Better Call Out for Developers/coders

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Better Call Out for Developers/coders

Post by SQ » Mon May 03, 2010 3:47 pm

This was touched on in the images in video description and Public QCs topic I made earlier, but I figured it deserved its own topic and merited some attention.

There is a general lack of coders on the .org, and those who have volunteered their time in the past have become, for the most part, rather invisible. The site is in need of an overhaul, but of course this cannot be done without experienced coders (or developers). While at first, when I took some time to try and figure out what would remedy this problem myself (just to toss around ideas), I thought that it could be plausible to hire a developer with donation money for a one-time site overhaul and sort of hope we could maintain it later. But as I'm sure we can all agree, there is probably not enough money laying around to do that, nor would hiring a coder for a site such as this be very vanilla.

So what other ways could we perhaps overhaul the site?
Well, for starters, we could make it a bit more known that we need help.

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.

Perhaps if we set up a different system? What if we removed this old notice and came up with a new one, complete with a new usergroup or perhaps a point of contact for some sort of interview process. Maybe a forum announcement combined with a site-wide notice-- this way we could catch many editors who perhaps do not use the forums, or help spread the word around to non-editors.

In addition, what if we were to take the current staff, and work on taking those "higher up" trustworthy ones on a volunteer-basis, and perhaps teaching them basic bits of coding. Not anything that amounts to much, but something that would be good to have- such as simple maintenance of the site if a piece of it breaks and another, more experienced coder is unavailable at that particular time.
While I am unsure of how the power structure works currently, I am under the impression that maybe two people have access to the .org's inner workings, so everything, even small fixes is up to these two people.
If we spread the small load across many already proven trustworthy users, we could leave the simple things to them and give more time to the 'more advanced' things for the more experienced users.

As it stands now, we will always be looking for new developers... But how are we supposed to find these developers if we have no actual system to accept new developers?
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Re: Better Call Out for Developers/coders

Post by kickass331 » Mon May 03, 2010 4:05 pm

I love this site. I've always hated fancy sites. Something I would like to see changed, however, is a modernization. Forum and site should be themed to match Windows 7, but there should be an option to switch to Mac OS X as well. Anything that can make the colors more appealing and any forum improvements such as better smilies, maybe the ones on hongfire, and cleaner, more efficient code should make the site better. I'm all for change as long as it's not a total conversion, and is simply a cleaning up / modernization.
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Re: Better Call Out for Developers/coders

Post by SQ » Mon May 03, 2010 4:13 pm

By overhaul I wasn't specifically referring to 'redesign' but I agree.
Mainly with new emoticons. Those would be nice.
Or just our pitifully small selection of emotes all being able to be viewed without having to hit the 'view more'.
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Re: Better Call Out for Developers/coders

Post by Nya-chan Production » Mon May 03, 2010 5:24 pm

Themes as OS: No, why?
Cleaner code: Yes, definitely.
Smilies: Totally optional and mostly irrelevant. Do you want this forum to have thousand smilies after every post? :+) :+) :+) :+) :+) :+) :+) :+)
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Re: Better Call Out for Developers/coders

Post by kickass331 » Mon May 03, 2010 5:42 pm

Nya-chan Production wrote:Themes as OS: No, why?
Cleaner code: Yes, definitely.
Smilies: Totally optional and mostly irrelevant. Do you want this forum to have thousand smilies after every post? :+) :+) :+) :+) :+) :+) :+) :+)
Themes as OS simply because they tend to be the cleanest and nicest themes, not because they integrate well, I'm on a PS3 with buttons that look like windows 95, and themed buttons don't do anything when you click them. That's besides the point, I loathe smilies, and that's WHY I want better smilies, everybody putting 10 pixels of bullshit next to their ratings of AMVs is worse than nothing at all. If you're gonna have smilies, make them look nice. If you aren't gonna have smilies, then that's even BETTER. :pizza:
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Re: Better Call Out for Developers/coders

Post by SQ » Mon May 03, 2010 6:25 pm

Nya-chan Production wrote:Themes as OS: No, why?
Cleaner code: Yes, definitely.
Smilies: Totally optional and mostly irrelevant. Do you want this forum to have thousand smilies after every post? :+) :+) :+) :+) :+) :+) :+) :+)
We don't have that problem now, so I fail to see why it would become a problem with a different/better emote set.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of free ones you can just pick up off phpbb.org or anywhere, really.
But anyway, my specific gripe was mostly how we have a very small amount of smilies, yet we still have to click "view more smilies" to get to a few of them.
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Re: Better Call Out for Developers/coders

Post by kickass331 » Mon May 03, 2010 6:33 pm

SQ wrote:
Nya-chan Production wrote:Themes as OS: No, why?
Cleaner code: Yes, definitely.
Smilies: Totally optional and mostly irrelevant. Do you want this forum to have thousand smilies after every post? :+) :+) :+) :+) :+) :+) :+) :+)
We don't have that problem now, so I fail to see why it would become a problem with a different/better emote set.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of free ones you can just pick up off phpbb.org or anywhere, really.
But anyway, my specific gripe was mostly how we have a very small amount of smilies, yet we still have to click "view more smilies" to get to a few of them.
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... just saying
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Re: Better Call Out for Developers/coders

Post by SQ » Mon May 03, 2010 6:52 pm

I would think that the .org staff would have enough sense to pick an emote set that wasn't obnoxious.

I thought that would've been a given.
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Re: Better Call Out for Developers/coders

Post by kickass331 » Mon May 03, 2010 6:54 pm

SQ wrote:I would think that the .org staff would have enough sense to pick an emote set that wasn't obnoxious.

I thought that would've been a given.
actually I was saying that you can just use the img bbcode for smilies. The problem is most people are lazy and will put ugly ass forum smilies.
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Re: Better Call Out for Developers/coders

Post by Panky » Mon May 03, 2010 7:24 pm

I don't think there is a *real* need for hiring programmers. What was done up until now, is more than likely the base of the sites design/codes, and if there are needed changes, in most cases I'm pretty sure someone would get to do it. See dokidoki, he added the image tag to the amv's description. Like I said, if there's a big need for an specific change, I suppose it will definitely get changed eventually.

That being said, I'm in for a developers group like there was, but if there is any visible flaw the site is going through, or there isn't any activity at all from the current developers. Else, I don't see too much of a reason on making it. Adding too many people in one code can be confusing, and troublesome.

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