Ask HN: What open source projects need help?

As someone who made small contributions to several projects and left comments under many GitHub issues, things that I see:

* Heavy users are more likely to report bugs and end up contributing to the project * If many people run into the same issue, more likely someone will create among them will write a fix, or at least suggest a workaround * A "healthy" project -- one that addresses GitHub issues and pull requests quickly, that responds to people's questions instead of ignoring them, that encourages technical discussions, is more likely to attract even more contributions. * Some projects have issues and pull requests that are open for a long time without any response from maintainers (despite active development). I myself wouldn't even bother reporting a bug because it's not worth it

Meanwhile, even under this thread, you can find people that expect certain amount of experience with a particular language. That just says to me they don't want contribution. Why? I am no expert in that certain language, but I am experienced enough in software engineering that I can jump into many codebases and create a high quality patch with some ChatGPT. I've done this many times before. If they are so obnoxious I'd rather put my energy elsewhere.

https://github.com/levkk/rwf

All aspects of project are open to contributors. Beginner friendly. Learn Rust/web tech if you're not familiar with how the sausage is made.

https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript-Website/issues/2804

Contrary to many people's perception, Microsoft is one of the biggest contributors to open source, whether for projects they "own" like TypeScript or VSCode, or other common projects like Linux. The amount of users and bugs/feature requests etc don't match headcounts available at Microsoft.

an object-storage, backend as a service platform. enables you to build complex websites/applications including chat, messaging, email, without needing any custom backend coding among other things.

https://gitlab.com/societyserver/

https://github.com/societyserver/

backend: Pike/MySQL (without Roxen)

frontends: XSLT or REST (for custom javascript frontends), java desktop clients, a PHP library.

this project is forked from the original developers who stopped publicly maintaining it more than a decade ago. http://web.archive.org/web/20120502154511/http://www.open-st...

the website was lost during covid due to an administrative error while i was busy with family problems: http://web.archive.org/web/20211017092823/http://societyserv...

tasks that need to be done:

1: rebuild the website by scraping content from archive.org/ (skills needed: HTML/CSS/JS/UX)

2: rebuild the TLS stack and the auth API. (skills needed: pike, auth)

3: build more frontend examples for different frameworks (currently we have angularjs and aurelia. would love to see react, svelte, etc...) (UX/JS/TS/HTML/CSS)

4: add a GraphQL API. (pike)

5: document the developer tools. (most of that is on gitlab/github)

further on my wishlist are:

integrate shared editing like etherpad.

support SQLite as an alternative to MySQL/PostgreSQL.

better developer tools, like integration with git. (content is stored in the server with a history. the history can be exported to and imported from git), remote editing of content from VIM and other editors.

matrix integration (we already have IRC, XMPP, IMAP, SMTP, POP3, NNTP, FTP, WEBDAV, TELNET, LDAP...)

a gmail style mail frontend.

other integrations

this project has a long history and a lot of potential. i am actively using it for my own websites, but i have been neglecting the project itself since i was busy finding more work. if i could only get the first two steps done, we'd be back in business.