The best guide you can find is actually the very code itself.
Nothing teaches you more than reading it and knowing what does what in-game.
If you have any doubts, you can just post about it on the thread and I'm sure someone will be happy to help you.
For the spiders themselves, you'd want to start with the current spiders and any file above them in their hierarchy. OOP is extensively used and you gotta learn to understand it, but it's really not that hard.
Well, he did talk to the thread. That's why we don't have that morale shit for instance.
I think he got shit on when he added shit (pests) and enough praise for cool stuff (new pandemic, chem replicator).
They stay that far a reason. Think of everyone involved with SS13. Not even just 8ch stations, ALL of SS13. Everyone who had name shares something: he got shit on.
Doesn't matter if you're coder, admin, mentor or the guy who reads sets up SSH acess on a saturday evening.
You have a name, people will known you and you're gonna piss off someone. And when that happens, the people who are pissed off will shit up a thread or two about you, the people who think you're doing a good work won't really bother to defend you (and honestly, there's no reason they should anyway) and sooner or later you have to disappear.
I've been playing SS13 for years. Nearly as long as it existed. I'm telling you: people who get named have two options: stay far from the playerbase, or don't stay at all. That's it.
Consider that even if you manage to make some of the players extremely happy, you're gonna make others extremely unhappy. Because not everyone likes the same shit (consider the meeseeks for instance. Some people loved them, some people hated them).
When that shit hapens it's even worse. Even if the coder/admin leaves for good, the players themselves will fling shit at each other, because they want two diferent things and can't coeexist.
Like the great Debacle on TG13 between the valid hunters and the roleplayers.
At that point, the guy who coded that feature, or the guy who handed that ban/rule needs to go away, disappear, and whathever he did needs to be gone. Code? Gets axed. Ban? Lifted. Rule? Dropped. That's the nature of online comunity. We're not tolerant nor we play nice. If shit gets to a point where there's enough friction between users, the only solution is to cauterize the whole thing and hope for the best.