Project ideas for Google Summer of Code 2017

[erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)]

Continuing the discussion from List of project ideas for Google Summer of Code 2016:

Please post your links to any appropriate GSoC ideas here. If you’re not familiar with GSoC, briefly put it’s an event run by Google wherein they pay students to work on an open source project for 3 months. We participated last year, and will be applying this year as well.

Google Summer of Code

If you have a feature on your wishlist that fits the scope of a 3-month student project, share it here!

@downey

One tip from our org as a 10-year GSoC veteran: Take any project scope that a seasoned open source developer could do in 3 months, then cut that scope in half. A typical student should be able to get that done in the allotted time.

(Of course, having some “bonus point” items is also always a good idea.)

If you have an idea that hasn’t been discussed before, please start a new topic about it first and then link to it from here. Feel free to share multiple links in one reply.

I’ll be updating the official doc with your suggestions:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/wiki/Summer-of-Code-2017-Ideas-List

[jafeth.diazc (Jafeth Díaz)]

Hello @erlend_sh,

I see that Post Slack snapshot to Discourse project idea is not anymore in the GSoC 2017 ideas list. I think there is already someone working on it, according to this:

Slack: Post chat snapshot to Discourse

Certainly worth considering. @vinothkannans is gonna be working on this, so if our initial plan fails, he can try the “pull approach” instead.

Are there other project ideas that could be removed?

[erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)]

The rest is still up for grabs.

All of the ideas listed are enhancements that we genuinely care about though, so on rare occasions the core team might end up taking on one of those ideas, e.g. if a client has asked for it.

To avoid conflict, we highly recommend openly inquiring about the project idea(s) you’re interested in as early on as possible.

[Shriyansh_Agrawal]

Hello Everyone,

I’m a GSoC aspirant and would like to work with Discourse Community this summer. Is there any IRC Channel or forum where all the aspirants are discussing about the ideas, because I can’t find one

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

That forum… you just found it

[Shriyansh_Agrawal]

Oh! That’s great.
How would I start contributing to Discourse?? Though I have my college Mid-sems this week but, I’ll be active after it.

[erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)]

It’s explained in the Ideas List as well as the Application Guide.

1. Read our Contribution Guidelines.

2. Find some #pr-welcome and/or #starter-task topics that you’d feel comfortable diving into.

[tobiaseigen]

I’d love to see this happen as part of GSoC - would go a long way to offering community spaces for people who speak different tongues but have shared interests and needs.

https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-translator/32630/86?u=tobiaseigen

And this:

Translate email notifications and digests into user preferred locale language

Many of the people in my community who don’t speak English also don’t log in often because they live in parts of the world where Internet access is scarce. So they participate by email. It occurs to me that it would be quite useful for these people to get emails from our discourse in their language. Has anyone looked into this or considered it? Digests and notifications could all be provided in the user’s preferred language, perhaps with the original text clearly identified directly below it. W…

[david (David Taylor)]

@erlend_sh I see that the “multiple email addresses” project has been removed from the ideas list. Was it decided that this feature isn’t wanted any more? Or has someone taken it on?

[erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)]

Yes, “multiple email addresses” will be handled internally; we definitely still want it!

In retrospect it was a bit overambitious of me to add that to the ideas list.

[deevolution (Gentry Demchak)]

I might be a bit late to the party. I just found out about the GSoC program yesterday and submitted a brief proposal !

I just posted a potential enhancement or plugin that could be built into the composer / editor window. Link the discussion is here.

The gist of the plugin/enhancement is that a user’s post could be pre-flagged and they could be notified that what they are about to post may be toxic and that they should take time to review it. I think the Google Jigsaw team has been working towards developing something like this. @codinghorror linked google’s perspectiveAPI. I haven’t had time to play around with it myself but it looks promising from my initial glance. Maybe a plugin that uses that api?

What are your thoughts/feelings on something like this?