LDraw guideline: Procedure for quitting Part Authorship

[Willy Tschager]

Hi,

in prospect of the recent events the LDraw Steering Committee (SteerCo) has elaborated a guideline for those authors who wanna quit their PT authorship:

1. The Part Author (PA) wishing to quit should submit their intention to the Part Tracker Administration (PTAdmin) in writing via email to <parts-AT-ldraw.org>.
   
2. Following this, access rights to the Part Tracker (PT) will be removed in a timely fashion.
   
3. The PTAdmin will keep a record of the signed Contributor Agreement (CA) of the person quitting.
   
4. As the quitting PA's parts (the parts) were submitted under the terms of the CA, and thus the "copyleft" Creative Commons license, all parts submitted up to that point will be left where they are, whether that be as part of the published library, or in some state on the PT.
   
5. No changes will be made to the parts that would undermine the existing terms of the CA and associated license.
   
6. All the parts remaining on the PT will be immediately considered open for editing by anyone, under the usual provisions of the CA and associated license. Any existing reviews will be left as is.
   
7. If the PA wishes to reattain part authorship, they must apply as a new author, including signing a new CA.
   

Willy Tschager
On behalf of the LDraw Steering Committee

[Steffen]

I think an explicit statement should be made about hold votes of that author.
Downgrading them to novote would be Bad Idea ™, as they might be present for parts
which have 2 cert votes and an Admin cert vote already, thus bringing them immediately
to "certified" status, despite that problems were discovered which led to that hold.
Leaving the votes as-is, as currently described, is the best option, as this forces the other authors
to re-submit a file where the leaving author has put a hold onto.
However, I think this should get mentioned.
The same problem arises when a parts reviewer (not author) leaves us.
We should apply the same procedure then IMHO.

[Travis Cobbs]

Unless I'm mistaken, a defunct reviewer account doesn't really have any impact on the PT, and as such, probably doesn't require any action. I assume this procedure was created so that an author can revoke their acceptance of the contributor agreement.

[Tim Gould]

I'm not sure what you're saying, Steffen. If the votes are left as is then holds will be left as is. The Hold can then be cancelled by Certifys or resubmission.

As Travis mentions, a reviewer quitting simply makes no impact other than them not being able to make more reviews. Which is no different to someone just setting down tools and never reviewing again.

Tim

[Chris Dee]

Removing the quitting authors Hold votes would be a manual process anyway, so this case should be detected.

From an operational point of view, it is unlikely to occur. I don't normally Admin certify unless there are two Certify votes, and I withdraw the Admin certify if a Hold appears. I just found some that slipped through, so I'll check if it easy for the Hold action to automatically remove the Admin vote.