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(Potential FAQ entry) How do I contribute code to Barbelith?

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15:24 / 28.05.07

For those among us interested in improving Barbelith's code and donating our time to increase quality and implement administration-approved features, there should perhaps be a wiki FAQ entry or even a forum on the matter.

I, for one, would happily give the Underground a happy XHTML rewrite (with the addition of a doctype, for starters...) and work toward W3C compliance. That being said, I wouldn't want to especially change the appearance of Barbelith as it's already very nice. Its markup could just use a stern talking-to. I would also implement "beta" versions of Barbelith in their own website to allow users to avoid brokitude when it occurs.

If there is some chunk of etiquette floating around here discouraging such enquiry, I've failed to find it (and I apologize).

Cheers!

*

15:49 / 28.05.07

Ahahahahahaha.

No, there's no etiquette discouraging such an inquiry, but it is part of an ongoing bellyache, so you may get a bunch of other posters screaming in frustration, but it's not you they're screaming at.

Just thought I'd let you know before the fact.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

15:49 / 28.05.07

Well, for a lot of people's peace of mind I guess they'd prefer not to let someone who's only just joined get involved. It's Tom's call, so you could PM him, but he's not let people who have been here for many years near the code so I'd say you were wasting your time.

16:07 / 28.05.07

The separated beta should help to assuage the concerns of potential code vandalism, as any contributors would have read-only access to the main code tree and would only be modifying a test copy.

17:44 / 28.05.07

Int, see here and here for discussion on why you're highly unlikely to get anywhere near the code in the near future.

Sorry, dude, as I'm sure you'll soon realise if you read those threads, many of us are very unhappy with the current situation.

18:45 / 28.05.07

Hmmm. But if'n you sets up beta versions of your OWN code... I imagine there would be some excitement.

19:14 / 28.05.07

Grant, that's what I had in mind. I think I'll start coding now, with or without support from the Barbelith community, simply as a pet project. If no one wants to adopt it, fine by me. Of course, as has been pointed out, I'm a new user and I still need to make a concerted effort to learn what users in the community like and don't like, and what features are useful. Once I have a "roughly working" example, I'll post a link.

19:40 / 28.05.07

I think I might like you

20:59 / 28.05.07

Yes, I was thinking exactly what grant said.

Just promise that if you build it and it becomes successful, you won't go becoming famous and deserting us.

Essential Dazzler

23:23 / 28.05.07

*Do we have to check to make sure we aren't het-flirting? I'll be retrained.*

This is a very good idea interval, I'm really looking forward to how you progress. Are updates going to be frequent?

Of course, if things do become fruitful, what do we call it?

Essential Dazzler

23:24 / 28.05.07

Restrained, sorry.

Mon Oncle Ignatius

01:45 / 29.05.07

Not such a Freudian slip?

Good luck, Interval - it's a bold move, but one which could be welcomed here at a guess.

16:39 / 29.05.07

Updates will more likely than not be frequent, as I'm re-entering the student life for two years. I welcome any and all input you may have; feel free to dump it in this thread.

16:57 / 29.05.07

Well, one of the things I've been very interested in (and utterly incapable of doing myself) is creating a distributed moderation mod for phpBB - something that allows groups of moderators to vote on moderation decisions.

By creating it as a mod, it seems like it'd be easier to plug it into different sorts of communities to see how it works on a social level.

18:04 / 29.05.07

I like it when!

Okay, what about distributed banning? If a group of moderators, say 7, decides that someone is undesirable, they have the power, collectively, to give them the boot. I'd like to see something lke that.

Anyone want to give Interval a hand here?

18:59 / 29.05.07

Good ideas.

Today I've been fooling around with basic things on the main page, mostly working with shiny new CSS. My brother's server is randomly dead, so I'll prod him to revive it this evening; I may be able to post a pre-pre-preview of the front page then.

One of the things I was considering doing is a rather neat little feature, and one that I'm not sure has been implemented anywhere. I'm thinking of making per-user private PHP-generated RSS feeds such that the user can choose to watch certain threads or forums. It makes more sense than notification emails, and since RSS works rather nicely with Thunderbird and other modern intra-bloggo-tube gadgets, I'd like to give it a try.

Another thing I want to do, for the benefit of the forum and the universe at large, is make my code open-source. It's going to be version-controlled in a Subversion tree on the server, so everyone will have (at least) read access to the PHP. We can do other neat things like say 'publish to /var/www on svn commit' with hooks.

Anyway, back to coding..

*

20:12 / 29.05.07

Are those different from the RSS feeds we have?

Scuse me, not terribly technically savvy, but interested in following the process. If I can help in some noncoding way, I'll be delighted.

20:59 / 29.05.07

Somewhat. Those are public, and coarse-control. But say you want two specific threads from a forum to be fed to you, and only updated when someone has posted after your post. This would be more selective.

Anyway. Before you visit this link, chew on the following caveats.

