I first released Autodia back in late 2000, it's a fairly small project, doing a specific and small job of interest to some programmers.
I remember how pleased I was the first time somebody emailed me about it, saying thanks and how useful it was. It was a huge surprise and I was really chuffed, that somebody the other side of the world (I think it was South America), had found it and thought to contact me.
Nearly 10 years later it's almost an every day thing. The number of contributors is now just under 50, with another 20 or so bug reporters.
All that for a pretty simple tool that has no mailing list, a couple of (unfortunately out of date) web pages, and only had public version control since last year.
I put almost no effort at all into publicising it, releases are infrequent and the website needs work - but still people find it, post patches and test cases and even sometimes just say thank you without requesting a bug fix.
I'm glad autodia has been so popular and attracted so many contributors. But it's not always true for many small projects (or even some medium-scale ones). I've started several projects of my own, and often I'm happy just to hear of people who are using them, are trying to use them, or are just interested in them, while people trying to actively contribute code or other patches is something I consider quite a luxury. So consider yourself privileged with autodia.
Note that I'm not complaining. I'm not forcing and cannot force anyone to contribute, I'm just saying that one should not expect every project to be interesting enough to gather co-developers. So I've come to accept the fact that I need to do most of the work myself, and not hear too much from my users. I'm still keen on publicising the interesting projects in such resources as Freshmeat, LWN.net or the FSF directory because I'm still hopeful to acquire some users through them, which will hopefully translate into some feedback and contributions.
