I found a nice and easy lemmy bug to fix, but someone beat me to it by 18 hours.

Jeena@jemmy.jeena.net to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 99 points – Search only communities by default when coming from communities page · LemmyNet/lemmy-ui@92f6fe9
github.com

I already forked the ui-repo, found the correct file to fix it and even found the place where I should add a query to the search form to search only for communities if you start searching from the communities page.

But then I saw that this change is already done in that file. I double checked the HTML on my instance and there it's broken. I checked the history of the page and see it has been fixed 18 hours before I started looking into it.

All my hard work for nothing.

18

At least you got yourself into the contributing mindset. Tackle the next issue!

Lesson learned, always pull and branch from main.

Actually I was working on the main and that's where I saw it being fixed :D

I have another bug which is bothering me. When the site settings are set to "Registration Mode": "Close Registration", the Sign Up link still shows up and the route still sends you to the Sign Up form. You can fill in everything there but then will get a infinite spinner.

I wanted to at least remove the link at the top when sign up is closed. But obviously it's not as easy as changing a static HTML as in the other bug.

That’s why you should always search for or file a bug report before trying to create a fix.

If it's a nice and easy bug, better just make a bug report out of it.

Plenty more bugs to fix, don't give up being a contributor!

My process is:

  1. Check for an issue that describes the bug you're seeing.
  2. If there isn't one, create one.
  3. If you feel like it'll be snapped up because it's a relatively easy fix, comment on the issue saying you'll give it a go.
  4. Fix it!

There is still a chance someone might swoop in and fix it but this lowers the chances and it's good to get into the habit of creating and linking Issues to your PRs.

I had this exact thing with Mastodon a few days ago. Couldn't find a way to get the local server's post-ID for a federated post if you had the original URL, so I thought "screw it, I'll do it myself".

Downloaded the source, set up a local instance, added extra space to my server so I could run ElasticSearch, went to the file where I wanted to add my "uri:" search prefix, and I find (to paraphrase)...

Send resolve=true to fetch remote instances and return their local ID

Been there for years.

Good to see active development on the repo! I'm a Golang dev but I've been interested in Rust for quite some time now. Maybe I'll start with Lemmy :)

You can just build a time machine and commit it before the other one. Problem solved.

That type of bug is what is called "low hanging fruit". With lots of active contributors, such bugs will get fixed pretty quickly.