Neocolours needs your help.
If there's one thing that didn't go well on the old Neocolours, it's the poorer maintenance that occured after some time. Scripts stopped working, old poses were duplicated, detection didn't always happen properly, and in general too many things depended on one person to fix.
One of my goals while writing the scripts is to change that. There is a fairly large group of people that seems willing to help us, and even though the keys to the site aren't going to be handed to just anyone, there are a number of tasks that any responsible person can do.
Part of this sharing of power has already been done. At this moment, Jazzy, Kamil and I have theoretical access to pretty much anything that matters - databases, scripts and so on. We don't use what we don't need - I myself have no reason to poke around in anything forums-related - but one of us disappearing will still leave others able to access the scripts and resolve things in some way.
There is more, though. Just as there are moderators to take care of problems on the forums (as unlikely as they tend to be), I could use some help on the site as well.
First of all, most of the below things give access to an admin panel, which also gives some faster access to the Turmaculus alerts: no confirmation needed, and a couple of overrides. Of course, please don't abuse this - but then again, none of these things should be.
To the point.. In the end, what do I need help with?
- Old poses uploads. I've added some old poses, but it takes me some time to find and upload them. Your duty, if you'd choose to accept it, would be to hunt down old poses (a number of them were posted elsewhere), find the day that they were uploaded, and upload them to the server with the appropriate date.
- Force detection. It occasionally happens that the detection of poses fails. Click the button, and they'll be tested again.
- Rainbow Pool checks. <strike>These currently have to be done manually, because haven't gotten around to figuring out what cookies I need to send. I'm too lazy to always do so, so occasionally there needs to be view source -> copy and paste, for recently updated pets, or just a full run or whatever. With enough people, it shouldn't need to be done that often.</strike> - Okay, I can do this manually now
- Layout stuff. See another topic for this, any designs (in XHTML/CSS), ideas, bits of code, and so on are welcome.
- Coding. This has vaguely come up a few times, and it's something stuff needs to be decided on. More help is good. Even if it's just basic coding, it's basic (tedious) coding I don't have to do. On the other hand, giving just anyone access to the code will lead to disaster - malicious code can be inserted, scripts can be messed up, giving non-working or extremely bugged pages and (intentional or accidental) security holes can open up. Some sort of CVS server for private use could work to work together on this (the code is already stored in a local one), but needs some infrastructure to set it up, and some agreements on uploading stuff would have to be made. All or some of the scripts could be opened up as well to the public, but I'm not too keen on this - although it could be interesting to see, general Neopets behaviour makes me wonder whether we'd see a "Look! Our own colour finding and viewing system is running at ..." without any attribution.
- I occasionally desire some information. At the moment, I do. <strike>Although I can, when given time, figure this out on my own, I'm secretly hoping that someone already has this information so that I can save myself some time and spend more on actual programming. For a number of Neopets pages, you need to be logged in. My scripts can do this by sending the appropriate cookies. However, a large number of them are set by Neopets, with some appearing to be related to the advertising instead, some being session cookies, and some actual permanent ones that'd keep me logged in. I haven't been able to find out yet which of these are which, and although I can experiment, if anyone has done some research into this, it'd be appreciated. I recall some people knowing more about this during the recent cookie grabber incident. If not, it'll just take me some more time getting this to work.</strike> - It was easier than I thought. No longer needed.
* Random appropriate name inserted to give people a reason to go on a tangent to discuss them, distracting them from controversial issues.