Hello everyone,

I want to talk about our contribution guide running at https://contribute.funkwhale.audio/

Currently it has serious technical issues, mostly because it wasn't maintained for a long time. We would need to update a lot of dependencies and probably also change a huge set of code in order to make it work again.

So I am asking myself if its worth the effort. Lets dig into this a bit.

We are a small team and we are here to maintain Funkwhale, eventually retribute as well. The Contribution guide is yet another tool, with technical overhead. We would need to find resources to maintain the tool, and I'd like to avoid investing into another repository/project.

I doubt that we gain a lot of contributors through the tool. I don't have any tracking numbers, its just an intention I get from reading issues and talking to people in our chat.

A huge problem I see is that even if we can people show what tasks should be worked on, they are not on the platform we use for our day-to-day work. They cannot interact. I think if people really want to contribute, we need them to be on our Gitlab instance as well.

I talked to @Sporiff and I think we shouldn't just drop the tool without replacement. But there is a technically much simpler solution: We can put he hints to our contribution guide, providing an entry point for new contributors. We can still link to specific issue filters on Gitlab to guide interested people to issues they might be able to solve to get a quick success. In the future we could also fetch data from the Gitlab API to display it in the text, but this would be much less technical overhead than yet another, external tool.

The idea for a timetable is to deprecate the contribution tool, lock or archive the projects on gitlab or weblate to avoid people investing a lot of time into it, rework the contribution guide in our documentation, add a redirect from contribution.funkwhale.audio -> the right section in the docs and finally delete the tool from our server.

I'd appreciate some feedback, especially if you notice that I am missing an important point here. Let me know!

Happy funking! 🐋