Mench made the often repeated point that the team is small, and Slither is the only person who understands the code well enough to fix most of the bugs.
I completely understand that.
My recollection from a few town halls that I have joined is that Sindome (Withmore Hope, whatever) has hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in cash reserves.
Over the last few years, there have been tens of thousands of people laid off from Silicon Valley and other tech companies. Some of those people have some coding skill.
There are tens of thousands of people around the world, outside of America, who are aspiring coders with reason amounts of fundamental programming skills.
Why not setup a bug bounty program for the MOO? Let people who don't play here have a crack at the code base? I know that there is a test / dev environment.
The major risk is that the code base gets out. That would be horrible. A significant part of the allure of playing here is learning how the game works.
That said, I have to wonder if we're at the point where the current situation is untenable. The situation of having one person, without much free time, being the sole individual with the authority and trust of the community to fix things.
(This is nothing against Slither personally. I do not doubt for a second that he is doing the best he can, when he can, with what little free time he has these days.)
I don't know what the answer is. I am willing to admit that opening the code base up probably isn't the answer. Or at least, that the risks of opening up the code base are greater than the risks of Slither winning the lottery, or otherwise deciding to never come back to Sindome.
The problem as I see it is the lack of incentives for people to learn how to code here on Sindome.
How do we "fix" that?
The answer clearly isn't, wait for the MOO Code Messiah to show up. As much as I wish a MOO Code Messiah would appear.
Maybe we pray for an advancement in AI code analysis? Hope that the right combination of training sets produces an ML algorithm that can parse out and correct bugs?
