i do wonder though, for all the people looking to take those elevated positions, how often are you found in the PHP forum helping out the coders who are begging for help? i do find it strange that everyone's so willing to criticise code yet...meh
I would very much like for you to show me the thread in the PHP forum that reads "Please help me verify this segment of code conforms to vBulletin Coding Standards".
If I ever saw such a thread, I would be happy to clean up the code for the user, and also post a link to the Manual, showing him where to reference for the future.
As for the people saying "If you clean the code for them, they'll never learn.", I disagree. What WILL prohibit learning is no-one they look up to pointing out the flaws in their coding. I could have an user with 5 posts tell me he disagreed with my coding standards (if it weren't for the fact that I already comply to an extensive degree with the vBulletin Coding Standards ), and I would simply ignore him.
What's the difference between a volunteer team of members checking hacks and pointing out these flaws, or someone who actually has this as a job on this board? Nothing forces the coder to comply.
I can agree with the people saying it would be a kick to the scrotum to get your hack denied from the board, but this has already been changed in the original post, so this argument is invalid.
As for the labels, I think a newbie hack installer has a right to know if this hack has been coded as per a set of standards. This will make the user feel more secure about installing the hack, because he can be certain the odds of this hack destroying something on this board are minute.
I think we should be careful to cuddle the coders enough to put the end-user at risk.
I propose the following change to this idea: 4 levels of labels for a hack:
Valid - The hack complies with the vB Coding Standards both in terms of PHP and Source Code Formatting.
Cleared - The hack's PHP is optimised, but it has obvious flaws in Coding Style
Warning - Neither the hack's PHP or the hack's Coding Style complies
Pending - Pending evaluation (default for new hacks)
If a hacker is determined to become a part of the community, he will accept that he has to learn and not publically release 15 hacks before finally wising up his style.
There could even be a new forum where aspiring hackers can post their "raw" hacks for tips and pointers on how to optimise it and make it comply.
I just feel that I have seen too many horribly coded hacks (one of them is a major hack that is even SOLD, Darkwaltz4 will know what I'm talking about ).
Jelsoft creates out-of-the-box clean and fairly optimised code, they have spent many developer hours making their product more hacker friendly, something they really didn't HAVE do to, but did it anyways. Is it really fair to repay them by allowing any form of garbage (as garbage can come from experienced coders as well as newbies), degrading the performance of their product, then whine to them about how it's running slow? Hardly.
EDIT:
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Originally Posted by Erwin
Or just forget the { in an if statement, put it all in the 1 line and end it with a ; .
Extremely annoying as well, makes debugging a pain.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Erwin
The truth of the matter is that this is a good idea, and if there are people who have the time and dedication to do this, it would be great. I would mainly see this as a process to fix up security holes in hacks.
That's an added bonus, yes
Quote:
Originally Posted by Erwin
But it has to be a voluntary thing - maybe hackers who choose to go through this process can opt in.
That's a good idea, but there would HAVE to be a label showing the end-user that this hack did not go through validation.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Erwin
We can't really force every hack author to go through this. Like I brought up earlier on, this may discourage new members from releasing hacks they cooked up late one night - it may be badly written, but it may be a great idea, and someone else who downloaded it may recode it and post it back up in the thread. Such a hack may not "pass" the initial review.
But if the author is unwilling to fix his hack even with the help of others, the end-user should be warned, IMO.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Erwin
Besides Dark Visor, who else would have time to review the potentially thousands of hacks that will get released?
08-02-2005, 10:47 AM
), and I would simply ignore him.
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