Upvoting projects in Copr

Let’s take a minute of our time and upvote our favorite projects in Copr to appreciate the great work their maintainers put it.

There are tens of thousands of projects in Copr with vast differences in the quality of packages they provide and how well they are maintained. Many of them are just testing projects without any further purpose, others provide production-ready software valuable for many users. For a long time, we wanted to give projects some badge or a shiny plaque, that would reflect their popularity among users, and I am happy to announce, that we finally launched upvoting (and downvoting) of projects in Copr.

Project Score

We do not want to define what upvote or downvote mean and rather let everyone to have their own interpretation of those words. If you like the project (for whatever reason - you may like the software it provides, it may be extraordinarily well maintained, you just want to support the project, or anything else that is important for you), please give it the thumbs up. If you feel negative about a project (it may be for example dangerous to enable it), don’t be afraid to give the thumbs down. The score will then reflect the general popularity of a project.

At this moment, Copr just shows the score in a project detail page, there are no features tied to it yet. They are definitely going to be some benefits for popular projects soon, we are just not sure which ones. Please let us know what features you would like to see! We are currently considering the following:

• Add a possibility to sort projects by their score
• Revive the idea of Fedora Playground and automatically provide the highest-rated projects within one playground repository.
• Add a page with popular projects, that would show the highest scored projects in absolute numbers, projects trending this month, and the most controversial ones.
• Do not introduce any additions and leave the score to be just feedback for the project maintainer and other users.

These ratings will also help us pick new projects for our trying-to-be-monthly series 4 cool new projects to try in COPR.

User Interface

There are many options when it comes to scoring content online - Numeric value 1-10, one to five stars, likes or hearts, and possibly a lot of others. We perceive thumbs up / thumbs down scoring to be a simple, yet effective solution, so we went for it. The actual user-interface is inspired by Reddit and Stack Overflow, which I believe are well-known platforms among Copr users.

The highlighted upward arrow signalizes that I already upvoted this project. Similarly, a downvoted project would be highlighted with red color. Click the highlighted arrow to remove your vote, or point your cursor to the score number, it will show you the number of upvotes and the number of downvotes for the project as two separate numbers.

Do you find the interface intuitive and user-friendly or would you rather like see some improvements done to it? Please, let us know. Currently, there is no copr-cli or API support for upvoting and downvoting projects.