idea for community

[trusktr]

It'd be neat if js.org was more than a landing page for info on making js.org subdomains. For example:

• a list of exiting js.org subdomains so people can explore (perhaps including descriptions that people can provide with pull requests to this repo)
• maybe something like community.js.org can have a forum for talking anything about JavaScript
• Perhaps a page(s) with JavaScript resources, showing the top libraries and tools, etc.
• Perhaps allow people to submit articles in a blog type of section. The articles would be reviewed, and if they are good, would be posted.
• etc, we can think of more!

That would make js.org more of a landing page for JavaScript enthusiasts and the JavaScript ecosystem.

What are your thoughts on that? Need help with it? I would be willing to pitch in.

[centralomd]

If they can also make the subdomain tutorial clearer, I agree.

[MattIPv4]

a list of exiting js.org subdomains so people can explore (perhaps including descriptions that people can provide with pull requests to this repo)

I think adding custom descriptions would result in further maintenance overhead here, which I'm not too keen on. However, I totally agree that we could provide a list of active subdomains to make the site more interesting. All the data is already in this repo in a parseable format, so this feels like it wouldn't be a heavy lift.

Feel free to submit a PR to https://github.com/js-org/js.org/tree/gh-pages if you want to make those changes :)

maybe something like community.js.org can have a forum for talking anything about JavaScript

I'm not really sure this is something that fits js.org -- there are already many JavaScript communities out there that are far more active than what we'd likely be able to achieve. I think it's better to just point people to existing communities if they ask, such as SpeakJS or r/JavaScript.

Perhaps a page(s) with JavaScript resources, showing the top libraries and tools, etc.

A curated list of top resources and tools makes sense as a useful bit of information for js.org to provide, but we need to have consideration for how this will be kept up-to-date. To me, this also feels like something that'll introduce maintenance overhead for us, which is something I'd want to avoid?

Perhaps allow people to submit articles in a blog type of section. The articles would be reviewed, and if they are good, would be posted.

Like with the community site suggestion, I'm not really sure js.org is the right place for this. We're essentially a domain registrar, not a canonical place for the JavaScript community to gather.

[indus]

It'd be neat if js.org was more than a landing page for info on making js.org subdomains. For example:

I'm open to add more other content to the page. I just allways found it hard to pick something really meaningful so I went with the minimal approach.

* a list of exiting js.org subdomains so people can explore (perhaps including descriptions that people can provide with pull requests to this repo)

I thought about that but I find it hard to come up with a solutition that gives users a benefit without ranking or comparimg pages in some form or another (websites for local JS communities are as important to me personaly as a big JS player like webpack). Some time ago I've run https://stats.js.org/ (comparison and nothing else) but I've closed it favour of https://bestof.js.org (in the meantime they decided to not use the JS.ORG any more). I'm using bestof myself sometimes and find it hard to improve it. While there are no personal JS related pages / blogs I'm not sure a JS.ORG listing would find any audiance.

* maybe something like community.js.org can have a forum for talking anything about JavaScript

I like the idea of a forum but I fear the hassle of moderating one (GDPR, etc.). At the same time of stats.js.org there I've also operated a site called news.js.org where people could self-puplish JS related news (after years of usage I got unsatisfied with echojs.com). After some time the the page got used for subliminal advertising services or companies. i took it down when GDPR came along.

* Perhaps a page(s) with JavaScript resources, showing the top libraries and tools, etc.

see https://bestof.js.org (I don't see a need to compete with them)

* Perhaps allow people to submit articles in a blog type of section. The articles would be reviewed, and if they are good, would be posted.

see my experience with news.jsorg

That would make js.org more of a landing page for JavaScript enthusiasts and the JavaScript ecosystem.

What are your thoughts on that? Need help with it? I would be willing to pitch in.

