How I can help PhantomJS development?

[ariya]

If you get a lot value from PhantomJS (business revenue increases, your spouse is happier, lucrative job offers keep coming) and you have a lot of time/motivation/money and you plan to contribute back, what can you do to help this project?

This meta issue is a starting point for the discussion.

[ariya]

Off the top of my head, triaging the existing and incoming issue can be crowd-sourced rather easily.

Examples of such activities:

• Stop everyone who is doing "+1". It's noisy and annoying. The Subscribe button should be used for this purpose.
• Similar to the above is the "Is there an update yet?" question. This digital equivalent of "Are we there yet?" has an obvious answer ("No").
• Remind everyone to stay on-topic. It's not helpful if the issue filed regarding "PDF zooming problem" is turned into "What's the best brunch place in San Francisco?". After all, who likes thread hijacking?
• A general question, code review request, build problem should be first posted somewhere else (Stack Overflow, mailing list, etc). See my response in e.g. thumbnail using phantom js #13846 (comment).
• Any report of crash of PhantomJS 1.x should be requested to be reproduced with PhantomJS 2.x. Even more important, there should be an independent way to reproduce the crash, e.g. a smallest test script. Lacking these two, we can't follow up the crash at all and the report should be closed.

[ariya]

@zackw who is been doing a lot of triaging probably has an idea or two. @zackw Feel free to chime in!

[lkraav]

Does the PhantomJS project need money to move faster and more consistently? For example, I'm supporting https://pods.io/friends-of-pods/ and this link is a landing page with a short explanation of why getting businesses to pay some kind of a recurring monthly payments could be huge for keeping a couple of qualified devs focused on a project full time.

[ariya]

If we discover a suitable continuous build system (#13828) and its cost is not zero, then that's one aspect where some limited funding could be useful.

[ariya]

Other things you can do:

• Help us figuring out the best continuous build system. See Continuous build system #13828 for further details.
• Help us to set up a user discussion forum. See Set up a user discussion forum #13865 for further details.

[gsouf]

Related to #14541 and the lake of contributors/time to work on this project.

I think a major problem with phantomjs development is the lake of contributors. In my opinion that's due to the difference between users skills and phantomjs technology stack:
I think that most phantomjs users are webdev that dont use to work with C++ or QT, for instance I'm not a good at C++ and I barely know the basics of it but I intensively use phantomjs however that does not mean I can't fix minor issues.

Sometimes I would like to contribute but I dont have a clue on how to do it for instance #13797, I think it's simple to fix and that probably does not need a lot of work to fix it.

Well, I think the problem is "how to increase the number of contributors?" and I think that making access to source easier and having an internal documentation for contributors might help, the key is to have a way to train people to work on phantomjs.
Today I couldn't find internal documentation, I dont know how the software is structured, I don't have a clue where to start with "hacking" phantomjs and I dont have a way to train myself.