Better Call Out for Developers/coders

[Zarxrax]

Something like coming a website is a lot of work. Its hard to find people willing to just volunteer all that time and effort. I think it would be better off to hire someone to do it, if we could get a donation drive going that could rake in enough cash.

I think the current site is really... complex. I mean the main menu has something like 50 different items.
If you look at other sites like youtube, they manage to put a LOT of similar kinds of functionality into significantly fewer pages.

[Zarxrax]

Blarg...

coming -> coding

[downwithpants]

but yeah, my sentiments match zarx's (minus the freudian slip). contracting out site coding has been brought up as a possibility. if we can get the funds for it.

[SQ]

Something like coding a website is a lot of work. Its hard to find people willing to just volunteer all that time and effort.

It's even harder to find people willing to do that if there is absolutely no system that allows developers to volunteer at all.

While I agree with you (in hiring a dev), I think we should still either take down the "calling all coders/devs!" notice on the main page and/or set up a system where it's actually possible for someone to volunteer.

Trying to find someone is only as impossible as we make it.

[dokidoki]

Right now, the only thing that mentions we need developers is on the front of the members page. It's very old, and tells potential users to join the developers usergroup... Which at this point does not exist.

Judging from the join dates of the people in the (not publicly visible) Programmers group, I'm guessing the functionality broke during the upgrade to phpBB3. I never noticed because activity in that forum is so dead.

A brief history of my work for the site:
When people wanted a "journal reply" system back in the day, I asked Phade for the code for the journal system. In Spring 2002 I created journal reply functionality and he never put it online. I thought, "screw it", and left it at that. I'm not sure what he was thinking (and I can't remember exactly what I thought) when he named me site coder when he resigned, but I think I was in denial about the whole thing.

Around mid-2006, I got tired of seeing all the unanswered threads in Site Feedback & Site Help, and bugged Phade and derobert for access to change stuff. (I did have some level of access, but hadn't used it) I went on to make the Donators Forum, AMV Alerts, Download Queue, and random stuff. I wanted to do streaming, but couldn't meet Phade's requirements so I didn't bother. Corran made it work out. I don't have as much time as I used to, but I just did the "AMV Spotlight" which Corran's code made fairly easy to do.

Anyway, there are/were a lot of people in that inactive forum, but few people were allowed to modify the code that I know of. In short, granting access is done by derobert, not me, so I never learned the process.

How come there's no AIM Kissy face? We used to use that all the time.

I think I started messing with the selection after it fell into disuse. Added.

Didn't want to put in one that didn't match the phpbb2 style?

Yes and no. As I mentioned, I edited a couple to match the style, but with others there was no point.

Alsoalso, is anything being done about the original intention of the post - is there a developers group or a contact email or something now?
That's kind of more important than some emotes, I think. Unless you don't want [more] developers.

It's been discussed, but I don't think there's anything concrete to announce at this time, though dwp alluded to something.

Silly SQ. The Org doesn't have developers. It has dewelopers.

I can has theme song?

I think the current site is really... complex. I mean the main menu has something like 50 different items.
If you look at other sites like youtube, they manage to put a LOT of similar kinds of functionality into significantly fewer pages.

I thought some items in the new expandable menus (which both Corran and I worked on) were questionable, like "Site Help Forum" when you can go to the forums and then the subforum, but figured, "meh I can collapse it".

[SQ]

Thank you for the update Doki!

Curious- is there a journal reply function now?
And if not, will it ever be added eventually?

[dokidoki]

Curious- is there a journal reply function now?
And if not, will it ever be added eventually?

I think I lost the code for it.
I added "send priv msg to this user", since I didn't want to end up re-programming something like LiveJournal. ("I don't like his reply so I wanna delete it!" etc etc)

[SQ]

Couldn't you take some opensource CMS and kind of edit it and apply it to this site?

Or I guess I am not really sure if code can be applied in that manner to a database like this.

[dokidoki]

Couldn't you take some opensource CMS and kind of edit it and apply it to this site?

The site is already integrated with phpBB. Integrating with another codebase would be somewhat of a hassle.

[SQ]

What if - and this is a crazy idea that probably won't work, but I'm just going to throw it out there -
you added a subforum that is hidden from the main index, or a seperate board completely, that auto-generated a thread for each user's journal.
Then this thread would auto-generate a post mirroring the journal's post. The journal system's "comment" function could allow people to reply to said thread, underneath said journal post.

While this may get confusing for people who wish to comment older journal posts, maybe a reply to said journal entries will automatically quote the journal entry in the post?

Crazy idea. Probably nonsense.
My apologies.