[General Topics] eagleeyetom:
As many in the XDA community are aware, Mazda lost his Recognized Developer (RD) title and has been publicly unhappy with that decision. Because he chose to state his grievances in a public thread, we decided that a public thread was the best way to address them.

His complaint has been thoroughly analyzed and discussed within the Developer Committee (DC), among the Senior Moderator body, and with site ownership and administration. The way of removing his title was questionable and we would like to apologize to him that it hasn’t been done in an official way. Even though one of his complaints was that Jerdog “went rogue”, it should be known that Jerdog has been his biggest supporter within the DC throughout his time on XDA. When Mazda was found to have kanged code from Androidhive's "Android Building Free Wallpapers App" guide without credits to create his Papuh wallpaper app, the DC considered removing his RD title immediately. However, Jerdog personally requested he keeps the title at the time out of respect for Mazda’s ongoing contributions. When the committee recently decided that it was time to remove his title, Jerdog, acting as a delegate of the committee and out of the relationship the two had formed, decided to reach out to him through Hangouts as a more personal medium. That was a bad decision. In the future, we will communicate through more official channels.

We also saw that he was unhappy with the “Former Recognized Developer” title. At the time, we decided that the usual “Retired Recognized Developer” title did not apply, but Jerdog thought it would be insulting to change him back to Senior Member. So, out of respect, he made it Former RD. Our apologies for not making that clearer at the time and for going off-policy.

The reason the title was revoked was due to Mazda not upholding the Developer Code of Conduct. The final deciding factor is that, as stated in our minimum requirements, RDs are expected to be active within the community and provide/maintain development projects. Not only was his last on-site development contribution over six months ago, but he was (and still is) actively forbidding other developers from posting official builds of his team’s ROM here. We're still not totally sure of his stance on unofficial builds, but many of the changes we are making to our rules in the next couple weeks will give him (and all developers) much more control over their brands on XDA. RDs are reviewed periodically, and after looking at the above, he wasn’t delivering an expected level of involvement on XDA and so the title was rescinded.

Even though our decision to remove his title still stands, we’ve decided on further consideration to give him the Retired RD title because we recognize the contributions he makes toward the Android community and we respect that. Also, after six months of active, on-site development activity, he is welcome to use our Recognized Developer application to reapply for the RD title. Again, here are the minimum requirements.

We specifically recommend:

Being active by developing on XDA

following forum rules

trying to avoid on and off-site arguments concerning XDA members

resolving the issues politely in private

being reasonable about things

We started the RD program years ago to give a little recognition and a few perks to the developers who were making XDA awesome. The fact that something so simple has caused so much heartache has even made us consider eliminating titles altogether-- but that didn't feel right either. So, we're in a sucky situation, and we're sure many of you are going to find a thousand reasons why this is outrageous. All we can say is we're doing our best. We'll even acknowledge that some of Mazda's loudest pronouncements against the site are in fact leading to positive change. [MENTION=1289361]Mazda[/MENTION] has been notified about this thread both by the mention and the private message.

Thank you for taking the time to read this,

eagleeyetom

Leader of the Developer Committee