We're always looking for ways to make it easier to contribute!
Forem 🌱
For Empowering Community
Welcome to the Forem codebase, the platform that powers dev.to. We are so excited to have you. With your help, we can build out Forem’s usability, scalability, and stability to better serve our communities.
What is Forem?
Forem is open source software for building communities. Communities for your peers, customers, fanbases, families, friends, and any other time and space where people need to come together to be part of a collective See our announcement post for a high-level overview of what Forem is.
dev.to (or just DEV) is hosted by Forem. It is a community of software developers who write articles, take part in discussions, and build their professional profiles. We value supportive and constructive dialogue in the pursuit of great code and career growth for all members. The ecosystem spans from beginner to advanced developers, and all are welcome to find their place…
One thing we've been considering is reducing the number of labels because it can get a bit overwhelming.
Top comments (11)
For people new to the codebase, I think it would help if more tickets pointed users in the general direction of what files they need to touch. It makes things a lot easier.
I think the problem is that there are some good labels set up at the moment but then you have to scroll through the comments, ask questions for clarification, and make sure the ticket hasn't already been picked up by someone else. I think sometimes contributors have to do a bit of work upfront to find a ticket they feel comfortable working on.
Filtering by a ticket that's assigned to someone or not could be good, but then you'd be missing out on tickets that were at one point assigned but are no longer being worked on.
Once someone volunteers on the issue, we generally assign it to them. This is also mentioned in the automatic reply we post on every new issue:
Alas not everyone always follows this process, but overall this seems to be working out quite nicely lately.
That's true - I think as a beginner to a repo you might not take that extra step of filtering though, and just default to looking through "good first issue".
Also I've found that sometimes there are some good tickets to work on that have already been picked up by someone else, but it will have been over a month or quite some time since it has been assigned to them and they never had the chance to work on it.
All good points and we're definitely aware of these issues. Maybe we could aid this process by automatically adding another label when assigning someone, but we're open to all suggestions 😃
There is one minor thing when you mention @forem /oss generally it appears in normal font weight not in bold like when you mention user. I was confused couple of times because of this (double checking if I typed it correctly). It would be nice if the text @forem /oss could also be made bold in Github comment.
Unfortunately it seems team mentions were primarily intended for internal use, there doesn't seem a way to make them work as expected when external contributors use them ☹️
On this end, do you think it would be helpful to have some sort of onboarding or welcome flow? I personally would love a "Start here" section in our contributing section of the readme. Or maybe a GitHub bot/Action that does this?
Just some freeflowing thoughts 😅 Thanks for raising this point!
Yes! It would be great if users didn't have to browse through Github issues. It would be pretty cool if there was even some sort of a UI that would present issues in a more appealing/friendly format (but that's probably outside the scope of Forem/DEV).
Test2 (sorry, was trying to reproduce a commenting bug but its not letting me delete this comment now).
A longer project but, I would love to see the Forem docs become more localized!