Starting on Telescope and Finding a New Issue

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 potentially spam. However, as most examples involve machine learning, my solution will likely be not as flexible, but I will try to make it as effective as I possible can given my skills.

External Issue

I have not decided what issue I will work on for my external issue, but I think I might make another contribution to Pokemon Showdown if I can find a good issue, as I have already worked on the project before.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

External Pull Request and Creating a Spam Checker for Telescope

Image
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...
Read more

Setting Up for Second External Pull Request and Contribution to Telescope

Image
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...
Read more

Second Contribution of Hacktoberfest

Image
For the second week of Hacktoberfest, I contributed to Fast Read , a React App created by Hamzaolak. The Fast Read Application The Issue   As I was having issues with the other projects I was planning to work on, I settled on another simple fix; changing the names of the custom colors defined in the code. The Fix After finding the color definitions, all I had to do was change the names in the definitions, as well as in the files that use those colors. The color names being in the issue description was helpful, especially with them being in the same order as the original colors. Creating the Pull Request After confirming that everything works as intended, I switched the origin remote to my forked version of the repo. Then I created a new branch and pushed my commit to it. Finally, I created a pull request to merge my code into the original project. Issues and Lessons Learned While searching for projects to contribute to for this week, I noticed ...
Read more