[General Topics] _that:
Not only developers. Crowdsourcing works well for big tasks, so *all* "Recognized" members should have limited moderation power by default (unless explicitly revoked for repeated abuse, but why would they still keep their "Recognized" title then?): the power to flag bad posts, and this should take exactly two mouse clicks and no page reload: one to activate the feature, another one to select a predefined reason (exactly which forum rule was violated - "I don't like this" doesn't count). Flagged posts should not be displayed by default (maybe requiring multiple flags to really hide posts by more senior members). And it should be public who flagged the post and for what reason.

This should relieve moderators of boring standard work and free up some time for resolving conflicts arising from abuse of this feature - which will occur without doubt, but since R* members abusing their mod powers have their title to lose, it should be quite limited. I think this would increase the average quality of the remaining posts a lot.

See above. Give your trusted users more control and handle the escalations.

I think that donations are the main reason why this thread exists at all - competition for donations (and thanks) is killing the spirit of collaboration and sharing. Generally XDA is focused too much on "products" than on "development". Products are consumed by non-developers, and this is where thanks and donation begging is happening. Donation requests should be only allowed for significant original development with open source, if at all.

If the code is published under an open source license, that's permission enough for me as long as I don't want to sell it.

However I know that I'm unhappy when other developers use my free code to make money with a "product" based on it, but that's the general risk of open source - at least the GPL requires source code to stay open. Maybe that would be a good idea for XDA even for Apache or BSD licensed projects - if you post a derived work of some other developer's code on XDA, you need to keep the code open even if the license doesn't require that.

Any developer who posts a derived work of another developer should be required to give full credits in their OP, clearly state that their build is unofficial or a derived work, and, if not obvious, state what their share of original development is. So it should be recognizable if the tweaks are small or big. Users are clueless anyway and will happily install anything that has lots of square brackets and special characters in the thread title.

Licenses are important and every developer must know the basics of the common open source licenses, even if they are only doing this as a hobby. Copyleft licenses should be strictly enforced on XDA. I don't think that moderators need to be developers but they must understand the basics of their work, and licenses are an important part of that.

I don't want to deal with registering trademarks though - XDA should treat any name that developers are using for their products like a trademark and respect their wishes about restricting the use of that name for derived products on XDA.

Finally, a word to [MENTION=1289361]Mazda[/MENTION]: your first posts were insightful and interesting to read, but after 10 pages of "****" I'm now tired of it. You may have a point, but as a developer you should know how to follow rules to debug things - derailing this thread doesn't help to get your point across.