Can we make the submissions optionally identifiable?

[rodvrees]

Would it be okay if we implement a field in the submission form where users can as an option leave an email address/their name/a username, in order to trace back who submitted the point. It's something we have discussed before internally, but I'd like to open the discussion here publicly.

This can have some benefits, mostly to the ProteoBench development team but maybe also to the userbase.

Why would it be useful for the ProteoBench team?
As an example, today the following submission was made: Proteobot/Results_quant_ion_DIA_diaPASEF#67
Here, the user manually turned on the MBR field. As far as we understand this, Spectronaut does not have an MBR setting, so I feel I cannot accept this point as is. I added a comment to the pull request asking for information about their decision, but since the user will not receive any notification about this (unless they are following the PR, but that seems unlikely to me), it is likely that I am screaming into the void.
If the user would've been allowed to add their email/name to the submission, I could've asked them directly. This is not the first time and won't be the last time we have questions about the user's choices, so I feel having a way to contact the submittor would be beneficial. I also strongly belief it should just be optional, not a requirement.

Why would it be useful for the userbase?
I don't know, really. It might not be. But some users might find it nice to receive credit for the submissions. It can gameify the process a little bit. We could even go as far as making leaderboards or something, but that's of course future talk.

Some options for implementation.

1. There's a field for optional fill-in of email address/name/username. This is seen as a "parameter" of the submission and is shown in the datapoint metadata
2. There's a field for optional fill-in of email address/name/username. It is only passed to the PR, but not as datapoint metadata, and is thus not seen on the web interface but only in the PR

What do you think?

[julianu]

To allow the optional submission of a contact name / email address for the upload and checking by developers respectively maintainers is definitely a good idea and should be added. It might even be saver to have it not in the PR, if someone really wants to stay hidden and only give the name for reasons you mentioned, like if something needs to be double-checked regarding the submission.

But adding a gamification option and a public submission name might also be fun. So we could add a leader board of submitters, give some achievements... But this needs some more discussion, and a way to link a submission to a unique account (could be done via any SSO API though).