What would you like done?
I have a few different projects for our discourse community that I’d LOVE to hire someone to help with. If you’re interested in any of the individual projects below, or all of them, please reach out.
A quick intro:
I currently run a successful 3d arts service company called Beyond-FX. As part of our community outreach, we also own and run the only online community dedicated to real-time visual effects: www.realtimevfx.com. We currently have 2.5k users, and 100-300 daily active users, which feels like it might be the extent of the visual effects industry
It took a fair amount of community trust to get people supporting this site in the way that we have - we now have a tremendous amount of good will coming from the community, so I haven’t been heavy handed (at all) with my company Beyond-FX’s name on the site. We’ve barely begun to implement a revenue stream through it - starting with a very poorly integrated job’s board for recruiters, but there are a few other opportunities that I’d like to explore, if I can find an engineer interested.
Projects:
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Make sure the site is stable/secure/scalable
While I’m fairly competent as an admin on my own, we’re starting to hit numbers that make me want to double check everything. I have SSL running, I’m using ssh keys to access the data, and I vaguely recall running through a tutorial to setup some basic load balancing on the server, but who the hell knows if I did that right. I’d love to have you, or someone you recommend, to go through and make sure:
Is it secure? Is it stable? Are there scalability concerns? (i.e. should i prevent users from uploading graphics and force them over to imgur, etc) Are the extensions / customizations I’ve implemented causing unnecessary server/client issues? Is there more I should do to deliver the content around the world? (Cdn?) Is there more I can do to ensure stability or that I’ll be notified of issues? -
Correctly Setup Email Integration with Discourse
This is a little embarrassing, but I initially ran through the setup, and had reply by email working ~70% of the time, but had quite a few errors in the log that I didn’t have time to explore at the time. I disabled it “temporarily” but have never had time to go back and set it up again. I’d love to hand this task off to someone. -
Ad / Affiliate Link Revenue
I’m not sure ads are the acceptable way to go, but there are quire a few plugins that I’d be interested to try. I’ve never worked with any ad delivery mechanisms, or designs, so if this is your thing, I’d love some guidance to find non-intrusive ways to lay them out on the site.
Or if not ads, I’d also like to explore affiliate programs that may/may not bring in a few dollars. Since the community does have good will, I expect users would be willing to consider making purchases through our affiliate links The problem here is that there’s currently no way / place to surface those links to the users (classically a footer on the website). -
Elegant “Site Maintenance” Page -
I suspect this is actually really simple, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to work my ssl certificates such that I can take down the discourse server and perform server maintenance (note, full Digital Ocean droplet, not just maintenance within the Discourse Docker), and redirect to another server with a simple “We’ll be back shortly page”. Can someone help? I have the maintenance page, and even the other droplet setup already… -
Jobs Board
We currently have a Jobs/Recruiting board using an overly priced 3rd party service that doesn’t integrate into the forum at all - we’ve asked them if they’d let us integrate it better, but they’re going to charge us an ever higher base subscription rate. I’m curious to see if we can build and integrate our own. This is a big project, but one that we can build a revenue stream around, so if you’r interested, I’d love to chat with you and come up with a price scheme so I can build a business model around it. -
Portfolio Pages / Better Featured Article Pages
At the moment, the site is just a communication platform, but there’s a lot of opportunity for us to grow it into more than that - these are HUGE and probably expensive projects, but I’d love to hire an engineer that comes with Discourse familiarity, because the community conversation should be the backbone of everything else we create for it.
When do you need it done?
None of these are urgent - but I’d love solutions for them. I’m happy to work on/around anyone’s schedule that’s interested in tackling these with me.
What is your budget, in $ USD that you can offer for this task?
I listed a wide variety of different projects here, with lots of unknowns, so I’d like you to tell me how much they should cost. What I can say is this: I’m very interested, and able, to pay correctly for the time required to fix these. I’ve build my business around correctly rewarding my employees for their contributions, and I want to do the same here.