Open Source Development

Our assignment for this week is the same as the assignment we had last week; to make a large contribution to one external project and to make a contribution to Telescope; our internal project. While I am still trying to decide on what issues I will tackle, I worked on a small fix for my contribution to Telescope from last week: spam-checker.js . The Issue In my last contribution, I created a spam checker that determined whether or no a post was spam using a combination of rules and a spam filter function. In my function, the blog post's body content was parsed before any of the checks were run, but if the blog's title was empty or marked as spam the body contents didn't need to be checked. A classmate suggested that I move the blog body parsing to after the title checks to save on resources if title checks failed and the body didn't need to be loaded. The original order of checks, body is parsed before any checks are run The Fix After moving the content par...

This week I was working on two projects: fixing an error with Pokemon Showdown's downloaded match replays, and creating a spam checker for Telescope Pokemon Showdown Client The Issue   Resume button appears under Play button on launch The external issue I worked on was preventing the Resume button from appearing behind the Play button when viewing a downloaded replay from Pokemon Showdown: something I thought would be more complex than it ended up being, having worked with Pokemon Showdown before. The Fix After finding the class I had to work on, replay-embed.js,  I had to figure out how downloaded replays worked with replay-embed. While waiting for a response from Zarel, I tried generating a replay using my cloned version for Pokemon Showdown Client to no avail. Eventually, I learned from Zarel that the replay file has to be edited so that the script source points to my version of replay-embed. I changed the path to the filepath to my copy of replay-embed, but th...

With Hacktoberfest behind us, our next assignments are to make a large contribution to an open source project, and to develop features for Telescope , a site where blog posts across numerous websites are condensed into a single feed. Working with Telescope Telescope requires the Redis database and caching service, meaning I will have to set up Redis on my system before working on any issues. Currently I'm running into issues with this, but I should be able to resolve it by the end of the weekend. Telescope Issue For my contribution to Telescope, I will be creating a spam checker that detects and removes blog posts that could potentially be spam. While setting up Redis, I have been reading up on spam checking methodology in order to get an idea of what rules I should implement. So far I have decided to check for image-only posts, as well as for posts that use excessive capitalization. I should also come up with a dictionary of phrases that indicate that a post is potentiall...

For the final week of Hacktober, I contributed to Quaco, a Content Management System, and continued my contribution to Pokemon Showdown from last week. Quaco As I would be working on 2 issues this week, I chose a simple task for my new pull request: editing a readme.  The Issue Section of the original readme Quaco is a Content Management System for building webpages, similar to Wordpress. The issue involved fixing spelling and grammatical errors in the readme, but I also tried to make the overall structure of their readme more consistent. The Fix Edited version of the readme I looked over the readme and fixed any spelling or grammatical errors I could find. In addition to this, I changed the format of the first 5 points to all be questions and changed the points under "10 reasons why Quaco might interest you" to be more about Quacos features rather than their ideals. Pokemon Showdown Client The larger portion of my contributions this week was towards worki...