- My brother's server is prehistoric, and held together with elastic bands, chewing gum and lego. With this in mind, plz 2 not b DOS'ing him or swamping him with traffic.
- I make no claim as to the stability, usability or edibility of the test site's contents. If your browser catches fire, please don't sue me; I'd rather bring marshmallows.
- Yes, I know all of the links are broken. I only started today.
- Yes, I know that only https and not http is working; this is because the local ISP blocks :80.

Now that that's out of the way, peruse my brand-spanking-new, table-hell-free, W3C-compliant, no money down beta front page!

https://barbel.ath.cx

21:21 / 29.05.07

There are two things I'd be wary of - using the name Barbelith and using Tom's design. As a test page I doubt there'd be an issue, but you'll need to... tread very carefully with stuff like that.

I'm sure you're already aware of this, though, and have just gone with that while you're testing things out, but it's best if it's pointed out now, just in case.

22:10 / 29.05.07

Randy, thanks for the cautionary note. I'll add some sort of disclaimer.

00:17 / 30.05.07

Nice go so far, interval.

Are you considering any modifications to the current structure of the front-end layout? It would be cool if there was a front page feed showing the most recent threads, posted to threads or as you suggested, selected threads by the registered poster. Users would then get an indication of what's going on under the hood.

If you're feeling especially frisky, maybe you'll consider making the layout em-based.

I do realize that I'm saying this from the comfort of my desk chair, so I'm just throwing these things out there.

00:56 / 30.05.07

You're right, of course. In the first run I just copied the pixel values that the old site used.

02:06 / 30.05.07

Pacific State, I suppose you have a (perhaps temporary) answer.

The test content now lives on https://barbel.ath.cx. It's not completely em-ified, but at least the text sizes in IE now. Also, I find it kind of funny that the designer (Cal, I assume) wrote the CSS to prefer "Lucida Grande", when all boxen I've seen have "Lucida Sans Unicode". As a result, the "new" font will seem quite different, but is closer to what the designer originally intended. Whether to keep the other one for nostalgia's sake is kind of an unimportant question at this point. Just musing.

Whee fun.

02:33 / 30.05.07

So I'm stupid, and it's a mac font.

Silly grasshopper
Google it before speaking.
Subtract foot from mouth.

01:45 / 31.05.07

It's cool. You'll find that people like Zeldman enjoy using the mac-based font first. I usually lead with this font when I'm not using a serif for body text like georgia.

I believe that the other font you mentioned was the commonly found linux based font out in the wild.

I wouldn't be surprised if you already knew about this spot, but Typetester is pretty useful.

*

16:33 / 22.06.07

So... what's new?

Would it be a terrible terrible thing if I were to make a, like, survey about what people would like to see in a Blith2: The Next Generation? Because I'm curious.

17:15 / 22.06.07

No, I say go for it. Right now I'm absolutey gipping for a 'Lith 2 - here's hoping Interval is making some headway.

Closed for Business Time

17:24 / 22.06.07

Zippy, would that be a quantitative online survey using something ala Surveymonkey, or a qualitative one using the board (there's already loads of material here in Policy which sits ready for dissection and re-assemblage), or both, or something completely different and altogether wonderful?

Here's me hoping for the latter.

And yeah, interval, if you're there, what's cooking?

*

18:09 / 22.06.07

Er... I was thinking a quantitative one with lots of comments, and discussion in a thread. But I can't afford an upgrade to the pro version of surveymonkey.

... maybe a yahoo-group?

16:07 / 28.06.07

Ganesh said he might come back to a Barbelith that was modern and worked!

If we make a new Barbelith, Ganesh will come back!

Let's make a new Barbelith!

23:42 / 28.06.07

Easy answer, Vanilla plus a distributed moderation system plug-in and you're golden. If I had plies of cash I'd pay someone to do it *sigh*

14:13 / 30.06.07

I've been dreaming of, instead of clearly defined stripes, being able to tag discussions as covering more then one area (but running with the current deliniations), and also of replying to specific posts and so having multiple branches, possibly of different tags / levels of formality.

THis strikes me as making everything less messy and solving the problems the original "roving threads" were meant to (but never did, because I'm not sure they ever actually moved).

Would this even be anywhere near as good as I like to think it would be? or anything like anything you are interested in, interval?

13:44 / 02.07.07

being able to tag discussions as covering more then one area (but running with the current deliniations), and also of replying to specific posts and so having multiple branches, possibly of different tags / levels of formality.

Interest seconded - I think I called this "flagging" once upon a time, but "tagging" makes more sense.

*

14:47 / 02.07.07

Tagging is a function of one of the Vanilla extensions I saw after looking that up. Distributed moderation, however, is not.

21:55 / 02.07.07

Vanilla does look pretty good though, and being open source with the ability for add-ons, is promising for different and unique modifications. I may have misunderstood, but it seemed in some cases you could ask developers and they might write in the functionality.

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