bartervg
Make barter.vg open source
When barter.vg is open source, other (talented) coders have the option to contribute to, or learn from your codebase. The latter may be irrelevant, depending of the state of your code. However, I think it would be great if you let others contribute to barter. Some applications:
- Elaborate code reviews: A great learning experience when an implementation of something is bad or could be improved, as you learn why.
- Better bug tracking: Bug hunters can then pin point exactly what's causing it, so you don't have to figure it out yourself. Also, bugs can be found that don't necessarily appear on the surface of the site.
- More transparency: Users can see with their own eyes how responsible you are with their data and see exactly what their data is being used for. It makes barter.vg more trustworthy.
- Improve lifespan: This enables Barter to continue to exist, even when you won't be around.
- More features: Developers will now have a chance to add features to the site. They will work with their own copy of the site, add a feature, test it, then they will make a pull request (PR) of their version on Github. In a PR you can review exactly the code they added and make sure they don't add something bad. You can even add comments per line in your review, if you don't understand something, or wish to change something. Only after you are satisfied with the PR, you can accept and merge it with your main codebase. This works really well. I can tell from experience.
One major downside is that with open source, people can copy your site very easily. To battle this, you can add a LICENSE that tells them that you can't do that. Sure, people may ignore that, but I don't think it will get copied anyway for one simple reason: It's about the userbase. Copycats would have no chance against the original Barter's active users. Lestrades is pretty much an example of this.
I see that the help-wanted tag was added - what kind of help is needed?
You can start by just setting up Git and learning how to use the .gitignore file. Once you have all of your files checked in to version control and have a handle on the basics (all you really need to know to start is clone, pull, commit, and push - the rest can be Googled), you can create and check in MySQL schemas for the tables using phpMyAdmin or whatever other admin tool you use. I can give you access to the GroupBundl.es repository if you want to see how something like that would look.
Update: all of the frontend and much of the backend code is on GitHub now and I've taken steps to make the code more open source ready, such as using lower-risk API keys if they're accidentally revealed (API key of account with no games, no friends versus the main Barter Steam account). Yes, API keys or database passwords shouldn't be placed in public repos, but it seems to happen.
Not sure if or when this would become public.
@bartervg did the repo content get removed? There is no backend code in the repo and not much FE code either. I would love to be able to help fix a few bugs that I've found but the relevant files are not in the repo.
