The Pros And Cons Of Googlecode

As most of you know we use Google Code for our Public SVN repository, and doing so has its pros and cons.

One of the coolest features of Google Code is that it allows people to rate and comment on revisions. This is great for bug tracking and getting a quick consensus of what people think about the revision.

In order to get quicker responses and have a wider degree of testing/comments, we have granted public access for comments/ratings/issues. This is extremely helpful because as a small team, we don't have the time nor the man-power to constantly test every revision, therefor we count on the public to test for us, and inform us on things we may not know. Furthermore, we have also gained new coders and contributors through their comments/issues on GoogleCode.

There is a huge downside to this open-environment however; the most notable one being the trolls. Like with most public sites on the internet, we have our share of trolls. People giving negative ratings to a bunch of irrelevant revisions because they're mad their game broke. Or people leaving spam (even threatening) comments. Or best of all, people repetitively saying that game XYZ doesn't work on every revision, and telling us to fix it.

A great example that I have to mention here is someone who has made dozens of comments telling us to fix GT4/3, and always complains when we ignore him. At this point he's started to just rate revisions negatively without even leaving a comment as to why. Sometimes I wonder if these people just think we're purposely not making games work because we're evil or something...

Now you might just be wondering, "So, why don't you just ban the guy." Well this is the biggest problem with GoogleCode, currently there's no way to just ban users from your SVN. We can either make public access to comments/ratings/issues, or we can make it only available to project members. There's no way to have it public while banning the trolls like ferrarinews.

Anyways, there's more to GoogleCode than what I talked about here, but I think i described the main issue we've been having with it