GFLPraxis's Journal: Where to look for volunteers for a web project?

Well, I was curious if anyone here on /. might have some suggestions to my dilemma.

There's a bit of story behind this, but I'll try to make it brief. I'm part of a small group of individuals, mostly students, running a web site, http://www.nintendoplayers.com/. The site is entirely custom-coded in PHP. We had decent viewership, established press contact with a lot of the major gaming companies, get free games from companies like Capcom and Hudson Entertainment, go to press events like E3, etc. It's essentially a Nintendo gaming/news/rumors/community site.

We wrote the site in PHP, with the original intention of expanding it heavily with community features later on, but just creating it a news site initially and plugging in a PHPBB forum in the back. We created user accounts for the main site, so users can create accounts and comment on articles, with the intention of eventually building our own forum using the same accounts and letting users have their own blogs and profiles, etc.

We also built up a games database. Over 5000 games manually entered, along with their developer, publisher, release date, supported peripherals, number of players, etc. Some games have box arts, and we intend to eventually have box arts on almost everything. Every game released on the NES, Super NES, Nintendo 64, GameCube, Game Boy, and Virtual Boy is in that database, along with most DS, Wii, and GameBoy Advance games. However, outside of a search and reviews system, we don't have anything actually using this database.

However, the guy who was coding the site is moving on with graduation and marriage. We've been reassessing our mistakes with the site and we realized we weren't really offering much that other generic sites weren't, and we want to capitalize on our strengths.

What we're looking for is someone who would be interested in partnering on this. We're handling all of the press side of things but none of the remaining staff members has enough coding experience. We want to build the site into a large community site, with user profiles and blogs (think Facebook for Nintendo), perhaps web apps using the games database, and innovative new features that other sites don't have yet. I don't care whether we stick with more custom-coded stuff or switch to a CMS and start coding custom addons to it, as long as we keep our games database as there's a lot of work put into that.

We're all students and we realize there's a lot of work involved in this. Sadly, we can't really offer payment, but the intention is for the site to become profitable (right now it's only paying for itself), and the promise would be that if the site can be built into a profitable web site any coder we find would be considered a partner and get a sizable split with the rest of us.

Problem is that I have no idea where to even start looking. I mean, I'm looking for some very specific things- I need a PHP coder who is has enough free time to try something like this out for experience or fun (since profit isn't guaranteed, I can't see professionals bothering to 'waste' their time on it), and is enough of a Nintendo fan to want to do something like this. I suspect most Nintendo boards won't have anyone with enough experience, and most programming boards won't have a lot of people willing to jump on board.

Does anyone out here on /. have suggestions on where I can look for a coder who might be interested in a project like this?

Also, any suggestions for web apps or ideas to make the site unique would be definitely helpful.

Thanks for any help!