VRIM Interest Survey (Attention Programmers and Translators)

[FreezeWarp]

This is going to sound a little strange to many people, but bear with me for a bit. VRIM3 is currently under (incredibly slow) development and is slowly shaping its outline. General users won't notice a whole lot different (minus some slight polishing), but the secondary goal (under which I label VRIM as "FreezeMessenger") is much more than providing a decent instant messenging experiment to Victory Road: it is providing one to the world.

VRIM3 will promote three kinds of active third-party development, and I would like to know if anyone has any interest in any of the following. VR has a lot of programmers and a lot of people who know a second (cultural) language, so please post here if you might want to explore the underlying framework or even translate it into one of many different languages. At any rate, here are the three forms of development:

• Translation: Translating Simple Phrases and Sentences into Other Languages, like Japanese, Spanish, French, and Italian
• Plugin Development (Mainly PHP+MySQL): The Creation of Plugins for VRIM/FreezeMessenger That Any (per your terms and conditions) Webmaster, Host, or Cheney Could Use to Their Liking
• Client Development (Any Programing Language Under the Sun / Oracle of Seasons): Creating Clients for Servers Running VRIM/FreezeMessenger to Give Users a Better Experience, Cool New Features, or a More Streamlined User-Interface

While many users have seen VRIM's somewhat rocky development due to occasionally poor server planning and my own frequent stupidity, the product truly is developing into something unrivaled, and much more refined than, say, Xat or IRC (if you want to yell at me for this, please do). By making it possible for foreign-language websites to use the software or for people to access the interface in ways that go beyond the contemporary, a new, better, and occasionally-crashier-if-you-are-using-the-betas Internet can emerge. You may think of this as some random preaching; maybe you're right, but if that's the case the software still provides ample opportunities to quell boredom or scratch that programming itch. Examples of clients that could be possible if you so wanted:

• A Terminal Client (Cat has done something like that, in fact)
• An IRC-Look Alike
• A Text-to-Speech Client for the Impared
• One through Pidgin or Trillian

And the plugin potential is even greater:

• Automatic Spam or Troll Detectors (its possible!)
• Automatic Spam or Troll Bots (though I'm not too keen on that myself)
• A "+1" Favourite Marker
• New BBCodes (Tables, Javascripts, and so-on)
• A Quiz Show

For those who really are interested, know that there will be extensive documentation of the following available at VRIM's opensource release:

• Hooks (like those used in WordPress and vBulletin)
• Phrases (as needed for translation)
• Backend Functions and Methods
• Templates (again, vBulletin)
• The Database and Filesystem Structures
• The XML API used for Client Communication

And finally, because I don't particularly want to stop talking, a release date of all this can be expected around June 30th; a week or two later if felt absolutely necessarily, or a week or two earlier if things come together sooner. Users who may express any interest in developing plugins and clients may be granted access several weeks beforehand to the documentation and in some cases codebase, and the full phrases for translation will be presented later this month if any interest is generated.

[Blues]

Uh, okay. I can't claim to know anything about ANY of the coding stuff you just mentioned - but I'll just say this anyway. This seems WAY overly ambitious for a casual chat on an average sized Pokemon forum on the internet.

I love VRIM as much as anyone, but is making it "the best chat EVER!" really necessary?

[Alakazamaster]

Anyone who has played Minecraft with me knows that I am good at hosting quiz shows~.

Please make that number one priority and people will rejoice!

[FreezeWarp]

Originally Posted by Blues

Uh, okay. I can't claim to know anything about ANY of the coding stuff you just mentioned - but I'll just say this anyway. This seems WAY overly ambitious for a casual chat on an average sized Pokemon forum on the internet.

I love VRIM as much as anyone, but is making it "the best chat EVER!" really necessary?

'Course; after all, its not a chat for a mid-sized Pokémon forum.

[A'bom]

I'm not sure what I'd be most suited for along the lines of what you listed, but I have developed GUI's using Java and Flash (though I am much more experienced in Java than in Flash). I'd love to get as involved with this as possible, since I'll be graduating from college in six months and need experience in the field.

[Velociraptor78]

>quiz show
YESYESYES~! This would be so awesome if we could do this.
Everything else you said sounds fine too

[hinorashi]

Originally Posted by FreezeWarp

Translation: Translating Simple Phrases and Sentences into Other Languages, like Japanese, Spanish, French, and Italian

Such a thing is possible as I've seen it done on an imageboard I frequent. It becomes less reliable for languages like Japanese; the translation result either way is hard to make heads or tails of. I believe it somehow utilized Google Translate to do it - I kind of know how they did it, but I'm not sure if it would be useful in this case or not.

Originally Posted by FreezeWarp

A Text-to-Speech Client for the Impared

Not to sound like a stick in the mud, but this sounds as if though it would put a large strain on the server utilizing it if used and would largely be unused otherwise.

Originally Posted by FreezeWarp

Automatic Spam or Troll Detectors (its possible!)

Spam detection sounds necessary. It would be nigh impossible for a script to recognize the difference between somebody trolling or joking; both are similar, but one is meant to be spiteful.

These are just my thoughts, anyway.

[FreezeWarp]

Mind you, I didn't ask for opinions, I asked for people who actually wanted to contribute.

And I mean actual translations, not some kind of hack. In other words, people who know two languages would translate one into the other. Mind you, its not complicated.