LessWrong 2.0 is open source, but so far we haven’t done a great job at making contributing a good experience. Here’s our first attempt at fixing this, which covers the basics of "how to contribute" and "high level overview of the site architecture."

tl;dr:

Get a local copy of our git repo installed
Check out the Good First Issue filter of our github repo Issues page.
Once you're familiar, check out the Help Wanted filter.
You'll still want to read this post to get oriented.

Getting Started

Assumed Background Knowledge

Currently, this guide assumes that you know your way around a terminal and github, and have worked with javascript, html, sass/css, and ReactJS.

If you know at least some of those things and are excited to contribute, you can probably make decent headway (and if you run into specific obstacles, comment on them on this post or ping us on intercom, and we’ll see if we can update things to be more clear)

Setting up Locally

[Note: So far, everyone who's installed Lesswrong2 locally has been using a fairly modern MacBook. If you are running Windows or Linux you'll likely run into problems. (Trying anyway and responding here with your solutions will be helpful to get a better sense of how to install on a variety of machines, but it may be a bit more annoying to get started)]

LessWrong is a fork of VulcanJS's example-forum. We've had to make some changes to VulcanJS itself as well as their example-forum. We try to keep the changes to each codebase distinct, and have factored our web app into two repos.

I recommend starting by creating a folder to store both of them:

mkdir lesswrongSuite cd lesswrongSuite

Clone the two repos:

git clone https://github.com/LessWrong2/Lesswrong2

git clone https://github.com/LessWrong2/Vulcan.git

You'll mostly be working in Lesswrong2.

Install node dependencies in each of the repo folders:

cd Lesswrong2 
npm install  
cd ../Vulcan 
npm install

Start the development server:

cd ../Lesswrong2 
npm start

If it is NOT working, there is most likely some issues with your npm install process. If you are terminal-savvy you can attempt to resolve that yourself based on error messages. If you'd like help, you can ping the LessWrong team either by creating a github issue or pinging us on intercom on LessWrong itself. You may find some help in the README for Vulcan-Starter

[Further note: If the insta...

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