Having been a fan of the SDMB for several years, I was wondering if this would be a way I could give something back (and maybe others could to).
I’ve noticed that the board grinds to a halt at peak times, and searches take forever. I know there’s been a lot of debate about it and as far as I can see it’s fundamentally a resource problem.
On the other hand, I have been a professional software developer for many years, and I was wondering if there is any desire or need to have people volunteer to lend their programming skills to help speed up the board? I’ve had a lot of experience with MS Access, SQL Server and Oracle, as well as a lot of web programming languages.
Or is it the case that the board software is 3rd party source that mustn’t be messed with? Or, is it just a question of resources - too many Dopers, not enough servers, MIPS and bandwidth? If that’s the case, no amount of programming talent will help.
So - what is the policy on volunteers? Hey, it’s not often we programmers offer to do anything for free! (Linux notwithstanding
DarrenS - the Chicago Reader has purchased off-the-shelf software and the IS department is reluctant to “hack” it because once the source code has been modified you are no longer supported.
Of course, if you want to write another MB piece of software compatible with vBulletin (so that we don’t lose all our posts), and if it’s much faster, and you convince the Chicago Reader IS department to use it, and our performance problems go away, we’ll erect a virtual statue of you in ATMB.
Also, of course, the Powers that Be are understandably very reluctant about giving that kind of power to any old schmo who volunteers. The last time that one of the Teeming Millions decided to volunteer programming effort to “improve” the SDMB, the net result was the loss of three months of posts.
I don’t think any organization would accept unsolicited code submissions for use in a production environment.
But if you’re curious, the software that runs SDMB is a customized version of phpBB, which is written entirely in PHP, which is an interpretive language commonly used for constructing front-ends to databases such as MySQL.
