In our recent quest, “Break Your teaRank,” we awarded points to testnet users who successfully raised the teaRank of their projects from a low initial value (20-30) to a high threshold of 60. This threshold was set deliberately to identify packages capable of significantly impacting our mission to reward open-source developers. Points were granted to all contributors of the nine projects that achieved this milestone.
Note that an oversight led to moderators being added as contributors by some maintainers, resulting in unintended point awards. This will be rectified to ensure fairness and integrity.
The quest was achieved through the spamming of the npm registry with low-quality projects, falsely elevating the rank of associated projects. To counteract this, we have now implemented an AI-based automated spam classifier. This classifier will not only prevent spam projects from registering but will also ensure that registered spam projects do not receive any rewards, maintaining the authenticity of our ranking system.
We are closing the quest now because we have successfully validated our ranking metric. The quest has fulfilled its purpose, and points have been distributed to users who identified the ranking issue. We do not support spamming any package manager registry with fake packages to boost rank, as it undermines our mission to make open-source sustainable. Such actions detract from our mission and deter genuine developers from joining the platform. Thank you to everyone who supports our mission as we continue to improve our systems to better serve the open-source community.
First, for all the projects that I register to the tea protocol, most of them are real packages that are useful for other developers to use, not just nextjs templates like most other packages that have been registered. You can check it on github that you have seen. (Don’t just look at one repository).
Second, regarding the first article. Did you not read the whole article? I found the method and reported it to the moderators on the first day I found it. After that, you can see that the team has added package spam prevention. (Of course, I’ve deleted almost all of those useless packages.)
Third, regarding the second article. If I remember correctly, it was February when the new tea testnet was released. I didn’t know that what the tea protocol means when registering a project is our own project and not someone else’s. And you’re right that I only did those 3 repositories because I’ve gotten reprimands and warnings from several people. I have also apologized to the owner of the node-linter repository and there was a discussion there too.
Fourth, Manipulative commit activities? Like you never see other developers using auto commit for their activities. Even though I only commit 1x to fill my activity bar.
This makes no sense though, your github was created in February 2024, and in three months you could have hundreds or even thousands of projects pushed to the npm registry. - so the quality is questionable.
What I see is that you are just capitalizing on the momentum of tea. which you would never have created a project if tea never existed.
It would be crazy if the tea team would allow this.
The phrases “capitalizing on the momentum” and “would never have created the project” strike me as wrong. I have joined the open-source community since 2019 on the main account.
I created this account specifically for blockchain-related projects and I happened to create an account in February 2024 which coincided with the launch of testnet tea.
I’m not a dev so lot’s of quests were out of my capacity, but I was at 48000 so I thought I’d be getting to the next phase… since I daily collect rewards and stake on projects… but now I see I’ve went to 52000 so out of the cut… anyway best of success for Tea and all participants. It was a nice testnet for me!