What I would like to have is a beautiful flow-chart that covers all the possible paths and situstions of requesting a subdomain (Github vs. external page, asset paths are wrong after getting new subdomain, CNAME is in the wrong directory, the page is not accesible until your PR gets processed, etc.). This could be interactive or static but should at least have anchors on every node (e.g. "#noCNAME") that would be linked in our response on an invalid request. I think this could help people having problems to make a valid request as well as us as maintainers (@centralomd ?)

[midzdotdev]

It might well be worth considering creating a mini web client which enables people to submit new domains, such as the element issue generator. I'd like to take up the challenge using VueJS (and serverless) if I can get the go ahead!

[MattIPv4]

Sure thing, that sounds like it'd be quite useful if we can get it going. My initial thoughts are that it'll probably need a server backing it, as you will need to have to auth the user to automate a PR, you can't deeplink like you can with issue creation, afaik.

[indus]

Would be awesome to get well-formatted pullrequests in the future (e.g. alphabetical order).
Maybe some simple checks like existance of CNAME, minimal HTML size (more then "Hello World") or similarity between the choosen name and the repo- or username (levenshtein-distance?) could be done in a preflight as well. Not to completly enforce something but to notify upfront why a PR may get rejected.

[javaarchive]

support.glitch.com is a nice js community but linking support.glitch.com seems a bit awkward and people will think it's just product support or something. I suggest we do something like a redirect from gcommunity.js.org/path -> support.glitch.com/path

[MattIPv4]

Forgive me, but I'm not sure where linking to Glitch's support forum came from? I'm not really sure what that would acheive and why we'd do it?

[midzdotdev]

support.glitch.com is a nice js community but linking support.glitch.com seems a bit awkward and people will think it's just product support or something. I suggest we do something like a redirect from gcommunity.js.org/path -> support.glitch.com/path

@javaarchive please clarify whether you meant to comment on this issue and how it's relevant...

[midzdotdev]

@MattIPv4 @indus am I right in thinking that the huge list of CNAME mappings has to be updated on CloudFlare manually? If so, do they not have an API that we could use to simplify this process for you guys managing the service. I'm pretty sure that other providers, such as Netlify have an API for their DNS.

[MattIPv4]

Yes, we update it manually. Cloudflare do offer an API for managing DNS records, but I see no reason why we'd want to use it. Manually doing it ensures that each request is reviewed by at least one human before it is accepted, to ensure the site has legitimate content. In most cases, both of us will have reviewed a request before it is merged.

Sure, automation might speed things up and make our lives easier, but most likely it'd just reduce the amount of human oversight involved with is somewhat invaluable to us for correctly reviewing requests.

[midzdotdev]

@MattIPv4 Just to clarify, I'm well aware of the importance of the human oversight aspect, and by no means would I suggest that it be entirely automated. Say if something did happen to the CloudFlare DNS and your records were purged, you'd have to enter them in again. Instead, we could have a serverless function that allows syncing of the records from the repository.

We could also have the webapp that I was talking about which not only assists others in adding new records, but allows the admins to more easily manage them.

Perhaps this is all a little convoluted, but I consider js.org to be a big asset to the JS and web dev community. It seems only natural to have something along these lines created. This may be abstracted a little allowing anyone with a domain to allow others to have and manage their own subdomain.

[MattIPv4]

I really don't think we need to be building administration tools for managing the records -- what we do currently works just fine, and in the event that something did happen to the DNS zone, I can bash together a quick script to sync what we have here back to the DNS zone. Building a tool dedicated to doing that isn't worth anyone's time and isn't something we really need.

I'm quite happy for someone to build a webapp/tool that allows for pull requests to more easily be created here and helps walk them through some of the validation steps we as the maintainers always perform, but I don't think we should look to complicated things further than that.

[midzdotdev]

That sounds great.

I was thinking, as there is no PR back linking (or equivalent), we could have a GitHub bot which has access to creating PRs for the repo. This bot could interface with server less functions used by the front-end. Maybe GitHub actions are appropriate here, I haven't used them yet..?

I've not made something like this before, but does this idea sound viable?