Feature request: Community helppatches inside vvvv gamma
Summary: Easily upload user made community helppatches that can be searched for each library within the vvvv gamma help interface.
Opportunity: Users often solve their own problems, particularly from perspectives (eg beginner) not considered by the creator of a library when they create the original help patches.
Sometimes it’s possible to find these solutions by searching the forums or chat but often they get lost.
By reducing the barrier between users sharing solutions and other users finding and accessing those solutions the community learns to help itself better.
Idea:
To upload a community helppatch:
-User makes a helppatch that shows how to solve a problem
-Button in vvvv gamma ‘Upload this patch as a community helppatch’ , where you can provide some meta data and which library it should be part of. Makes you log into vvvv.org to attach to your user profile.
-Community helppatches should follow the same naming conventions as normal help patches eg ‘HowTo x y z’ or ‘Explanation x y z’
-Community helppatches are all uploaded under a permissive licence that the uploader must agree to.
To find a community helppatch:
-When typing in the search bar on the vvvv gamma help it shows official helppatches for each library . and then in separate column will load list of community helppatches from server. It’s clear in the UI they are user submitted and not official.
-Click on a community helppatch to download and run it.
Stretch goals:
-Link to vvvv.org forum ‘mark as solution’ functionality, one click to open the linked community helppatch in gamma
-Users can rate each helppatch (thumbs up this was helpful)
-Users get some kind of karma on vvvv.org for making nice helppatches (incentivising making well laid out community helppatches)
-Users make wiki pages with a guide and embedded links that open community helpatches in gamma
-Users can rate if a community helppatch is out of date or broken, will add this as a tag.
-Automatically tag commmunity helppatches with which version of the library they were created for
-Basic tests on community helppatches after a library is updated to ensure no red or purple nodes, and will exclude them and notify creator if this occurs
-General culture of community helppatches should be quick dirty helping others with just a few minimum conventions
-Comments/discussion for each community helppatch visible directly in vvvv gamma and vvvv.org
Risks:
Malicious community helppatches that mess with system things, install malware or even break things by accident. By lowering the barrier for users to execute each others code this is easier to abuse than making a bad library or issuing bad advice.
Solutions could be:
-use at your own risk warning
-community helppatches blocked from running if they contain I/O or sensitive nodes or functions from the GAC (But you can still view them and at least see a proposed solution… although if it says ‘COPY N PASTE THIS FOR 1K FREE BITCOIN’ is that basically the same issue?).
-community helppatches must be approved by original library author. This whole feature actually just streamlines a pull request to their git project to contribute a new helppatch.
-community helppatches go to a portal and must be approved by experienced (whitelisted) patchers, you get karma for spending some time doing this. For approvers the patch starts paused so they can check it before they run it.
-Only whitelisted users allowed to contribute community helppatches in the first place… maybe wrecks the spirit of it.
-Must have a licence to submit community helppatches… skin in the game
-Library authors can disable community helppatches for their library entirely if the library exposes functionality sensitive to being abused