A central "Help wanted" page for all projects

[ThinkSome]

I'm of the opinion that many people would be interested in contributing in the various projects of the spring ecosystem, but are often turned away because of (not limited to):
1) the belief that doing so requires one to be a programmer
2) not knowing what needs to be done
3) not knowing who to ask for guidance
4) existing work being poorly documented
5) development community being fragmented

I could find no central page where people could post either "designer/artist/programmer/... wanted for help with implementing feature X in project Y" or general "designer/artist/programmer wanted for help on project Y". With these I do not mean GSoC-like serious projects, but small few-hours/weekend projects in the former and open-ended/use-your-imagination/see-separate-issue-tracker work in the latter"

Can e.g. https://springrts.com/wiki/Contributing (currently empty) be made an official place to post such "advertisements"? This page would list everything, from help on Spring, to lobbies, servers, games, websites and public relations, and would be linked in the main menus of websites such as this one, lobby client about->help wanted and other easy to find locations.

[FLOZi]

Wiki is a poor format for what you are after imo, forum is better. 'Contribution Corner' or such.

[gajop]

GitHub "help wanted" labels in issues. If they can't be bothered to check the issue tracker don't expect any meaningful contribution.

[ThinkSome]

Wiki is a poor format for what you are after imo, forum is better. 'Contribution Corner' or such.

I'd rather have something where people could quickly ctrl+f the whole page than use the search box. Plus it would be hard to [re]move completed/obsolete tasks. GSoC ideas are also not in forum but wiki form, probably for good reasons.

GitHub "help wanted" labels in issues. If they can't be bothered to check the issue tracker don't expect any meaningful contribution.

"the issue tracker"? Since when is there only one?

[FLOZi]

Any such thing will require back and forth discussions, wiki is extremely poor format for that. Thread need only be locked to show that the request is complete.

[gajop]

GitHub "help wanted" labels in issues. If they can't be bothered to check the issue tracker don't expect any meaningful contribution.

"the issue tracker"? Since when is there only one?

There isn't just one of course. Go to the GitHub page of the project you're interested and start from there. This is what most people do when contributing to open source projects these days, why invent a convoluted monolith system for Spring?
Wiki is especially bad as most such issues require discussion, which issues/PRs are basically made for.

[FLOZi]

The downside to yours is e.g. If I post an issue on an obscure git repo asking about how best to implement canals, who will even be aware of it?

[MasterBel2]

Any such thing will require back and forth discussions, wiki is extremely poor format for that. Thread need only be locked to show that the request is complete.

Wiki could link to a forum post, in theory? It'll still be useful for having all the information in one place, but then it can hand off the task of discussion to issue-specific threads? Or would that make too many threads? I don't think so, considering that this forum isn't particularly busy anyway. A few more threads in the content developers' subforums shouldn't be an issue, should it?

Or if you were to link to github, then the wiki page could link to github issue pages of projects who are looking for contribution? But using issues does make sense… they just have to be used. .-.

Except that contribution doesn't always come in the form of code also. And this is where wiki/forum would be useful? For example, work on the website, or writing a new news post for the latest release? As in, completely non-coding things.

[gajop]

@Flozi, Ah, well for things like that forums might be a better option.

Is the point to offer easy issues which can be contributed to by newbs or to provide a discussion (with a proof of concept implementation at the most) for difficult issues?
I was thinking he was mostly interested about newbs hence why I suggested GitHub issues.

[ThinkSome]

Discussion would be important as well. Ok, I guess we can start with forum threads and then in the future perhaps condense all the issues on a wiki page, should forum search prove to be insufficient.

Can somebody now create the "contribution corner" or "help wanted" subforum?

[gajop]

Discussion would be important as well. Ok, I guess we can start with forum threads and then in the future perhaps condense all the issues on a wiki page, should forum search prove to be insufficient.

Can somebody now create the "contribution corner" or "help wanted" subforum?

Content Development subforum should suffice (this is where questions have been going traditionally, and it's pretty deserted anyway). Start there and see how it goes :)

[ThinkSome]

I cannot post directly to "Content Development" and none of its subforums fit the post with which I would like to start with: namely "Help wanted, add player lobby client name & version reporting support to protocol and Uberserver (langs: XML,Python)".

[gajop]

I cannot post directly to "Content Development" and none of its subforums fit the post with which I would like to start with: namely "Help wanted, add player lobby client name & version reporting support to protocol and Uberserver (langs: XML,Python)".

Is Lobby Clients & Server really such a bad place to ask?
Honestly as you seem so keen to do this, I wouldn't mind and create a subforum for this, but it's something an admin would have to do.

[ThinkSome]

"Lobby Clients & Server" is not under "Content Development" :)

But ok...