Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] [libreplanet-discuss] Help Wanted Site for Free Software Projects

[Assaf Gordon]

Hello,

(joining late to the discussion, adding few tidbits)

1.
Regarding "outdated" posts:
It might surprise you (it definitely surprised me) that some of these posts you 
consider "outdated" are not outdated at all. They are old, that's true - but 
not outdated.
In fact, I personally contacted many submitters, and many of them insisted that 
their posts remain as-is, even if they have been unchanged for years. Many also 
refused to update or refresh their posts.

You can read a bit more about our attempts here:
   sr #106581: doing something about stale jobs?
   https://savannah.gnu.org/support/?106581

2.
Regarding "automated removal":
At the time of the discussion (see link above), automatic removal was frowned 
upon.
There was a suggestion to manually contact posters and ask if the post is still
relevant, and if so update it.
From my humble experience with administrating savannah - I *highly* recommend 
against
anything that requires manual work.
If you do implement a new "help wanted" website - have an automated way to 
expire posts.
Of course, you might want to have a more sophisticated mechanism
to send email alerts about coming expirations, etc. - but that's
more complicated to implement.
Anything that requires manual work (and requires volunteers' time) will quickly
become a chore.

3.
> On Sun, Apr 23, 2017 at 01:38:49PM -0600, Bob Proulx wrote:
>>  Also the
>> Savane web interface has been suffering from a lack of volunteers for
>> updates for some time.  Therefore I can see the attraction of setting
>> up an independent site for this information.

On one hand, if there are volunteers out there that want to
improve the "help wanted" pages - why not hack directly on the savannah 
interface?
we always welcome more hackers, and the best place to start is here:
 https://savannah.gnu.org/maintenance/RunningSavaneLocally/
 https://savannah.gnu.org/maintenance/SavannahHackingIdeas/

On the other hand, starting from scratch is usually more fun
(and you won't be bound by FSF policies).

> Practically speaking, how easy would it be to extract just the 'help
> wanted' section of Savane and modify it to have the improvements I
> mentioned earlier (ie. expiring posts and such)?

If you want a database-dump of the relevant tables - that's easy.
Contact write to us at address@hidden and we
can find a way to make it work.

When you write "modify it" - do you mean the PHP code?
The links above are the best place to start to hack on the PHP code.

Alternatively,
There's also an attempt to write python/flask code to view the savannah
database - eventually it'll include the "help wanted" pages as well:
  https://varanusex.housegordon.org



Lastly (and this is only my personal opinion and is not necessarily
shared with other savannah hackers or FSF):
I'm fully supportive of moving savannah's "Help Wanted" section elsewhere,
and removing it from savannah.


regards,
 - assaf