Hi all,
You may or may not have noticed that the 'meetups' feature on the Forum (accessible under 'Nearest meetups' in the sidebar) is a little broken. Meetups are sometimes repeated anywhere from two to twelve times; sadly this doesn't reflect the oft-anticipated explosion in EA activity, but rather a problem with the Forum code. We're still tracking the precise problem down, but the repeated meetups are due to people submitting them multiple times, as there's currently no acknowledgement that a meetup was successfully posted on submission. There's no need to submit multiple times; doing so once works. Except that another problem is that clicking on meetup titles currently takes you to an error page, rather than to the page full of details it used to.
We're sorry for the problems and the delay in fixing them. This is partly due to working with the codebase being as difficult as explaining the risk posed by AI to your granny. (This isn't wholly surprising as we[/Forum creator Ryan Carey] inherited it from LessWrong, who forked it from Reddit, and even many of the original developers don't fully understand it.) But I'm sure it's also partly due to errors on our part, which we'll find when we track down what's going on.
Of course, if anyone would like to help out with this or other valuable EA coding projects then we'd love to hear from you. There are some great members of the community working on this (like Alex Richard, Joshua David, Patrick Brinich-Langlois, and Peter Hurford, who helps to coordinate the tech work). But we're still particularly short of people who can make a reliable commitment to do volunteer programming. The Forum is written in Python and though I have to concede that it's tricky to work with in some respects I'd encourage people to get in touch with Ozzie Gooen whatever your skills. If it would make a difference we can sometimes offer small stipends to help cover time spent on EA projects.
Some of you may also be interested in following (or helping out with) a related project: getting as many EA events as possible that have been posted around the web (for example as Facebook group events) into an RSS feed and thence publishing it on places like the Forum.
Tom
(On behalf of the various community members helping Ryan out with the Forum)
Is the forum code open source?
Yes, the community working version is at https://github.com/tog22/eaforum and the deployed code is at https://github.com/tricycle/eaforum . Anyone can suggest and work on bug fixes and feature suggestions via https://github.com/tog22/eaforum/issues (or even better by emailing Ozzie and then getting passed on).
Tom, can you clarify what the relationship is between the EA Hub and the EA Forum (If anything)? It seems like those links point at different things.
To clarify a little more, they're totally separate codebases I believe.
Whoops, wrong links. Corrected.
...and for suggestions, the EA project page on the .impact hackpad wiki, which anyone can edit and comment on, is perhaps slightly more user friendly than github.