Feedback On Coding/Spriting/Player Projects in Discord

[ZeWaka]

1. Add an "Available for coding" or "Available for spriting" role to Discord for people to take, where pinging that role will let those available see if they're interested
2. Add a channel thread or Player Project posts dedicated for coding/spriting requests

In my personal opinion, this is what the #imxyz channels are for. Others might disagree though. This is worth further thought, for sure.

Add a "Code help requested" or "Sprite help requested" GitHub label, so that people can easily add it to a PR they have in draft or in work

Are people really trolling GitHub to find projects to help with? I'm not aware, but if they are and this would help, we can look into adding this.

2. More dev involvement in player project approval/disapproval
I don't believe there is enough/proper use of the Dev Approved tag. There are some posts, like constructible atmospherics, as well as Flockmind, that haven't used this tag.

I envisioned this tag to be where a player can create a design document, have it approved, and then be confident that they can spend a dozen hours working on it without fear of it not being merged. I basically translate it to as "we like this, and will actively work to get it merged when done".
Flock didn't exist at the time this tag was created, and as far as the atmospherics - multiple PRs have taken a while to get to because we weren't sure about the design/code.
There have been multiple succeeding cases, such as nuke reactor, conveyors, and the current speech code rework.
In my opinion, if people want to be sure their work is not in vain, they should seek approval. If they're fine with it not being merged due to a design issue, then they don't need to.

Additionally, I think there should be a Dev Disapproved tag, ... 

I think if you seek an approval and don't get one, this is the same as a disapproval. I don't see a need for a tag.

There are many projects in the Discord right now where people have started them and then they just "staled".

To be a bit blunt, I think a lot of these projects have just staled due to effort no longer being put towards working on them. This is an inevitability with an at-will community-developed game, in my opinion.

I feel this is the exact place where devs should be providing direct feedback, not just when pinged directly but in general.

I agree. Personally, a reason why I have not given feedback on multiple player projects is purely just because I'm not super interested/engaged by them.
As we're all volunteers too, I only have so much time in a day to work on SS13. I could either:

• Review a project that doesn't sound interesting to me
  
• Review an interesting project I want to help with/get merged
  
• Work on personal projects
  

Personally, I think the latter 2 win every time.
I hate that my feedback here is that the projects should 'be more interesting', but I'm not sure what else to say - this applies to getting contributions from other players also.
One way or another, this has always been how PRs have been merged across SS13.

devs may provide feedback, but is more of a individualized ... "think this could be better in regards to xyz" response from devs, rather than a formal "Approved with xyz changes" ...

This is because we're being careful not to speak on behalf of the 20 other devs - without a design document (Developer Approved) there's nothing we can bring to the group show and tell time and say 'we like this'.

To help with this, I think there could be at least
1. A "Looking for Dev Approval" tag for players to add to projects, for devs to add a Dev Approved or Dev Disapproved tag to replace it with, ...

I think this is a good idea, with the caveat that I think a lack of approval is the same as a disapproval.
I think there could be better guidelines/processes on how to request an approval. Maybe a form, but I need to think on this more.

I have no knowledge whatsoever of any testing that was done for this by devs/admins, which there has been at least some ...

We technically have a 'testmerged' github label that gets applied/removed when testmerging a PR. I wish there was better tracking, and perhaps that could come to the Goonhub round page in the future - with linking to the PR somehow.

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I'm not too qualified to speak on the rest so I will let others respond.