Rewards for active bug reporters and contributors

This should probably go here rather than Youtrack, but let me know if not.

I was thinking about a rewarding system for people who actively and repeatedly report bugs and comment/reply in Youtrack. For instance, I alone in the last 3 weeks or so reported 23 bugs for PhpStorm and commented on 13 others in YouTrack. I also strive to give detailed feedback, with screenshots and/or code examples every time.

I noticed and I imagine there are others like me, who are probably even more active. These folks take valuable time out of our schedule to report all those to JetBrains. It certainly shows how much we enjoy the products and how much we are willing to give back to JetBrains to improve the product ... even though they most probably have purchased licenses already!

Why not consider some tangible reward for these contributors?

Even though they have licenses, you can turn it to your advantage. It gets you more exposure and publicity as you can post about awarding someone in your blog, forums, newsletters. It would also provide an incentive for everybody else to contribute back so you can get even more valuable feedback about bugs/enhancements.

Examples:

- offer a free license so they can make it a present to a colleague or friend. We are already telling everyone how great the JB product is and that they should try it and switch from whetever they are using now.

- or offer a bunch of licenses if they are academics, which they can give to students. Getting them used to JB products gets you real benefits later on when they look or start a job. This works even if they are students (usually they have lots of colleagues/friends coding in the same language, so great potential to spread the word).

- any other kind of tangible reward would do the trick.

Think about it.

Cheers,
Alex.