do some extra steps before I could get it. It's not the most important thing in the world, but it's symbolic at least.

Thank you.

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I set these up many years ago, they are pretty much an abandoned user engagement idea.

They are linked. Any one from the "MATE Developer" group earns the "MATE Contributor" badge, and any one signing up with a mate-desktop.org e-mail address is automatically added to that group. Being in the group also sets the member title to "MATE Developer" and grants a higher trust level to begin with.

The idea was to scan the :mate: MATE repositories on GitHub and award the MATE Contributor badge if the member's e-mail is attributed to a commit, and the same for Project Contributor but scanning :ubuntu_mate: Ubuntu MATE's repositories instead. This system was never implemented.

So, if this was to be picked up by the present team, the badge should either be scrapped, automated or manually assigned (like an awards ceremony? :trophy: )

The Donator badge similarly is stale. If I remember, the project leader manually imported a list of e-mails each month along with the monthly donation reports that were published on the website's blog. (They have since been taken down due to GDPR concerns)

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Thanks for the clarification, @lah7. :+1:

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