Members developing code for the new platform with us

roxy_r

kathleen414 that is exactly what got me excited too! 😃

mrjeeves sure, we can start with a group PM and see where we go from there. I think something like Slack would be good once we get into the meaty bit, but there will be a few things that we might want to do before, as we get ourselves ready.

Cheers bluemoonbaz, if you know anyone interested send them my way! Happy to have them

pault1974

roxy_r ive sent you a PD.

munglespoon

roxy_r

I have skills to review code and write in both of these languages. However, could we allow this thread to develop as a place to discuss the matter, please, and discourage people from just posting their thanks and approval?

roxy_r

Hey munglespoon, I think at this stage it is great to see people showing their support. Not everyone will have the skills to get involved and I think it is a great thing to see that regardless of that, people are on board with the idea. If I at any point you feel like the conversation could be more productive otherwise let us know and we will jump in. Also, I think the flow will settle once we know who is interested and start working on getting that set up.

Coming back to the project, would you be interested in giving this a go? 🙂

Awesome pault1974 ! I think I will start adding names to the OP just to make sure we capture everyone.

pault1974

roxy_r I'd like to volunteer for this. 😀

munglespoon

roxy_r Hey munglespoon, I think at this stage it is great to see people showing their support. Not everyone will have the skills to get involved and I think it is a great thing to see that regardless of that, people are on board with the idea. If I at any point you feel like the conversation could be more productive otherwise let us know and we will jump in. Also, I think the flow will settle once we know who is interested and start working on getting that set up.

Coming back to the project, would you be interested in giving this a go? 🙂

My experience reading other parts of the forum means that I am not confident that this settling down will happen, but you are in charge. You can tentatively put me down at the moment so I can start to learn what will be required and then I can give a more firm commitment to specific aspects that I would be comfortable committing to.

roxy_r

munglespoon sure thing!
There will be a bit of time in the beginning for us to figure out what everyone needs to learn until the platform team powers though some of the fixes on the list. You can use that time to also check things out and see if you think it would be of interest to you.

formulaone

Awesome!

It's nice to see you already have some members taking part!

🙂

jaymailsays

roxy_r feel free to drop me a PM if you want to have a chat

Hi @roxy_r ,
It is virtually impossible to initiate a PD (private discussion) formerly PM on mobile.
It is fine, if you are replying to a saved message but not when you want to PD a member for the first time.

Any thoughts on when this fault will be addressed?

roxy_r

Hi jaymailsays, I just sent you a PD in case you want to ask something and also gave Alex a nudge to look at why you cannot do that.

ujo55

mrjeeves
I honestly wasn't talking about you, I made that clear I thought, I was talking about what may happen in the future.
My point remains if giffgaff find it necessary o perform background checks on those participating in charity nominations and removing some nominations then surely the same or greater level of scrunity should be applied to anyone writing code.
It was certainly not aimed at you I promise, just concerned about the future.
I've no programming skills alas, just a member who was unjustly named and shamed by giffgaff by implication.
Perhaps roxy_r would like to comment further.

ujo55

roxy_r
A question related to this proposal regarding security of the platform and members information.
Whilst I am in no way suggesting that anyone of the existing members has anything but the best possible motives in contributing code to further the community interests, what of the future.
Could it be possible that someone could join the community and contribute code for less ethical purposes?
Will those making contributions be vetted, and how will the code they contribute be evaluated to ensure it contains no nasty surprises?
As background checks are carried out on members making charity nominations to ensure they have no undisclosed connection to a charity, according to @t_will, surely much more stringent checks are required for this purpose if the forum and member details are not to be compromised not now but at some point in the future.

mrjeeves

ujo55

Obviously, since you're talking about me as well as the rest of the members who have volunteered, I'm not the best person to answer this.

Initially, we're just developing a dark theme for teh community. We do this in a styling language called "CSS" (Cascading Style Sheets).

In CSS, there is basically no way to do anything malicious. You can only customise how things look.

My current dark theme is totally open source so anyone can look at what is behind it and you can even contribute: https://github.com/davwheat/giffgaff-flarum-dark-mode

In the future, if we start going more in-depth into the forums, I'm sure there will be peer review stages where people check each others' code for any issues, then likely a stage where some giffstaffers look over it, too.

giffgaff likely has checks planned on us of some description, whether it be a coding test or something else.

I'll let a giffstaffer/roxy give you a more concrete answer as this is more as a guide but rest assured: the chance of anything bad coming out of this is less than members putting all of their details into one of the common scam messages.

munglespoon

ujo55 A question related to this proposal regarding security of the platform and members information.
Whilst I am in no way suggesting that anyone of the existing members has anything but the best possible motives in contributing code to further the community interests, what of the future.
Could it be possible that someone could join the community and contribute code for less ethical purposes?
Will those making contributions be vetted, and how will the code they contribute be evaluated to ensure it contains no nasty surprises?

Open source has a long and proud tradition. Most of the world wide web is based on Apache open source technology, built entirely by volunteers. Wikipedia is built entirely by volunteers and manintains higher degress of accuracy and currency than many news and encyclopedic sites that rely on paid labour. The difference between a volunteer and a paid person is not in their integrity. There is one of the UK's leading experts in this exact field on this community. Unfortunately he's not currently... er... I'll leave that there.

mrjeeves

ujo55 Don't worry. I didn't take any offense because you made an amazing point.

I know that you weren't implying any of us would try to "sabotage" this, so-to-speak, but it is possible and a genuine issue they will have to look at and determine what to do about it.

stephenpperry

roxy_r THIS. COULD. BE. MONUMENTAL! So cool for the community to have the opportunity to write code for the community! I'm in love!

merew

Awesome, fab way for the community to build the community

jeremylalou

Why not, I haven't coded in a long time. Is it a way for giffgaff to get unpaid work done though?

mrjeeves

jeremylalou

In a way it is, I guess.

This all sparked from us wanting a dark mode on the forums anyway, so I like to think of it as a way of us getting what we want.

ujo55

jeremylalou Of course it is.
Why pay software developers to do the work
when members will do it for nothing.

benjamin567

ujo55 for many people, they have joined this project to improve their coding skills. For others, it is cool enough to develop something and for it to be implemented on a mobile network's website.

I can assure you, the software devs are working very hard and a dark mode is not at the top of their list. Therefore, if the members want a dark mode and are willing to offer their skills then why not? It is literally called the "mobile network run by you" so I think that it is great that giffgaff are getting members involved like this

roxy_r

Heya folks,

Just as an assurance, when it comes to code developed by anyone internally, we do have security checks that we perform before adding anything to the code base. When it comes to this project we will also be working closely with the product team and making sure that everything is nice and secure from the very beginning and then go through the normal security checks. We also have a bunch of automated security tests that continuously monitor for vulnerabilities.

When it comes to the type of code we will be developing, benjamin567 is spot on. With the new platform there is, as you might imagine ,quite a long list of fixes and improvements that the product team needs to make. Some will be more urgent then others depending on the wide-scale impact that they have.

We thought, that if there are some features that are low risk security wise and nice to have mainly for the most active forum users, we can give some of our willing members a chance to have a go at writing it and then we would only have to review it.

There will be a payback element with this of course, but the reason why it is not mentioned in the OP is because we want members to volunteer for this for the right reasons: making our forum lives better, learning together and making the most our of this new platform by being part of making it our own. It is also a great way for us to keep the run by you alive by giving our members an opportunity to get closer to us and do something that they don't normally get a chance of doing, only if they want to of course.

m0dcm sure, you can use this post to suggest and put forward your ideas. I have not finished the full framework just yet but if we think a different thread might be good then we can make that happen. What do you think?